[Aztlan] on the rightness or wrongness of human sacrifice--various comments

[Jerry Offner]

Michael Smith makes two important and unarguable points. Psychohistory in
the recent past is unreliable and it is certainly unreliable at this
distance.  We do not have sufficient evidence, no matter how carefully and
expertly analyzed, to know the opinions of the various sectors of the
population five and six hundred years ago.  Way too many holes in the data.
We have no time machine and we wouldn't have the funding to do the polling
if we did.

This leaves the evidence open for recruitment by partisans arguing whatever
ideology they wish and such has indeed occurred continuously regarding the
Aztecs as well as many other ancient cultures.  And then there are those
who argue about the motivations behind those who have argued about this
topic.  The results of such efforts should be taken at their proper value
and it can be pointed out that such struggles have produced some better
understanding of the Aztecs, sometimes inadvertently or as a side argument
to the main argument.   There are, however, many more direct and productive
ways to approach the past.  I don't want to dredge up unpleasant memories
from the recent past, but there are in fact unknowns that are not only
known but also known to be unknowable.  Yet, the arguments and posturing
persist, have persisted and will, it seems, always persist.  Everyone has
an opinion at the neighborhood tavern and that is for many a big and
enjoyable part of life and gets them or keeps them interested in new and
different things.  

Second, many specialists and many newcomers tend to believe the sources
from Tenochtitlan and accept them as a sort of standard by which other
historical traditions and reports are found deficient.  We do know,
however, that the Tenochcans destroyed all the earlier documents that they
could (because they say that they did just this) and that Tenochcan
historical reports are nearly always simple, unilinear narratives and very
biased towards Tenochtitlan.  We also have reports from Tlaxacala. Chalco
and Texcoco that come from different, much more complex and textured
schools of Nahua historiography.  (This means that they applied different
methods to their writing of history, like other eminently civilized and
accomplished peoples.  Anthropologists, said to be seeking the "otherness"
in cultures, have generally done a poor job of analyzing the schools of
Aztec history writing or historiography).  These other schools are
sophisticated in their presentation and include information favoring their
own as well as other sides.  They are an important crosscheck to the
Tenochcan hegemonic official history but only some Aztec specialists,
beginning perhaps with Jimenez Moreno have taken this conclusion to heart
and only some have begun the process of comparison, although their number
is slowly growing.  Still, they often encounter fierce if unsupported
opposition from modern Tenochcan hegemonists.  The Texcocans, for example,
regarded the flowery wars as extremely dangerous, where Tenochcan treachery
and collaboration with the Tlaxcallans might lead and did lead to the
convenient planned killing of important Texcocans, principal allies of the
Tenochcans.  (Texcocans also used the flowery wars in just this same way). 
This was a very, very complicated world in which Machiavelli would have had
to race to keep up.  Flowery wars: were they fact or just an idiom idiom to
dodge explanation and  failure?  Or sometimes more one than the other and
most often both? And there were of course plenty of wars not explicitly
described as flowery wars when prisoners were taken for sacrifice and as
slaves and where the principal objectives were conquest and control of
trade goods, their sources and their trade routes.  How entirely like all
the other warring peoples on earth...  Very complicated this war
thing--start by seeing Ross Hassig's book, but don't stop there.  The full
meaning of Flowery Wars?  This is close to, but so far as we know, not yet
an unknowable unknown.  It still draws a lot of attention and awaits that
one new convincing perspective.  It will bea lot more like Mike's than the
version in biased Tenochcan history.  (And a side mention about slave
bathing, where merchants purchased slaves on occasion specifically for
sacrifice).  

With regard to Sid Hollander's comment on what proportion of time experts
should spend on such matters as cannibalism and human sacrifice, Mike's
work is a good example.  It is certainly a single digit percent.  People
specializing in religion would necessarily spend more space, but not much
more space.  In fact, people who spend most of their space on such matters
are the least informed and reliable (e.g. Michael Harner, the
"nutritionist") as I tried to intimate in my earlier post by mentioning
that Lloyd Anderson is uncritically rushing to the list a presentation by a
graduate student not specializing in Nahua culture--evidently an "error in
reasoning" of the type he is quick to point out in others.  Would that he
had applied the negative critical apparatus that he employs with limited
substantive success against Caroline Dodds Pennock to his report of the
graduate student's work, or, upon careful consideration, not reported it at
all.  I should also mention it is child's play to string a number of
negatives, vetatives and "self-contradictions" together--it is another
thing entirely to produce substantive results which Dodds Pennock has done.
Dodds Pennock's book deserves much fairer, restrained criticism and
appreciation, especially  in such an informal venue as this.  It's written;
let's get the best out of it.  And another point to make arising from Lloyd
Anderson's criticisms. is the extreme difficulty in interpreting all this
evidence and how clear it is how little we know and will be likely to know,
at least in our lifetimes. 

