Cannibals and Kings (16 page)

At first, only the freshwater arms of the lake were used in this manner. But as the areas occupied by the
chinampas
increased, Aztec engineers tried to reduce the salinity of the brackish portions by diking them off and flushing them with fresh water channeled through a complicated system of aqueducts and sluice gates.

Looking back, then, on the developmental sequence in the Teotihuacán Valley and the Valley of Mexico during the millennium from
A.D.
200 to
A.D.
1200, we can discern three broad phases of agricultural intensifications followed by three shifts in the mode of production: first, the intensification of hillside slash-and-burn farming; second, spring-fed canal irrigation; and third,
chinampa
construction. Each of these involved progressively greater start-up and construction outlays, but each ultimately sustained greater population densities and larger and more powerful states. In those thousand years the population of the Valley of Mexico rose from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, while the scope of political control grew from one to two valleys to a whole subcontinent. By the old onwards-and-upwards theory of progress, the steady augmentation of agricultural production should have meant that the Aztecs and their neighbors increasingly enjoyed the benefits of “high civilization”—a phrase anthropologists have not hesitated to apply to them. But the phrase is wildly inappropriate.

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. 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, Bernai Díaz, 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 Cortes’ 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 center of what is today Mexico City. As they mounted the steps, wrote Bernai Díaz, other temples and shrines “all gleaming white” came into view. In the open space at the top of the pyramid “the great stones stood on which they placed the poor Indians for sacrifice.” Here also was “a 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 “very broad face and monstrous and terrible eyes,” before which “they were burning the hearts of three Indians whom they had sacrificed that day.” The walls and floor of the temple “were so splashed and encrusted with blood that they were black” and the “whole place stank vilely.” In Tlaloc’s temple, too, everything was covered with blood, “both 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:

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 Duran of the legendary slaughter of prisoners captured among the Mixtees:

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 Florentine 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:

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:

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.

From Brazil to the Great Plains, American Indian societies ritually dispatched human victims in order to achieve certain kinds of benefits. Virtually every element of Aztec ritual was foreshadowed in the beliefs and practices of band and village peoples. Even the preoccupation with the surgical removal of the heart had its precedents. The Iroquois, for example, vied with each other for the privilege of eating the heart of a brave prisoner so that they could acquire some of his
courage. Everywhere, male prisoners were the chief victims. Before being killed, they were made to run a gauntlet, or were beaten, stoned, burned, mutilated, or subjected to other forms of torture and abuse. Sometimes they were tied to stakes and given a club with which to defend themselves against their tormentors. Occasionally one or two prisoners were kept for extended periods and provided with good food and concubines.

The ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war among band and village peoples was usually followed by the eating of all or part of the victim’s body. Thanks to the eyewitness accounts provided by Hans Städen, a German sailor who was shipwrecked on the coast of Brazil early in the sixteenth century, we have a vivid idea of how one group, the Tupinamba, combined ritual sacrifice with cannibalism.

On the day of the sacrifice the prisoner of war, trussed around the waist, was dragged into the plaza. He was surrounded by women who insulted and abused him, but he was allowed to give vent to his feelings by throwing fruits or broken pieces of pottery at them. Meanwhile old women painted black and red and wearing necklaces of human teeth brought out ornamented vases in which the victim’s blood and entrails would be cooked. The ceremonial club that would be used to kill him was passed back and forth among the men in order to “acquire the power to catch a prisoner in the future.” The actual executioner wore a long feather cloak and was followed by relatives singing and beating drums. The executioner and the prisoner derided each other. Enough liberty was allowed the prisoner so that he could dodge the blows, and sometimes a club was put in his hands for protecting himself without being able to strike back. When at last his skull was shattered,
everyone “shouted and whistled.” If the prisoner had been given a wife during his period of captivity, she was expected to shed tears over his body before joining in the feast that followed. Now the old women “rushed to drink the warm blood,” and children dipped their hands into it. “Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it.”

The body was cut into quarters and barbecued while “the old women who were most eager for human flesh” licked the grease dripping from the sticks that formed the grill. Ten thousand miles to the north, about two centuries later, Jesuit missionaries witnessed a similar ritual among the Hurons of Canada. The victim was an Iroquois man who had been captured along with several other companions while they were fishing on Lake Ontario. The Huron chief in charge of the ritual explained that the Sun and the God of War would be pleased by what they were about to do. It was important not to kill the victim before daybreak, so at first they should only burn his legs. Also, they ought not to have sexual intercourse during the night. The prisoner, his hands bound, alternately shrieking with pain and singing a song of defiance learned as a child for just this occasion, was brought indoors, where he was set upon by a crowd armed with brands of burning bark. As he reeled from one end of the room to the other, some people seized his hands, “breaking the bones thereof by sheer force; others pierced his ears with sticks they left in them.” Whenever he seemed ready to expire, the chief intervened “and ordered them to cease tormenting him, saying it was important that he should see daylight.” At dawn he was taken outside and forced to climb onto a platform built on a wooden scaffold so that the entire village could watch what was happening to him—the scaffold making do as a sacrificial platform
in the absence of flat-topped pyramids reared for such purposes by the Mesoamerican states. Four men now took over the task of tormenting the captive. They burned his eyes, applied red-hot hatchets to his shoulders, and thrust burning brands down his throat and into his rectum. When it was apparent that he was about to die, one of the executioners “cut off a foot, another a hand, and almost at the same time a third severed the head from the shoulders, throwing it into the crowd where someone caught it” to carry to the chief, who later made “a feast therewith.” The same day a feast was also made of the victim’s trunk, and on their way home the missionaries encountered a man “who was carrying upon a skewer one of his half-roasted hands.”

Let me pause here for a moment to discuss interpretations of these rituals which attribute them to innate human impulses. I am especially concerned with elaborate theories offered in the Freudian tradition which claim that torture, sacrifice, and cannibalism are intelligible as expressions of instincts for love and for aggression. Eli Sagan, for example, has recently argued that cannibalism is “the most fundamental form of human aggression” since it involves a compromise between loving the victim in the form of eating him and killing him because he frustrates you. Purportedly, this explains why the victims are sometimes treated with great kindness before their torture begins—the executioners are simply reenacting their love-hate relationship with their fathers. What this approach fails to make clear is that the torture, sacrifice, and eating of prisoners of war cannot take place without prisoners of war, and prisoners of war cannot be captured unless there are wars. I pointed out earlier that theories tracing warfare to pan-human instincts are useless for explaining variations in the intensity and style of inter-group
conflict and that they are dangerously misleading because they imply that war is inevitable. Attempts to understand why prisoners are sometimes pampered, then tortured, sacrificed, and eaten in terms of conflicting universal instincts of love and hate are useless and dangerous for the same reason. Prisoners are not always pampered, tortured, sacrificed, and eaten, and any theory purporting to explain why this complex occurs must also be able to explain why it also does not occur. Since the activities in question are part of the process of armed conflict, their explanation must be sought first and foremost in military costs and benefits—in variables which reflect the size, political status, armament technology, and logistics of the combatants. The taking of prisoners, for example, is itself an act which depends on the capacity of a raiding party to avoid counterattacks and ambushes on its return home while encumbered with reluctant enemy captives. When the raiding party is small, and when it must travel considerable distances through regions where the enemy can retaliate before safe territory is reached, the taking of prisoners may be forgone entirely. Under such circumstances only pieces of the enemy can be brought back to validate the body count essential for establishing a claim on the social and material rewards reserved for excellence and bravery in combat. From this we get the widespread custom of bringing back heads, scalps, fingers, and other body parts in lieu of the whole live captive.