Human Sacrifice in the Pre-Columbian Americas: Fact vs Fiction

Stories and evidence of pre-conquest ritual human sacrifice abound throughout present-day Latin America. The conquistadors, mired in the process of slaughtering thousands of natives in the name of Catholicism and gold, were repulsed by the rite and put a quick end to it without understanding its role within these indigenous societies. Yet each culture had its particular reasons and methods for human sacrifice, which, far from the wild and gory celebration of violence it is often depicted as, was most often a solemn ritual that served spiritual, political, and societal purposes.

The practice of human sacrifice, certainly not unique to the Americas, began among the earlier cultures of the region and was still in use among the Aztec, Maya, and Inca at the time of the conquest. With so many pre-conquest records destroyed by the colonizers, researchers lack comprehensive information about the finer details of the practice, but some strides have been made in studying the nature of human sacrifice.

For all of the cultures occupying Meso and South America before the conquest, religion was the initial motivator for ritual sacrifice practices. The practice of making offerings to the gods appears to have been rooted in the ideas of reciprocity and atonement. Across all cultures, the overarching belief was that the gods had made sacrifices, even spilling their own blood, in order to give humans the ultimate gift: life. Humans, in turn, made offerings to the gods to thank and repay them for this gift, as well as to atone for their sins so the gods didn’t change their minds and bring humanity to a swift end. Rather than indicating a lack of respect for human life, sacrifices were made because human life was so valuable, representing the ultimate gift to the gods.

These cultures also shared a belief in the afterlife, including the notion that those sacrificed to the gods were moving on to bigger, better things when their time on this earth came to an end, to be honored by the gods in the next world.

Some scholars argue that the term “sacrifice” itself is inappropriate, an imposed perspective from the Old World. In fact, many of the victims, as well as their families, if perhaps not overjoyed at the prospect of having their hearts cut out or being decapitated, would have believed it was an honor to be chosen to be gifts to the gods.

The Aztecs are perhaps the best-known practitioners of the sacrifice ritual, which the Conquistadors witnessed firsthand. What their chroniclers notably failed to emphasize were the far more common forms of offerings, including material goods and animals—these forms of sacrifice might have been offered daily, but humans were not.

While offerings were made to a variety of gods, it was primarily Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war, who needed to be nourished with blood to continue his battle against darkness. If he lost, the world would end. That did not mean that humans had to be constantly sacrificed, however. The Aztecs also practiced ritual bloodletting—that is, nobles and priests regularly let their own blood, which was collected and offered to the gods.

Religious belief was the initial source of the sacrifice ritual, but as the Aztec Empire expanded, beginning with the reign of Itzcóatl in the 15th century, a political dimension to the ritual took shape. It became used as a tool for intimidating conquered territories and keeping them in line, with increasing numbers of victims coming from outside the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan.

The Maya, once believed to be the more “peaceful” of the Mesoamerican civilizations, also practiced human sacrifice, dating as far back as 200 CE. Like the Aztec, the Maya engaged in human sacrifice for exceptional reasons, not as an everyday ritual. Other forms of offerings were far more common, including bloodletting and body piercing. For the Maya, ritual bloodletting appears not to have been contained to the elites but practiced among all classes.

For the Maya, death and rebirth were deeply intertwined, beginning with their twin hero gods, Hunahpú and Xbalanque, who had to travel to the underworld in order to be reborn. For this reason, sacrifice rituals seem to be particularly linked to times of death and rebirth, like the ascension or death of a ruler. Mass ritual killings might also be undertaken in times of great distress, while smaller-scale sacrifices might be made more regularly by priests in exchange for granting society the things needed to survive, namely water to fuel abundant harvests, which came from their rain god, Chaac.

Further south, evidence indicates the Inca also practiced human sacrifice, and for much the same reasons as their Mesoamerican counterparts: to honor and appease the gods, especially in times of uncertainty or difficulty. The Inca had many huacas, or sacred places, throughout their territory, and this is where many sacrifices were dedicated. Smaller huacas were honored with offerings that might include animals like llamas and alpacas or their blood, while the most important huacas, often on mountaintops, received human offerings.

The formal sacrifice ritual, capacocha (royal obligation), began in Cuzco, with the Sapa Inca announcing the event and requesting offerings from throughout the territory: gold, coca leaves, fine cloth, feathers, and humans. Some researchers suggest that human offerings may have been selected from among the elites, while others indicate they may have been offered by those wishing to improve their relationship with the Sapa Inca, both of which suggest a political dimension to the practice. These offerings were assembled in the capital and distributed during a pilgrimage to the sacred sites.

Across all three civilizations, victims appear to have fallen into two main categories: slaves or captured warriors, who were the most likely to be slain in mass events, and specially chosen human offerings whose selection had a specific political or spiritual element. The actual number of victims, however, is largely unknown.

For example, in the modern era, evidence of the skull racks and towers that the Spanish observed at Tenochtitlan has, in fact, been unearthed, but as far as the number of victims—which various Spanish chroniclers attested to be tens or even hundreds of thousands—archaeological evidence tallies nowhere near that number. Even at Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor, the main temple in the empire’s capital, where the largest number of such sacrifices would’ve been undertaken, the number of skulls uncovered so far has been less than 1,000.

