[Aztlan] Only 50/year sacrificed at Tenochtitlan

[diniz conefrey]

Dear Listeros

I cant  retain myself to share some observations about this topic adding
some perceptions off a point of view not of a scholar but as a very
interested person particularly in Méxica culture. In my personal approach
throughout the years reading about Méxica society and sharing information
with other people, there is always that great "black cloud" of human
sacrifices, that in a general sense put them behind acceptance or even
understanding.

As other archaeological data, the number of sacrificial victims as their
adequate importance, and i remember to be somehow glad when i had an
accompanied pedagogic visit to Templo Mayor where i put the question of the
often cited huge numbers of sacrifices in the dedication of the last phase
of the Templo Mayor, that was understandably explained to me in much lesser
numbers.

For a brief moment i was dealing with a reasoning that numbers could change
some perception of view, but afterwards i reached the core of a question
that was dealing mainly with language. To begin with that was what really
appealed to me in the first place, about Méxica culture: poetry, eloquent
colloquial speech and «disfrasismo» with is double sense for metaphorical
meaning.

American cultures had there existing relations linked directly with the
natural world. The most sophisticated ones developed a metaphysical
philosophy where blood letting, pain and death were not only an individual
or casual experience but an entirely community expression in the relations
with that world, and how they thought it was is order or is perilous
balance. Like «disfrasismo», human sacrifice had is metaphorical sense where
humans where playing gods - and nature - role.

Although this is a very complicated matter to us it is interesting to see
the social dynamics created inside Méxica culture, as we can see that great
poets were warriors, and that warriors of higher ranks were a most valuable
offer in sacrifice  accepting their role. There were off course others that
would be forced and dragged to the stone; people who were put in a
psychological state of fatigue or even drug ( as in the case of immolation
), as they were also volunteers or little children that probably didn't
realise their fate. Nevertheless, sacrifices were preformed every month in a
regular bases and in public performances with the participation or viewing
of the overall population; i think through an expression of identity of
communities values permitted violence in individual representations.

Interestingly, we have in the figure of the king Nezahualcoyotl  of Texcoco
a figure that was no subscriber of this practices, and in my view he
couldn't change that because human sacrifices were not only an expression of
power from the elite but in fact an inside cosmovision of the general
population, no matter distant or approaching they were over this issue. In
fact, the denial of human sacrifices by the Neo Méxica put them more faraway
to understand their own cultural routes and to assume a language of
occidental moral response without dialectical prepositions. With the same
bad results as Apocalypto ( a subject that i supposed already extended
discussed in Aztlan ) that begins with a quoted citation entirely false for
all that are truly aware of Maya history in the vicinity of the Spanisn
invasion.

In reality i think the relations between "civilization" and "barbarity" are
only a violent dispute among languages over land and that engineering
technology with there architectonic structures don't mean to me necessarily
a higher degree of human development or a definitive civilized achievement.
That's why i preferred to designate cultures instead of civilizations.
Everyone of us knows that Tenochtitlan was a more clean and fine structured
city that is counterparts in Europe, nevertheless it was raised to the
ground based on the human sacrifice argument. But we know also that the
enormous genocide Holocaust propagated in all American continent don't
necessarily needed for the same argument. Sustainable violence in expression
of cosmovision was placed by brutal violence in order to occupy land.

As for the violence for itself ( organized or as inner tensions in the human
societies ) its a fact that do not stopped even in our own times, and that
the technological worlds are even more violent that most "archaic"
societies. For that matter, as far as i know, the only society that manages
successfully to put an end to organized violence was Tibet, through
Buddhism, and we all know its fate.
Despite all our discourses of human rigths and democracy, language and land
continues to be the primordial issue of state politics, through economics
and violence; to let the citizens openly sacrificed for a global world where
the relation is not the language of the man with the natural world but the
language of the man with a mechanical technology that he invents himself.

Best regards
Diniz Conefrey