What good was the Inca or Aztec religions?

[river-wind]

when something bad happened and people didn't know why, they thought the gods were punishing them. they drew the conclusion that gods are evil and they want to kill people. so they thought that if they sacrificed people, gods would be pleased and wouldn't feel the need to kill people.

This is an extremely ethnocentric view, and inaccurate.


The world in which the Aztecs lived was not the first in their cosmology. After the last four (IIRC) worlds were were destroyed (the last one in a flood after the gods realized that the people were very greedy). The Gods then decided to create a new world, the fifth world, this time being very careful about how everything was created.
In order to create the new sun for this fifth world, the Gods needed two things: material from the people they had created, and the blood of a god to provide the power.

IIRC Ant agreed to sacrifice himself to be that source, but then became afraid, and ran. The other gods chased him down and sacrificed him. Once released, he was happy to be the sun, and was no longer scared.

As such, the Aztec considered it to be an honor to be sacrificed, to join Ant in keeping the sun and this fifth world alive. Also, to be sacrificed was to feed the water goddess who had destroyed the third world and liked to eat people (she was ripped in half to create the earth and sky). To sustain the earth as she sustained the people.*

The *winners* of the ball games at the annual festivals were the ones sacrificed, not the losers. Slaves and prisoners were only sacrificed to pad the offering - they were considered of lesser value; just like how Cain's offering of burnt vegetables was considered by God to be of less value than Able's offering of burnt meat.


And no, I don't understand it either. Though assuredly, they wouldn't understand the things that I feel are important. Individualism in place of the honor of sacrificing for the society as a whole? How foolish and wasteful!!



* all this comes from my undergrad class on Central and South American cultures, which was about 10 years ago, so I might be a bot off in some details.

 

[mikenostic]

They revered the sacred in human blood, but I think they carried that a little too far.

Umm, the god of the Bible old testament also required a blood sacrifice to 'cleanse one's sins'. Even Abraham was about to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Aside from the actual cutting out a beating heart, I see few differences.

 

[maxg]

It may have been good for the Aztecs but bad for their neighbors. I seem to remember that it was the people they conquered that ended up on the chopping block. So it certainly helped them control the population of their neighbors/enemies, provided a good spectacle to unit thier own people, and allowed them to work out personal trauma on a collective scale. There's also a theory that they practiced cannablism and that it was an important source of protein.

 

[Hapsburg]

No civilization was ever developed independently and spontaneously in Europe.

Celts, maybe? Etruscans, perhaps?

Indo-Europeans, as were the Greeks. But, they came into Europe quite a bit before the Dorian Greeks did, and started their own native civilizations. The Celtic people especially, were widespread.

Although, to what extent the common Celtic culture could be considered a civilization is up to debate.:shrug:

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Etruscans, perhaps?

The Etruscans were a pre-Indo-European people but their civilization arose at a time when the civilizations of Asia Minor had routine contact with the Neolithic Europeans. The technology of civilization consists primarily of ideas, which are difficult to keep from being "borrowed." AFAIK anthropologists do not count the Etruscan as an independently developed civilization, but rather assume it was built on what was learned from the Phoenicians and others.

The Celtic people especially, were widespread.

The Celts were the first Indo-European tribe to set foot in sub-Scandinavian Europe. Except for the Etruscans, they encountered cultures less advanced than their own because of their acquaintance with the Bronze Age civilization in the region they migrated from. For many centuries, Europe was The Land Of The Celts. This came to an ignominious end when the Roman legions started pushing from the south, the Germanic tribes from Scandinavia, and the Slavic tribes from the east.

Although, to what extent the common Celtic culture could be considered a civilization is up to debate.

Civilization is the building of cities and the Celts did not have it. The Celts were a Neolithic people, living in agricultural villages. Civilization was the next stage after the Neolithic.

• Mesolithic: Nomadic hunter-gatherers. Extended family units of people who knew each other intimately from birth. Harmony and cooperation occurring naturally due to the pack-social instinct.
• Neolithic: The technology of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry), which both required and made possible permanent settlements. Several family units living in a village, people who all knew each other but not necessarily very well. Harmony and cooperation with mere acquaintances was a strain on the pack-social instinct, which was adapted and partially overridden by reason and learning, made possible by the uniquely massive human forebrain's power to dominate the animal midbrain. Division of labor and economy of scale result in creation of surplus wealth.
• Civilization: The technology of highly organized life with a hierarchy of leadership. Complete strangers living together in a city. Harmony and cooperation with strangers was a further strain on the pack-social instinct and represents a triumph of the human species over its nature.

