Page 104 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Olmecs, the so-called ‘mother-culture’ of Central America, and it was
more than 3000 years old. A block of solid granite about four feet thick,
its sides bore reliefs of four men wearing curious head-dresses. Each man
carried a healthy, chubby, struggling infant, whose desperate fear was
clearly visible. The back of the altar was undecorated; at the front another
figure was portrayed, holding in his arms, as though it were an offering,
the slumped body of a dead child.
The Olmecs are the earliest recognized high civilization of Ancient
Mexico, and human sacrifice was well established with them. Two and a
half thousand years later, at the time of the Spanish conquest, the Aztecs
were the last (but by no means the least) of the peoples of this region to
continue an extremely old and deeply ingrained tradition.
They did so with fanatical zeal.
It is recorded, for example, that Ahuitzotl, the eighth and most
powerful emperor of the Aztec royal dynasty, ‘celebrated the dedication
of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshalling four lines
of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch
them. On this occasion as many as 80,000 were slain during a single
ceremonial rite.’
4
The Aztecs liked to dress up in the flayed skins of sacrificial victims.
Bernardino de Sahagun, a Spanish missionary, attended one such
ceremony soon after the conquest:

The celebrants flayed and dismembered the captives; they then lubricated their
own naked bodies with grease and slipped into the skin ... Trailing blood and
grease, the gruesomely clad men ran through the city, thus terrifying those they
followed ... The second-day’s rite also included a cannibal feast for each warrior’s
family.
5
Another mass sacrifice was witnessed by the Spanish chronicler Diego de
Duran. In this instance the victims were so numerous that when the
streams of blood running down the temple steps ‘reached bottom and
cooled they formed fat clots, enough to terrify anyone’. All in all, it has
6
been estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the Aztec empire
as a whole had risen to around 250,000 a year by the beginning of the
sixteenth century.
7
What was this manic destruction of human life for? According to the
Aztecs themselves, it was done to delay the coming of the end of the
world.
8

4 Joyce Milton, Robert A. Orsi and Norman Harrison, The Feathered Serpent and the
Cross: The Pre-Colombian God-Kings and the Papal States, Cassell, London, 1980, p. 64.
5 Reported in Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, Time-Life Books, Alexandria,
Virginia, 1992, p. 105.
6 Ibid., p. 103.
The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, p. 55.
7
8 Mary Miller and Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya,
Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp. 96.

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