What kinda deth kult is this anyways?

From: Fernandinande of Lemuria <lemurama@mindXspring.com>
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.slack
Reply-To: Fernandinande of Lemuria
Date: Tue, Jul 31, 2001 11:17 AM

As well-trained, methodical butchers of the battlefield and as
citizens of the land of the Inquisition, Cortés and his men,
who arrived in Mexico in 1519, were inured to displays of cruelty
and bloodshed. It must have come as no great surprise to them
that the Aztecs methodically sacrificed human beings, inasmuch
as the Spaniards and other Europeans methodically broke people's
bones on the rack, pulled people's arms and legs off in tugs-of-
war between horses, and disposed of women accused of witchcraft
by burning them at the stake[1]. Still, they were not quite prepared
for what they found in Mexico.

Nowhere else in the world had there developed a state-sponsored
religion whose art, architecture and ritual were so thoroughly
dominated by violence, decay, death and disease. Nowhere else
were walls and plazas of great temples and palaces reserved for
such a concentrated display of jaws, fangs, claws, talons, bones
and gaping death heads. The eyewitness accounts of Cortés and his
fellow conquistador, Bernal Dïaz, leave no doubt concerning the
ecclesiastical meaning of the dreadful visages portrayed in stone.
The Aztec gods ate people. They ate human hearts and they drank
human blood. And the declared function of the Aztec priesthood was
to provide fresh human hearts and human blood in order to prevent
the remorseless deities from becoming angry and crippling,
sickening, withering, and burning the whole world.

The Spaniards first glimpsed the inside of a major Aztec temple as
the invited guests of Moctezuma, the last of the Aztec kings.
Moctezuma had not yet made up his mind concerning Cortés's
intentions - an error which was shortly to prove fatal for him -
when he invited the Spaniards up 114 steps to the twin temples of
Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, which stood at the top of Tenochtitlán's
tallest pyramid in the centre of what is today Mexico City. As they
mounted the steps, wrote Bernal Dïaz, other temples and shrines
OEall gleaming white' came into view. In the open space at the top
of the pyramid OEthe great stones stood on which they placed the poor
Indians for sacrifice.' Here also was OEa bulky image like a dragon,
and other evil figures and much blood shed that very day.' Then
Moctezuma let them see the image of Uitzilopochtli, with its OEvery
broad face and monstrous and terrible eyes,' before which OEthey
were burning the hearts of three Indians whom they had sacrificed
that day.' The walls and floor of the temple OEwere so splashed and
encrusted with blood that they were black' and the OEwhole place
stank vilely.' In Tlaloc's temple, too, everything was covered
with blood, OEboth walls and altar, and the stench was such that
we could hardly wait for the moment to get out of it.'

The main source of food for the Aztec gods was prisoners of war,
who were marched up the steps of the pyramids to the temples,
seized by four priests, spread-eagled backward over the stone
altar, and slit open from one side of the chest to the other with
an obsidian knife wielded by a fifth priest. The victim's heart -
usually described as still beating - was then wrenched out and
burned as an offering. The body was rolled down the pyramid steps,
which were built deliberately steep to accommodate this function.

Occasionally some sacrificial victims - distinguished warriors,
perhaps - were given the privilege of defending themselves for
a while before they were killed. Bernardino De Sahagún, the
greatest historian and ethnographer of the Aztecs, described
these mock battles as follows:

OE... they slew other captives, battling with them - these being
tied, by the waist, with a rope which passed through the socket
of a round stone, as of a mill; and [the rope] was long enough
so that [the captive] might walk about the complete circumference
of the stone. And they gave him arms with which he might do battle;
and four warriors came against him with swords and shields, and
one by one they exchanged sword blows with him until they
vanquished him.'

Apparently in the Aztec state of two or three centuries earlier
the king himself was not beyond the task of dispatching a few
victims with his own hands. Here is an account by Diego Durán of
the legendary slaughter of prisoners captured among the Mixtecs:

OEThe five priests entered and claimed the prisoner who stood first in
the line... Each prisoner they took to the place where the king stood
and, when they had forced him to stand upon the stone which was the
figure and likeness of the sun, they threw him upon his back. One took
him by the right arm, another by the left, one by his left foot,
another by his right, while the fifth priest tied his neck with a
cord and held him down so that he could not move.

OEThe king lifted the knife on high and made a gash in the breast.
Having opened it he extracted the heart and raised it high with his
hand as an offering to the sun. When the heart had cooled he tossed
it into the circular depression, taking some of the blood in his
hand and sprinkling it in the direction of the sun.'

Not all the victims were prisoners of war. Substantial numbers of
slaves were also sacrificed. In addition, certain youths and maidens
were chosen to impersonate specific gods and goddesses. These were
treated with great care and tenderness throughout the year preceding
their execution. In the Dresden Codex, a sixteenth-century book
written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, there is this account
of the death of a woman who played the role of the goddess Uixtociuatl:

OEAnd after they had slain the captives, only [then] Uixtociuatl['s
impersonator] followed; she came only at the last. They came to the
end and finished only with her.

OEAnd when this was done, thereupon they laid her down upon the offering
stone. They stretched her out upon her back. They laid hold of her;
they pulled and stretched out her arms and legs, bending [up] her
breast greatly, bending [down] her back, and stretching down her head
taut, toward the earth. And they bore down upon her neck, with the
tightly pressed snout of a sword fish, barbed, spiny; spined on
either side.

OEAnd the slayer stood there; he stood up. Thereupon he cut open
her breast.

OEAnd when he opened her breast, the blood gushed up high; it welled up
far as it poured forth, as it boiled up.

OEAnd when this was done, then he raised her heart as an offering [to
the god] and placed it in the green jar, which was called the green
stone jar.

OEAnd as this was done, loudly were the trumpets blown. And when it
was over, then they lowered the body and the heart of [the likeness
of] Uixtociuatl, covered by a precious mantle.'

But such displays of reverence were few and far between. The great
majority of victims did not walk joyfully up the steps of the pyramid,
soothed by the prospect that they were about to make some god happy.
Many of them had to be dragged by the hair:

OEWhen the masters of the captives took their slaves to the temple
where they were to slay them, they took them by the hair. And when
they took them up the steps of the pyramid, some of the captives
swooned, and their masters pulled them up and dragged them by the
hair to the sacrificial stone where they were to die.'

The Aztecs were not the first Mesoamericans to sacrifice human
beings. We know that the Toltec and the Maya engaged in the
practice, and it is a reasonable inference that all steep-sided,
flat-topped Mesoamerican pyramids were intended to serve as a
stage for the spectacle in which human victims were fed to the
gods. Nor was human sacrifice an invention of state-level
religions. To judge from the evidence of band and village
societies throughout the Americas and in many other parts of
the world, human sacrifice long antedated the rise of state
religions.

[...more...][2]
http://www.heretical.com/cannibal/mamerica.html

[1] And almost as many men as women.
[2] See also "Early Western Travels", Thwaites

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Original file name: What kinda deth kult is this a... - converted on Thursday, 20 December 2001, 03:25