The roots of Aztec human sacrifice - gruesome but nifty

[RangerWickett]

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm

I just stumbled across this link while researching Aztec magical traditions. It didn't have the information I wanted, but it described an interesting ecological situation that would have sparked a culture that demanded human sacrifices. I'm not sure if it's true, but the theory is certainly interesting.

I wonder how it might affect fantasy cultures. My dark elves, for instance, live in a world fueled by the death of the surface -- as things decay and drain down into the cracks of the earth, plants and animals still flourish, but not in large numbers. Perhaps the dark elves turn to human sacrifice when their numbers get too large.

This actually reminds me of the Ember'yxhest, the underdark for the rather defunct Daemonforge setting. I wrote up the description of the place as a realm dominated by demons and giant spiders that fed on magical energy. They would breed exponentially until there were too many to survive on what energy there was, at which point they would just devour each other until only two survived, one male, one female. Bad from a genetic standpoint, but hey, it's magic.

What other ecological forces might shape cultures in a fantasy world?

 

[Alzrius]

That was so cool! I ate up (pun intended) material like this when I was doing my undergrad studies.

Another one might be migratory patterns among peoples. This usually evolves along with governments and their ability to patrol borders and make passports. In a fantasy world, it might have to do with movement-oriented magic.

 

[GrayIguana]

That is interesting, and creepy.

I also saw a special on American Native tribes that dissappeared in the Southwest US. I hate to say it was the Anasazi, but it may have been. The researchers found evidence of cannibalism, and hypothesize that a wandering tribe of Aztec decendants came upon the area, tried to take over, and used cannibalism as a form of control. Obviously, I'm summarizing and it was a long time ago that I saw this. In the end the original occupants fled or died.

A section in the article also reminded me of a practice I read somewhere about the ancient chinese. Sacrifices were used to dedicate buildings and fortifications to the gods. A neighboring region was kept unoccupied so the local tribes would repopulate and thus the supply of sacrifices was always being replenished.

 

[Ed Cha]

Cool, thanks for the link!

 

[trancejeremy]

Eh. I have my doubts about that. People today tend to overlook just how good they were at irrigating and growing crops

I also think if they really wanted livestock animals, they could simply have gotten them via trade. Llamas and Alpacas (which are big now, sorta, though I think it's all a scam) could be had from the Incans.

And if they had too many people, they could simply expand or start a war. While I think it was relatively crowded to the south, they probably could have expanded north without much trouble.

(Not an expert, but I did study Spanish for way too many years and one of my interests is archaeoastronomy, which is something else the Aztecs were good at.)

 

[Celebrim]

Environmental determinism has been really big since Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and while I don't at all disagree that the environment plays a huge role in the development and collapse of civilizations, I think you cross a line when using environment to explain away the development of cultural traditions. In particular, the closing lines of the article is utterly offensive to me:

Gruesome as these practices may seem, an ecological perspective and population pressure theory render the Aztec emphasis on human sacrifice acceptable as a natural and rational response to the material conditions of their existence...A materialist ecological approach reveals the Aztecs to be neither irrational nor mentally ill, but merely human beings who, faced with unusual survival problems, responded with unusual behavior.[emphasis added]

So, under population pressure widespread kidnapping, murder, and cannibalism - as the author himself puts it maintaining foreign populations as livestock - are acceptable and rational responces?

That is taking a desire to be non-judgemental just a little bit too far. The ecological pressures that the Aztecs faced were not unique, yet the particular culture that the Aztecs developed was unique. A great many other cultures faced problems of overpopulation and undernutrition, and most of the world's poor in every culture of the time was forced to live as virtual vegetarians, but by and large they did not turn to widespread cannibalism as a solution. Europes peasants were living off of little more than grains. China's peasants were living off of little more than rice. Both cultures suffered continually from widespread malnutrition. Yet Central America possessed at that time a variaty of potential vegetable food crops that exceeded the variaty of virtually anywhere else in the world, and had the author admits at least one domesticated food animal (the turkey).

