Page 103 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chichen Itza.
Rather lugubriously, I continued to climb the steps of the Temple of the
Warriors. Weighing on my mind was the unforgettable fact that the ritual
of human sacrifice had been routinely practised here in pre-Colombian
times. The empty plate that Chacmool held across his stomach had once
served as a receptacle for freshly extracted hearts. ‘If the victim’s heart
was to be taken out,’ reported one Spanish observer in the sixteenth
century,

they conducted him with great display ... and placed him on the sacrificial stone.
Four of them took hold of his arms and legs, spreading them out. Then the
executioner came, with a flint knife in his hand, and with great skill made an
incision between the ribs on the left side, below the nipple; then he plunged in his
hand and like a ravenous tiger tore out the living heart, which he laid on the plate
3
...
What kind of culture could have nourished and celebrated such demonic
behaviour? Here, in Chichen Itza, amid ruins dating back more than 1200
years, a hybrid society had formed out of intermingled Maya and Toltec
elements. This society was by no means exceptional in its addiction to
cruel and barbaric ceremonies. On the contrary, all the great indigenous
civilizations known to have flourished in Mexico had indulged in the
ritualized slaughter of human beings.

Slaughterhouses

Villahermosa, Tabasco Province
I stood looking at the Altar of Infant Sacrifice. It was the creation of the

3 Friar Diego de Landa, Yucatan before and after the Conquest (trans, with notes by
William Gates), Producción Editorial Dante, Merida, Mexico, 1990, p. 71.

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