Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
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Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
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Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#2Having read A Death in the Andes and 1492 and having spent a few months in the Andes myself, it didn't surprise me to read that this child sacrifice included llamas and was likely an attempt to appease supernatural forces as plagues and natural disasters threatened precolombian civilizations. The Andes are a very strange superstitious place even today. Native cultures and traditions are still present. Llama sacrifice is extremely common and can be seen regularly in the open. When I was there I even heard plenty of rumors that human sacrifice is still practiced fairly regularly. Usually they'll sacrifice the mentally ill, homeless or other societal outcasts, luring them into pits that have been dug to lay the foundation for new buildings. It's believed that burying sacrifices in a building's foundation will protect it from harm and bring it prosperity. I wonder what kinds of studies have been done on exact how common these types of sacrifices really are now.
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#3I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.
Because, no matter what culture you're part on, having your kill killed is going to make you be against the current rulers.
No surprise small Spanish groups of sailors and great armies of native allies could topple several empires through America.
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#4Why "sacrifice" and not murder?
> "People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains.
But then:
> isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire
To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine. Isn't it more likely, they were taken by force?
It's always strange when we assume ancient people would necessarily be superstitious; maybe some were, and some weren't.
Isn't it reasonable to think that mass killing would be a punishment inflicted on one group to another, following, say, a long war, or simply a conquest?
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#5I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0] examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The episodes were a companion to Daniele Bolelli's "History on Fire" episodes [1] about the first contact between the Spanish and the Mexica (Aztecs), but whereas Bolelli focuses more on the narrative drama of the events of these two incompatible cultures clashing, Cooper's episodes are more psychological explorations about the human condition that try to examine just where in our human minds arises these primal urges toward cannibalism and sacrifice of other humans and how early cultures dealt with the trauma of it in the form of rituals.
There's a progression to it too, where cultures tend to move between different phases (cannibalism to human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to purely symbolic sacrifice) where those 'psychic urges' can be played out in more and more abstract ways. It's reminiscent of Dan Carlin's episode about gladiators and public executions [2] and how our modern culture still wants to see the violence but to have it be virtual.
The MartyrMade podcast's analysis does a great job of juggling the two opposing ways of looking at these cultures. On one hand there is a human universality in that every culture and every people almost certainly has cannibalism and human sacrifice somewhere in its deep past. On the other hand, it's too easy for us in modern Western societies to try to interpret these other cultural behaviors in rational ways as if deep down they're just like us. Culture shapes its participants fundamentally; truly alien ways of being are the norm.
You can't read the account [3] of a young women ritualistically standing in for a Maize Goddess, being beheaded, flayed, and having her too-small skin being stretched and worn by a priest dancing before a crowd without being reminded of the quote "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." When people talk about the "cultural iceberg" [4], this exemplifies just how deep those icebergs go; it's not just language and food and dress and dance.
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[0] http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/
[1] http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec
[2] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-61-blitz-...
[3] http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html
[4] https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultur...
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#6Why "sacrifice" and not murder? > "People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. But then: > isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficu…
> To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine.
abraham was willing.
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#7I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire. Because, no matter what culture you're part on, having your kill killed is going to make you be against the current rulers. No surprise small Spanish groups of sailors and great armies of native allies could topple several empires through America.
> I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.
I don't think so. It's probably mostly down to what Jared Diamond describes - Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The occasional score of children and conquests slaughtered voluntarily is dwarfed by the numbers of natives that died from smallpox (f.e.).
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#8Why "sacrifice" and not murder? > "People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. But then: > isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficu…
The word "sacrifice" doesn't imply the consent of the person or animal being sacrificed
Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#9Why "sacrifice" and not murder? > "People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. But then: > isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficu…
> To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine. abraham was willing.
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Re: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
#10How did they get red pigment on the kid's skull?