And back to the math books--I can estimate I have published 444 pages on
the Aztecs.  About 8-10 pages deal with human sacrifice and prisoner
capture, and the index in the one book I have had time to write on the full
reach of Texcocan history, wars, politics  and society does not even
contain the terms for human sacrifice or cannibalism.  I only deal with
prisoner capture in an article as a means to elucidate the Nahua belief in
cities and empires as human bodies, fit for division into 6, 20 or 15 parts
for administration. And yes, sacrificed captives were divided into six
parts, most desirable parts first, in a very distinctive manner for
distribution, in order of effective participation, to  the maximum six
warriors who were allowed to lay claim to one act of captive taking. So,
mine is also a typical, fitting small percentage of pages dedicated to
these topics.  

But going back to 444 pages, that would be one unit of 400, two units of
twenty and 4 units of one.  We could write this easily in modern notation
in base twenty as 124.  The Aztecs had a number of ways to present this,
but if, for example, the scribe who produced the Map of Metlatoyuca were to
write this number, he would use a central stalk with many small diagonal
branches for 400 (representing a bunch of hair or grass) and two maize ears
for the two units of twenty.  The four units of one would be four small
circles (he would do this right to left and bottom to top, by the way,
certainly initially confusing at least to a Spaniard of the time).  If a
later reader or copyist wanted to exaggerate the total, the 400 would
become 8000, the two units of twenty would become two units of four hundred
and the four circles would become four twenties--8,880.  Or perhaps a
colonial writer would lose his way in taking notes, and would write 80,800
or 80,888 (cf. Duran's 80,400).  Or, there could have been left to right
and top to bottm reading errors.  These are the sorts of issues that take
into account indigenous information and its role in the numbers that appear
in the various sources, colonial sources, colonial sources taken from
indigenous sources, or post-conquest indigenous sources reproduced in a
context different from the production of pre-Conquest sources.  The problem
needs more work, and a presentation from a graduate student has negligible
economic cost, so I am all for further, but informed, research.  I do think
it unlikely that all of the Nahua researchers have been so collectively
stupid that they have mishandled this so badly and so ignorantly over the
decades and centuries that a student presentation on such a central,
well-known event is likely to contain novel, substantive findings--i.e. to
be newsworthy, at least without proper critical introduction. As an
example,  Ross Hassig's range of values cited in this thread is in fact the
best current constraining of the figures he discusses, but perhaps in time
good arguments will be produced to constrain it by an order of magnitude (a
factor of twenty for the Aztecs, rather than 10 for us) or even two.  Have
at it and come back with substantive progress...

In the early days of cable TV, a young reporter breathlessly asked the
pioneer Ted Turner what the exciting future of cable television could be. 
Turner, laconically and prophetically, said to look at cable TV then--that
was what it would be like in the future.  National Geographic, the
Discovery Channel, The History Channel, etc. all have their constituencies,
a good many of which are interested primarily in gold, jewels, other elite
goods as found in elite tombs, large buildings and cityscapes and, after
that, freakish things, mummies and persisting beliefs in their curses,
Mayan blood sacrifice, hallucinogenic enemas, or that old favorite--human
sacrifice, whether in a bog in Europe, in Peru, or in Mexico. (I would note
that there is a good market too for archaeoastronmy and the indigenous math
involved as well as the always popular Jewish/Christian/Bible history
interface).    These tendencies are studied by marketers and the program
content is accordingly market driven.  Hence the over-emphasis on the
freakish and easily saleable.  Hence my mention of its too frequent
appearance on the list.  I also think it worth mentioning that modern Maya
are not entirely charmed with the portrayal of their civilization by many
elements of the modern archaeological/resource allocation/broadcasting
complex.  It's their history, too--to say the least.  

We are now in the bright future of list servers, by now many years old. 
What I find encouraging is that the list is not so market-driven--still too
much, but much less. It's good to have one place not so market determined. 
I hope the trend continues.  

Jerry Offner 
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