[Aztlan] on the rightness or wrongness of human sacrifice

[Jaime Andres Pretell]

I still see this as rationalization. Of course cultures create their own 
standards of what is right and wrong. And it is different if they see what 
they do as violating the norms of the culture.  But it still entails a 
questio of willingness to participate by those afflicted with the death. 
The Inquisition saw deathsas purging of evil for God, and the Aztecs saw 
death as a way of gaining favor from their gods.  But the question is if the 
ones that died shared in those beliefs. If the Aztec victims that died were 
in themselves willing participants and believers in the sacrificial value of 
others, then I would agree they were part of the belief system, the norm 
values of the group.  And that is my question, did they? Were all sacrifices 
from within the Aztec belief system and willing participants in it when it 
came to others?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marcelo Donadello" <marcemusic at yahoo.com>
To: <aztlan at lists.famsi.org>; "Jaime Andres Pretell" 
<jaime_pretell at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 10:59 AM
Subject: [Aztlan] on the rightness or wrongness of human sacrifice


Differences.

Some time ago I take the example of traffic accidents to think how one would 
see the human sacrifice from an innocent perspective. Nevertheless the axis 
of any human act, and more when it forms a custom, and a law, and an 
evidently central custom - not in one but in many societies of a certain 
historical stage - is the intention, and the intention in the human 
sacrifices involves homicide, whereas in the accidents of traffic it 
involves transport.

As for the Inquisition and the human sacrifices, I do not see way of 
assimilating them. Up to where I understand what the inquirer claims is to 
eliminate the evil, to destroy something that should not be in the world or 
in the system. His action is parallel (and similar) to exorcism. In 
addition, another detail that assimilates to the role of Inquisition with 
the tandem intelligence - propaganda - police of the modern dictatorships is 
the darkness of the procedure: the church NEVER dictated nor carried out a 
death sentence. Simply it perfected the process and the convict went on to 
the civil justice, which then sentenced and eliminated without trying.

The hangman of the recent past was acting, usually, with his face covered. 
The hangman also is a excluded one, and exists because there is no another 
way. Nowadays, in some places where the "pena, poena, penalty" of death is 
in use, the responsibility of killing divides and dilutes between several 
possible hangmen who drive mechanisms, without it could never know which of 
them unleashed really the mortal process.

In the societies who were centring the flow of power on human sacrifices, 
meanwhile, the sacrificer is usually a public person, and frequently a 
popular one , often the king itself.

I can't assimilate, neither the death sentence, nor any punishment, to the 
human sacrifices as general rule, though one could look alike or to include 
the other.

Similarities.

In my opinion, the accounting and more exact comparison of the weight and 
measures of the goods, which summum is the money - the certification of the 
value of the things by the stablished power - , moved the axis of expression 
of power from sacrifices to gold and later cash tributes, from actual to 
symbolic things. Of the human life as value, offering and principal possible 
currency, to the symbolic representation of all the values across money, 
including that of the blood or the life of the man.

Human sacrifices in highly organized societies were a public transaction, 
not a punishment or denial of the unhealthy or different thing, but an 
offering or tax measured in terms of the most valued good. (In these 
societies also inquisitorial practices exist and there are normal and 
common, so much like in ours are the "payments" for motives of simple order 
and adhesion, or for motives of superstition or irrational custom)

The development of mathematics, writing, metallurgy and science of 
accounting-driven large-scale trade, etc, eventually gave birth to money, 
with the ability to develop a dual role of real "goods". Which brings us to 
another question, which is some two-to-one relationship between an economy 
with monetary and other without it ...

Maybe some difficulty in analyzing these issues is that today money's 
behavior and management, as yesterday blood's behavior and management, are 
in our personality, marked and protected by strong taboos.

Just a hypothesis. My apologies for daring to speculate, perhaps my errors 
should be attributed more to ignorance than candidness. Excuse my English 
too.

Marcelo Donadello



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