 

[Hapsburg]

True, the Celts didn't have a full civilization in the socio-economic sense.

However, they did have some form of general social structure, fairly consistent throughout all of the Celtic tribes across Europe. The threefold division of society into the warrior Aristocracy, the unique Druid caste, and the common people. This attests to at least a general cultural standard which the majority of Celts adhered to.

And, as you said, they did have access to bronze tools, and they were able to produce their own. This means that they were in a copper-and-bronze age, which is straddling the line between neolithic and agricultural society.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

And, as you said, they did have access to bronze tools, and they were able to produce their own. This means that they were in a copper-and-bronze age, which is straddling the line between neolithic and agricultural society.

No, metallurgy is an advanced stage of civilization. The first cities were built with stone and wood. Bronze required a sophisticated trading network between cities, since nickel ore and copper ore are almost never found in close proximity. It also required really hot fires to melt the ore. Neither of these could have been developed/discovered by pre-civilized people.

The first agriculture marked the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic Era around 9000BCE. (The oldest cultivated crop we have evidence of is the fig tree.) The dawn of civilization came about 1000 years later. The Bronze Age did not begin until around 3000BCE. (All dates for the Middle East. The Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Olmec and Inca civilizations arose independently at later dates.)

Of course Neolithic tribes traded with the cities nearby and were able to acquire metal technology that way. That pattern was repeated under the European occupation of the Neolithic region of North America. Much European technology was adopted by the American Indians, without changing their basic village society, yet became so ingrained that today it is thought of as "native culture," e.g. silversmithing and domesticated horses without saddles. The same was surely true of the Celts.

The second wave of metal technology, the Iron Age, starting around 1100BCE, caused a social upheaval. Iron ore requires hotter fires to smelt than copper and nickel, but it is fairly easy to find and requires no trading network. Once the Neolithic people on the fringes of civilization learned how to mine, refine and smith their own iron, every "barbarian" tribe suddenly became a kingdom armed with state-of-the-art weapons.

 

[madanthonywayne]

I just came across this horrific description of Aztec "civilization":

In the thirteenth century, the Aztecs had begun conquering Mexico, and by the fifteenth century they had brought most of central Mexico
under their control.

OK. That doesn't sound like a big deal.

Rather than assimilating the conquered tribes into a unified empire, as the ancient Romans had done, the Aztecs used the other tribes as “human stockyards.”

What?

The conquered tribes were required to supply, collectively, between 20,000 and 200,000
victims for human sacrifice every year. Aztecs were not sacrificed.

The Aztec priests, often wearing flayed human skins, skillfully cut out the hearts of living victims. Their favorite victims were children, whose tears were supposed to be a special source of pleasure to the Aztec gods. The dead bodies were then eaten by the Aztec upper class, who used cannibalism as their major source of protein.

Holy shit. If this is true, those bastards deserved everything they got from the Spaniards. Ironically, it was this inhuman treatment that led to the Aztec's downfall:

Hernando de Cortes landed in Mexico with 508 soldiers, 100 sailors, sixteen horses, and firearms. Although the Aztecs had neither firearms nor horses, it would have been impossible for Cortes to conquer the Aztecs if not for the alliances Cortes formed with other Indian tribes, who contributed 200,000 fighters to his cause.

Here are some of the references cited for this article:

92 VICTORIA, at 160 (book 1, § 3, item 17).
93 Roger McGrath, Atrocities Azteca, CHRONICLES, Oct. 2006, 13.
94 McGrath. See also Ross Hassig, Aztecs, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION AND WAR 30 (Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez ed., 2004)(During the 1487 rededication of the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, 80,400 victims were slaughtered in human sacrifice).
95 McGrath.
96 “Cortés, Hernán, Marqués Del Valle De Oaxaca,” in ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (2002 DVD edition).
See generally, BURR CARTWRIGHT, EMPIRE
OF THE INCA (1985).

http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/The-Human-Right-of-Self-Defense.pdf
I can't attest to the veracity of this. But I have certainly heard that human sacrifice was a part of the Aztec Religion. I wasn't aware of canibalism.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Holy shit. If this is true, those bastards deserved everything they got from the Spaniards.