The fact is that allow various cultures are faced with different challenges, how they react to those challenges is as diverse as the human imagination. The fact that the Aztecs derived some benifits from their cannibal empire in no way renders the statement that the Aztecs had "a maniacal obsession with blood and torture" untrue. IMO, the Aztec's culture is an extreme example of the development of social and cultural disfunctionality. It's not at all clear to me that any environmental need to persist in a cannibalistic practice the developed in Central America is not caused by earlier social decisions to accept cannibalism as an acceptable practice. In other words, I wonder if the writer of the article is guilty of confusing cause and effect. Were the Aztecs cannibals because of a lack of suitable domestic food animals, or was there a lack of suitable domestic food animals because they had temporarily solved protein problems by turning to cannibalism rather than attempting domestication? Whatever the case may be, it doesn't render the decision to develop a cannibal empire "acceptable".

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

So, under population pressure widespread kidnapping, murder, and cannibalism - as the author himself puts it maintaining foreign populations as livestock - are acceptable and rational responces?

Oh noes! He's going all moral absolutist on us!

Don't you know that'll bring in the moral relativists, and *then* we'll have an alignment thread on our hands, and no one wants that! Think of the children, mang!

 

[Celebrim]

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm
I wonder how it might affect fantasy cultures...What other ecological forces might shape cultures in a fantasy world?

Ok, rant aside, fantasy does provide some interesting sort of questions we can ask. Although this is something more of a science fiction question, its always interesting to ask how the differences in the sentient species effect thier culture. Take giants. What are the cultural effects of being huge? Or elves. What are the cultural effects of living for centuries?

But fantasy isn't perfectly suited for such questions. Take mind flayers. If you start looking at the common humanity of mind flayers, I think you are asking for philosophical trouble because mind flayers weren't created to be a creature with differences that emphasize a common humanity, but to be utterly inhuman and have features that emphasized its utter inhumanity. A narative discourse that sets about to justify the culture of mind flayers because they are 'born that way' is going to get tangled up, and misses the fact that they are monstrous on purpose and that they are better used as a symbol for what is monstrous than as a mirror into some aspect of or humanity. "Don't hate me because I'm a creature that can only survive by eating the brains of other sentient creatures.", lessens there value as a symbol and makes the author as potentially deluded about the nature of that symbol as the character's in his narrative would be. It would be like taking the aliens of Alien and making them into empathetic beings. You are missing the point. The question provided by mind flayers and Aliens is not, "What things are not essential to our nature as humans?", but rather, "How do humans react when confronted by an utterly alien predator that thinks of them only as food?" or even if you prefer, "If something was inherently evil, what would it be like?"

A more interesting take on this would be to have a race which shares a clear common 'humanity' with the other sentient races, but fails for its part to recognize that. I'm thinking for example of the Green Martians in the ERB's Barsoom stories, which is alien in form, but as we latter learn near kindred to the other 'men' of Mars. How would a member of a culture like that take discovering that he in fact shares common humanity with the other races, as for example the black martian racist Dator Xodar discovers when John Carter convinces him that the other races of mars are not mere beasts. Or how would a member of a more seemingly enlightened race take discovering that they are near cousins of a barbaric race, as for example a Gnome discovering that Gnomes and Goblins are the same people?

As far as ecological forces go, I wouldn't imagine that they'd be all that different in a fantasy world unless you had a truely fantastic ecology - and I'm not sure I've ever seen one done in a published campaign. The closest I can think of this the magical crisis being experienced in Larry Niven's, 'The magic goes away'. If mana turned out to be a non-renewable or semi-renewable resource, it might force cultures that depended heavily on magic to go to extreme lengths to keep thier supply available.

However, just because the ecological forces are the same, doesn't mean that you can't recast real world cultures in fantasy terms. For example, what if you did the Aztec empire as a necromantic culture whose ritual sacrifices were performed in order to drive an economy dependent on undead slaves, or what if the Aztecs literally did need to appease demons which they had become culturally dependent on? For example, the psuedo-aztecs might have formed a pact with a group of demons in order to win a war against a neighbor, but in order to keep the demon from turning against them, they now have to continually war on all thier neighbors in order to keep the demon fed. And because all thier neighbors now hate them passionately, they fear to seek any solution to the problem, because without the demon they would almost certainly be wiped out by thier now enraged neighbors.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

What if the Aerenal elves of Eberron are a lot more like the Aztecs than they're letting on?

Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh...

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

What if the Aerenal elves of Eberron are a lot more like the Aztecs than they're letting on?

Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh...

So, not only do they have freaky death cults, but they snack on their ancestors as part of worship?

Now, since they're healed by positive energy, if you can have them hang out in a zone of positive energy, you can just keep cutting and cutting and cutting and VOILA! the Aerenals don't have to cut down their precious trees to plant any crops.

Brad