Can anyone explain the Precolumbian world its extreme fondness of human sacrifice...

Can anyone explain the Precolumbian world its extreme fondness of human sacrifice? No other part of the world did it like the ancient Americas.

Other urls found in this thread:

ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Without being very informed on the subject, I've always thought there was a chance that their savagery was exagerated by their European conquorers.
>burn all of heir records
>give a disgusting account of their culture

The idea of sacrifice is very understandable in ancient cultures.

Humans anthropomorphize the world in order to better understand it. When disasters happen they assume it's because of capricious gods. Humans don't like feeling powerless so they make up ways of appeasing the gods. What do gods want? Well as anthropomorphization they obviously value what humans value, and humans value food and other humans most of all. So ancient cultures usually sacrificed food, animals, or other humans to gods in order to appease them and in so doing feel less powerless.

>More things naturalists have no way of understanding.

>reddit spacing

>I've always thought there was a chance that their savagery was exagerated by their European conquorers.

That's definitely true of the Plains Indians on the frontier in the 1880s when yellow journalism was at its height back east.

We know much more about the mesoamerican civilizations though and they did have a penchant for human sacrifice.

I guess the explanation is that it was a good way of executing war prisoners, and terrified enemies.

>More bizarre false allegations.

>Humans don't like feeling powerless
Just found the motivation behind organized religion in general. Atheism scares people, the concept of disappearing after death scares people, and its easier to believe someones going to save us from that once we die than it is to come to grips with our own mortality. Religion causes the vast majority of the worlds problems, or at least causes most of the ones we're seeing right now. Thousands of people have died, millions even. Over comforting fairy tales concocted thousands of years ago out of fear.

Hear me out, but what if it's because they relied on slave labour and not animal labour

>atheism scares
What are pleasure sluts

It's a good thing there's people far smarter than any religious person who spend their days being smug on an anonymous chicken farming forum

What I meant by that was "the concept of disappearing after death scares people" basically this and nothing else.

There are many Bible verses about land being "filed with violence".Isn't there also a passage about violence and violent death somehow "tainting" land and inviting demonic activity or something along those lines? I hate talking about Biblical topics tha I'm not very informed on because I don't want to mislead anybody, but I found the theory as it relates to human sacrifice and demonic influences in ancient cultures interesting.

Religious people would argue that just because they have faith doesn't make them stupid. They'd also point out that they have college degrees etc. Perhaps the problem is looking at this in a long term scope. It's not like they've never seen the effects religion has on a society, but they might not know how far reaching those effects might've been to the history of that nation.

Maybe the problem is that I just don't understand the concept of having "faith" in something. Without proof, its just a theory. I welcome anyone to try to explain it to me like I'm 5.

To understand its occurrence in Mesoamerica you need to understand their worldview, religion and politics. I can't speak for cultures outside of Mesoamerica, though from what I've seen it's occurrence outside of Mesoamerica in the rest of the continent isn't as frequent and more in line with what happened elsewhere in the world. And it's important to point out that cultures throughout history all over the world also did it too.

People MUCH prefer beleiving they set their own limits and don't answer to anybody. Also the notion that religion causes "the vast majority of hte world's problems" is asinine. Greed and fear in several forms cause war and genocide.

To Cain:

Genesis 4:10 And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.

Mass human sacrifice was fairly common in many other societies, like Shang China, Sumer, First Dynasty Egypt, Linearbandkeramik, Kerma, West Africa, Carthage, etc. On a smaller scale it was even more common, practiced by the likes of Celts, Southeast Asians (even in Buddhist/Hindu contexts), Polynesians, early Japanese, Romans, and possibly Greeks according to archaeological evidence. For the most part then the Americas weren't unusual, human sacrifice in places like the Andes and Mississippi being fairly typical.

Mesoamerican sacrifice on the other hand is pretty unique in the scale of it over such a wide area, in so many societies over such a long time. In other civilizations it tended to disappear over time, and if it continued it was on a small scale. I don't know much about Mesoamerican religions but as far as I know sacrifice, including human sacrifice and bloodletting, was central to their entire worldview. It wasn't just retainer sacrifice or offerings to appease the gods, it was seen as something central to the workings of the universe, so it couldn't just die out like it did elsewhere.

numbers 35:33 KJV
“So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.”

also several other less specific passages about "blood in the land"

really unironically makes you think

>Carthage
>Celts
Really?

Didn't Carthage sacrifice children to some deity? I recall seeing that before.

>and the land cannot be cleansed of the blodd that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it."
"An eye for an eye" basically?

ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
oh shit you're right! wow, guess you learn something new everyday.

Is crucifixion or burning a person alive any different? They are both, in essence, an offering to the gods

Both are archaeologically attested. Romans probably exaggerated, but it happened.

Yeah thats what I was thinking when you said "celts". That it sounds a little like Roman propaganda against the gauls.

For Mesoamerica, you have to look at it in the context of the particular civilization and period. Some civilizations in Mesoamerica did not practice human sacrifice. Human sacrifice happened in many different forms ranging from drowning, burning in a fire, getting shot by arrows, heart extraction, getting thrown down temple steps, getting crushed by a large rock and beheading, Most of the ones I described are Aztec ones. The human heart extraction is probably the most mentioned, and it seems to have been a more popular form of sacrifice among the Toltec and Nahua (Aztecs). The Maya practiced it too, but it seems this form of sacrifice was more prominent in the postclassic period (c.1000) when they were influenced by the Toltecs. It occurs very rarely in the Classic period, but you do see one depiction of it in a vase. The Mixtecs of Oaxaca also show this type of sacrifice in their codices.

In the Popol Vuh of the late postclassic maya of guatemala, their patron deity is mentioned as instructing them how to sacrifice, by cutting into the armpit and extracting the heart. The deity (Tohil) then suckles as though he was an infant. In the rabinal achi, a postclassic maya drama play sacrifice also occurs, however in this instance it kind of doubles as an execution. In Chichen Itza people were thrown down the huge well which was the cenote were people fell and drowned to their deaths. Gold was also thrown down there as offerings.

There were other forms of sacrifice not involving humans, such as sacrificing animals, which still occurs in Mexico btw. And there is also blood offerings that don't involve death, but just bloodletting. This is usually done by the individual to themselves. Such as passing a rope through their tongue if you are a Maya noblewoman. Others bleed through their ears, which you can see in the Madrid Codex of the Maya.

Maya kings of the classic period passed a rope through thei penis which was pierced by a singray spine as part of the ascension ceremony. Archeological evidence suggests Maya queen occassionally did the same in their groins. Sometimes warriors participated in these penis piercing rituals to prove their manliness, so it had less of a religious or political motivation. Priests also occassionally did this. Other forms of bloodletting was done in the calves, which was part of the ascension ceremony for Aztec rulers.

There are a bunch of remarkably consistent first-hand accounts, though.

+1

>tfw you can't help but think your Latina gf is probably totally cool with gore because of her genes

break up asap, you'll make her a favor

many tribes in south america also had self mutillation practices as mourning rituals

First hand as in diaries and memoirs or as in newspaper articles? I'm speaking of the latter.

The former. Commanche were hardcore motherfuckers.