Christendom in the sixteenth century was at its nadir, with Inquisitors running rampant. Jews, Muslims and even Protestants were "sacrificed" for their beliefs. It's a challenge to see how any civilization, no matter how vile, could be considered morally inferior to Christian Europe at the time of the "discovery" of the Americas.

Ironically, it was this inhuman treatment that led to the Aztec's downfall. I can't attest to the veracity of this. But I have certainly heard that human sacrifice was a part of the Aztec religion. I wasn't aware of cannibalism.

The Aztecs have been sensationalized, most notably by themselves. Many contemporary accounts are taken as valid with little reality testing. Wikipedia warns:

[Abstracted. . .]For most people today, human sacrifice was the most striking feature of Aztec civilization. The Aztecs, if their own accounts are to be believed, brought this practice to an unprecedented level. For example, for the reconsecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed 84,400 prisoners over the course of four days.

However, most experts consider these numbers to be overstated. For example, the sheer logistics associated with sacrificing 84,000 victims would be overwhelming. A similar consensus has developed on reports of cannibalism among the Aztecs.

For perspective, it must be remembered that the two halves of the United States of America "sacrificed" three percent of their population--one million victims--during their Civil War. A mere three generations later, the human race "sacrificed" two percent of the population of the entire planet--sixty million victims--in World War Two. With that perspective firmly in mind:

Aztecs defended the practice of human sacrifice by asserting that it was not very different from the European way of waging warfare: Europeans killed the warriors in battle, Aztecs killed the warriors after the battle.

Accounts by the Tlaxcaltecas, the primary enemy of the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that at least some of them considered it an honor to be sacrificed. In one legend, their archetypal warrior Tlahuicole was freed by the Aztecs but eventually returned of his own volition to die in ritual sacrifice. The practice may have been endemic to the culture of the region as a whole and not an indictment of the Aztecs in particular, since the Tlaxcaltecas also practiced the human sacrifice of captured Aztec warriors.

 

[cosmictraveler]

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

I'd rather not be doing any of those things.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

In the fifteenth century, the parallel would have been to be burned at the stake.

 

[iceaura]

The cannabilism as a source of protein is worth paying attention to.

As a general rule people make virtues of their necessities, and religions make ritual of the virtues. IIRC one of the Aztecs' major sources of meat aside from humans beings was worms sifted from the mud of lakes and ponds. They had essentially no large domesticated animals, no game worth mentioning, no large scale source of meat at all.

The Aztecs ate people on a much larger scale than most cultures. But so did the Donner Party, trapped and starving, so did the soccer team in that Peruvian airliner crash, so have widely scattered tribes in protein-restricted environments such as rain forests and isolated island valleys, so have others driven by necessity.

What good were such religions, to us (the unstated premise)? As fantastic rituals and object lessons, they remain without peer.

 

[cosmictraveler]

As a general rule people make virtues of their necessities, and religions make ritual of the virtues. IIRC one of the Aztecs' major sources of meat aside from humans beings was worms sifted from the mud of lakes and ponds. They had essentially no large domesticated animals, no game worth mentioning, no large scale source of meat at all.

Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you.

 

[iceaura]

Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you.

A quick Google search yields dozens.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00....0.CO;2-Z&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage

If you have access, that article will lay out the general scene - and the author disagrees with my assertions (on bad argument, IMHO) so you can get another take.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm A general article, from 1977. All of the numbers in it are in serious dispute, but details such as this one are not:

Another Aztec dietary problem was the paucity of fats, which were so scarce in central Mexico that the Spaniards resorted to boiling down the bodies of Indians killed in battle in order to obtain fat for dressing wounds and tallow for caulking boats.

The Aztecs were eating insects and pond scum and worms. Starvation food, in most cultures - carefully harvested staples, among the Aztecs. They were creating artificial islands for more garden land, and fertilizing it with lake mud and human waste for lack of manure. Even the Spanish were resorting to human bodies for fat and other meat-animal byproducts, in the Central Mexican Valley.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you.

