Why did the Aztecs sacrifice humans to the gods? Learn more about what this ritual served, along with other purposes.
The stone skulls at the ruins of the Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan represent the victims of human sacrifice. The traditional accounts of Aztec sacrifice are almost too gory to be true. In them, Aztec priests cut beating hearts from the chests of sacrificial victims before throwing them down the steep steps of pyramids., didn’t see sacrifice as quite so startling, nor as quite so simple.
“Sacrifice shouldn’t be understood as a single phenomenon,” Sugiyama says, though it still formed important part of the Aztec world view. Of course, whether spiritual, social, or political in nature, the Aztec traditions of sacrifice didn’t come out of nowhere. There were numerous cultural precedents for human sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica: Everyone from the
On a smaller scale, merchants and others would sacrifice slaves in public to increase their social status. But the most common form of sacrifice didn’t involve warriors or slaves or even death. While Aztec priests wouldThough perhaps not the most common, the most prominent instances of sacrifice were those that occurred in massive, state-sponsored rituals. One such ritual took place in 1487, after an expansion of the Templo Mayor by the Aztec king Ahuitzotl.
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