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Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

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Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#131

Post by lord_ring_11 »

badminton1 wrote: post #38
throwaway43532 wrote: post #19

Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva. The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it i…

The Spanish themselves conducted many religion-motivated rituals of human sacrifice in Europe and in the Americas. In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas. The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and t…

Didnt church burn people in the name of heresy to conserve their power. It included much celebrated joan of arc in france.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#132

Post by gjpr »

Choice tweets from the author:

Thanks for reading and sharing my story on Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed. But it's time for a discussion on why this practice was not "horrific" or "loaded [with] evil," as some of you have said https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv

https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822

It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world.

https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244

(Credit: https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/)

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#133

Post by projectramo »

5DFractalTetris wrote: post #79
kimmk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.

Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.

The big difference between human sacrifice and capital punishment is that the person sacrificed hasn’t done anything “wrong.”

The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#134

Post by stevenwoo »

narrator wrote: post #56
azeotropic wrote: post #18

They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Molo…

As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread…

I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#135

Post by thedailymail »

stevenwoo wrote: post #134
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread…

I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.

The Bible may be many things, but consistent it is not.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#136

Post by booleandilemma »

stevenwoo wrote: post #134
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread…

I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.

It ends up being just a test though:

God says, a few lines later, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#137

Post by thedailymail »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #97
zawerf wrote: post #46

Are we sure it's really all human sacrifice and not just an ossuary? For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris

i think maybe one bit of evidence against it being merely an ossuary is the large holes in the sides of the skulls, useful for inserting a pole. of course, that is not the last word. but, it's consistent with other evidence that large wooden poles bearing multiple skulls did exist.

The large holes were created post mortem, so that doesn't necessarily reject the ossuary hypothesis. But the body of evidence supporting the human sacrifice hypothesis is really pretty strong.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#138

Post by thedailymail »

coding123 wrote: post #20

I know this comment won't be accepted too well here, but as people become vegetarians/vegans even, but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls - it becomes clear how barbaric our society STILL is. Again, only visible to some people that have rejected some pretty common norms. It is interesting because in those times it was politically and socially acceptable to be OK with other humans being s…

I am not a vegan/vegetarian, but I do think that future generations will view meat-eating as immoral and see their ancestors as barbaric for eating animals. We already see this in the West with respect to limited categories of animals (whales, dolphins, dogs, cats). Probably the shift will involve a philosophical change in assigning moral status based on ability to experience pain (rather than the higher bar of self-awareness/higher consciousness) coupled with advances in food technology (including cellular agriculture/cultured "meat").

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#139

Post by tomrod »

stevenwoo wrote: post #134
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice. https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread…

I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.

This is pretty far from what I normally see on HN, but since we are here, I highly recommend Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#140

Post by 75dvtwin »

It is difficult to celebrate historical achievements of our ancestors, when we read about them, passages similar to this.

".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …."

"... Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children.

Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.

…"

But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past...

I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes...

May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?

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