It's well known that there were no large domesticated animals in the Americas except the camelids of the Incas. The largest domesticated animal anywhere else was the turkey.

The north-south geography of the Western Hemisphere was a major impediment to the development of agriculture and, ultimately, civilization, just as it was in Africa. It's easy to trade crops and farm animals with the tribes east and west of you, but much more difficult to take them to a latitude that they're not adapted to.

Add to that the low biodiversity of the Americas. Asia and even Africa had many species of huge herbivores suitable for eating and draft, so finding one that was relatively tractable in domestication was not an insurmountable challenge. In South America there is the llama and three other closely related camel species, and that's about it. Nothing bigger than the tapir and the javelina, until you get north of the Rio Grande where there were finally some deer and antelope playing. Oh yeah, and The 4-H Project From Hell: the bison.

Edible plants were just as big a problem as edible animals. The Old World had rice, wheat, rye, barley, a cornucopia of highly nutritous grasses. The New World just had the corn without the -copia, and corn is a perfectly wretched source of nutrition.

It's a testament to the ingenuity of Homo sapiens that agriculture was invented here at all and the Neolithic Revolution was launched in spite of the north-south axis. There's no shame in the fact that these people were only able to start building civilizations in the First Millennium BCE, thousands of years later than those of Asia and Egypt with their east-west axis.

When the first Europeans landed here, the Mesopotamian civilization that was carried on by Greece and Rome was three times as old as those of the Aztecs and Incas. I think we can forgive them for not being as "modern" and "enlightened" as their conquerors.

 

[dhowe01]

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

Don't Christians symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of their god?

 

[charles brough]

The higher loss we got from this conquest was that of Astrology & commune with nature

Yes, in a sense. One account is that the Aztecs believed they had to cut out human hearts on the temple each day in order for the sun to return the next morning. That is REALLY communing with nature!

charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com

 

[monita]

Not true

The Incas were highly civilized, peaceful people. They expanded their territory through diplomacy. Although they did, they hardly use force to achieve these goals.

The Incas DID NOT use to sacrifice people either. They did so in very rare occasions, but all they did was send the children to the high mountains and let them die naturally ad with as little pain as possible so they could later revere them, because according to their beliefs, if they did so, the children would enter the gods' reigns and become angels. These mummies were some of the holiest things in the empire.

The funny thing is, when they found the Inca mummies, everything indicated some might have been still alive:

horseridingchile(com)/horse-riding-chile-blog/inca-child-mummy

 

[Aqueous Id]

As to whether the Aztecs deserved slaughter, here is a witness account of Montezuma:

The Great Montezuma was about forty years old, of good height, well proportioned, spare and slight, and not very dark, though of the usual Indian complexion. He did not wear his hair long but just over his ears, and he had a short black beard, well-shaped and thin. His face was rather long and cheerful, he had fine eyes, and in his appearance and manner could express geniality or, when necessary, a serious composure. He was very neat and clean, and took a bath every afternoon. He had many women as his mistresses, the daughters of chieftains, but two legitimate wives who were Caciques[N.B. 2] in their own right, and only some of his servants knew of it. He was quite free from sodomy. The clothes he wore one day he did not wear again till three or four days later. He had a guard of two hundred chieftains lodged in rooms beside his own, only some of whom were permitted to speak to him.​

Doesn't sound like this witness (one of Cortes' crew) was chomping at the bit for slaughter.

 

[wellwisher]

It is very possible the exaggerated savage propaganda about the Inca and Aztecs was used as a justification for the brutal behavior of the greedy invading Europeans. The logic for the propaganda may have gone like this; since these people appear so savage to us, slaughtering them, like we enjoy, is justified. We are pure.

In Western cultures of the time, they had the death penalty for even minor offenses against the King, state, church or local overlords. These were performed with ritualized ceremony. These human sacrifices, often for irrational reasons by modern standards, were to insure stability within the kingdom and/or to provide special protections to the privileged. It is all how you spin it.

How is the modern death penalty different from a human sacrifice when these often have a person of the cloth present? It is all how you spin.