While definitive numbers of victims are nearly impossible to establish, who they were has been somewhat easier to determine through studying the DNA of remains. This has, in many cases, allowed researchers to determine the gender and approximate ages of victims, as well as whether they were from within the local population or outside.

For the Aztec, most of the victims discovered so far appear to have been from outside Tenochtitlan. This indicates they were likely war captives or slaves—who may have been purchased in markets or offered to the Aztec Empire as tribute. As many sacrifice victims were captured warriors, they were predominantly adult males. In the years prior to the conquest, the Aztec fought a number of ritual or symbolic wars, the flower wars, with neighboring groups, the Tlaxcala in particular. Unlike wars for conquest, these battles were waged at predetermined times. They had different rules of engagement, with some scholars arguing that their primary purpose was for young warriors to gain experience and improve their status by capturing opponents for sacrifice rituals.

The Maya, it seems, did not make a practice of collecting and displaying skulls of human sacrifice victims—perhaps one reason it was originally believed that they didn’t participate in the ritual—but remains that have been discovered include men, women, and children, both local and from outside the region. Remains of children have been found in cenotes, sinkhole caves thought to be portals to the underworld, where priests would sacrifice them to the rain god. Children, in particular, may have been used in sacrifices meant to promote renewal, such as the beginning of a new calendar or agricultural cycle.

Sacrifice was also associated, particularly in the post-classic Maya period, with their ceremonial ballgame. Researchers suggest war captives would be made to play the game with a predetermined outcome and then sacrificed after losing. It was particularly notable if a rival chieftain or other important leader could be captured and sacrificed, as noble blood was highly prized as an offering.

The Inca practice of sacrificing victims at high altitudes in the Andes actually led to the preservation of a number of sacrificed mummies, giving scholars quite a bit more physical evidence to go on than in other regions. In contrast with their contemporaries in the Americas, this evidence suggests that, outside the practice of sacrificing prisoners of war and the wives and servants of the Sapa Inca upon his death, for religious ceremonies, the Inca specifically sacrificed children and young holy women, aclla. Some scholars suggest that, at such a young age, these children were thought to be unblemished, a perfect offering to the gods.

The Spanish records of the practice note that it included the sons and daughters of chiefs and other nobility, reinforcing the idea that it had both religious and political motives. While the sacrifice was carried out to honor the gods, the victims were selected to reinforce the power of the Sapa Inca.

While multiple methods were employed for the sacrifice ritual, often depending on the status of the victim or the purpose of the specific event, each civilization had its signature move—and scholars caution that while in some cases the ritual was carried out as a public spectacle, it was not a raucous celebration, but a solemn one.

For the Aztec, the most common ritual involved priests holding the victim down on a platform atop the Templo Mayor and then using an obsidian blade to cut open the chest cavity. The victim’s still-beating heart would be offered up to Huitzilopochtli while the body was pushed down the temple steps.

Scholar David Carrasco notes that this ritual was a reenactment of the Huitzilopochtli origin myth, in which the god bursts from his mother’s womb, kills his sister, and tosses her down the mountain. While this performance fulfilled the spiritual element of the ritual, the displaying of victims’ skulls on racks was most certainly a political tool for intimidating rivals and showcasing the empire’s power.

The Maya were partial to decapitation, again possibly harkening back to their mythology, some versions of which claim that the maize god was decapitated during the harvest and reborn in the spring. Decapitation was closely connected with rebirth and creation, so researchers suggest this method was most commonly used in rituals with great spiritual significance. An alternative was to tie victims up before pushing them to their deaths down the long stairs of the temple, while lower-status war captives were often disemboweled. In the late Maya period, evidence suggested they also adopted the Aztec practice of heart extraction.

Both the Aztec and Maya practices were performed publicly, while the Inca ceremony was necessarily private, taking place in the isolated and treacherous mountaintops. For the child victims of the Inca’s capacocha, it appears efforts were undertaken to make victims as comfortable as possible and avoid unnecessary violence—before burying them alive to die of suffocation or exposure. In the period before the sacrifice, victims were well-fed, well-treated, and possibly highly drugged. The trek up the mountain to the point of sacrifice would have been taxing for the victims, weakening them and hopefully making their passing easier. Some victims appear to have been strangled or suffocated before being buried, but scholars suggest anything likely to blemish the victims and therefore damage the offering to the gods would have been avoided. It was the mountain itself, and the spirit within that was supposed to take the child’s life.

Christianity, the religion imposed by the Spanish throughout present-day Latin America, holds as its central premise that its god sacrificed his own son to save humanity’s souls. Millions have been slaughtered in the name of this god over the two thousand years since Jesus himself was killed.

Tens of thousands were brutally tortured and killed during the Spanish Inquisition while the Conquistadors rampaged throughout the Americas, murdering the Indigenous in the name of this same god.

Thus, many people, both scholars and amateurs alike, have begun to question why humanity has been so willing to embrace the Conquistadors’ framing of the Indigenous as “barbaric” for killing, on a smaller scale, to honor their gods and perpetuate human life in rituals their people understood and believed were necessary.