Sunday, August 15, 2010

First Weekly Question

I suppose it is worth trying out the question on my readers for clarity before inflicting it on my students.

Week 1 Question

The assigned reading in the textbook, and the excerpt from Bernal Diaz del Castillo's The Conquest of New Spain (1632), tell us quite a bit about how the Spanish conquistadors regarded the Aztecs (or Mexica, as they called themselves). Describe the motivations and justifications that the Spanish had for their conquest of the Aztecs. What do the readings tell us about Aztec views of conquest and power? How would you describe the range of beliefs of Spaniards about their rights to conquer the Indians? Were Spaniards of one opinion about the rightness of what happened? If the situations were reversed, how would the Aztecs have treated the Spanish?

While I am not going to impose the following reading on my students (since it is a bit amateurish work I did as an undergrad), I thought some of you might find it interesting and enlightening.

Aztec Human Sacrifice

by Clayton E. Cramer

What distinguishes human sacrifice from the other intentional homicides to which mankind is so very prone? Human sacrifice is a religious ritual in which a person, sometimes voluntarily, more often not, is consecrated to a god, then killed in a prescribed manner. While the purpose of human sacrifice varies from culture to culture, it is different from capital punishment in that those killing the sacrifice do not consider him or her a criminal. Indeed, the high standards for selecting victims often prevents combining human sacrifice with capital punishment.

Human sacrifice is not a peculiarly New World phenomenon. Indeed, human sacrifice appears to have been widespread throughout the world in different eras.[1] The pre-Christian Celts performed human sacrifice (drowning of females), as did China (the king's immediate servants were buried with him, at least intermittently, until the 17th century).[2] The Carthaginians, like the Phoenicians from whom they are descended, sacrificed children to their chief god, Baal Hammon — and other Mediterranean civilizations criticized them at the time for doing so.[3] The Scythians not only sacrificed captured enemies to their war god, but also sacrificed and buried a chieftain's wives, principal servants, and "50 men from his bodyguard" with the chieftain.[4] The funeral of the Mongol Genghis Khan required the strangulation of "forty girls young enough to be virgins."[5]

Not surprisingly, Christianity played a part in the ending of human sacrifice in those places where the sword backed up the cross. Other religions and even the effectively secular government of the Roman Empire also suppressed human sacrifice. Both Tiberius and Claudius prohibited Celtic human sacrifice (apparently to a god of the sun), and St. Patrick did likewise in Ireland several centuries later. British colonialism demanded that sacrifice to Dravidian village goddesses substitute animals for people, and Buddhism similarly replaced human sacrifice with dough offerings in Tibet.[6]

Human sacrifice in Mexico was not uniquely Aztec. Some other New World cultures engaged in human sacrifice, including the Maya ("young maidens were drowned in sacred wells"), and the Incas.[7] The Incas engaged in high-altitude burial of live children, though some dispute exists whether this particular form of human sacrifice was originally an Inca rite, or a custom of local tribes that the Incas adopted.[8] Spanish accounts of Inca sacrifices, as well as archaeological evidence, suggests that the child, before being buried alive, was made drunk with alcohol.[9] Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca described a Texas coastal tribe that killed their male children in response to dreams, though it is unclear from Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca's account if these were strictly human sacrifice.[10]

Previous cultures of central Mexico, such as the Teotihuacan, had engaged in both human sacrifice and cannibalism. At Azcapotzalco a bowl "contained the remnants of the piéce de résistance, the upper legs and hips of a human being, the most succulent portions for festive consumption." Individuals buried under temple foundations and "shallow dishes, cut from the top of skulls, testify to other rituals involving sacrifice and death."[11] Sacrificial knives, depictions of human hearts, blood as a sacred liquid, child sacrifices to the rain god, and the cult of the Flayed God (from which came the custom of dressing up in human skins), were part of Teotihuacan culture as well.

What may be the Aztec's peculiar addition to the custom of human sacrifice is that such sacrifices sometimes involved thousands of victims over a few days. This appears to be distinctive in the history of human sacrifice.[12] The popular image of Aztec human sacrifice is of a prisoner of war, sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, by a priest ripping out the still beating heart. Yet this was a relatively merciful death compared to the less common forms. In sacrifices to Huehueteotl, the fire god, the captives were bound hand and foot, and dropped, one by one, on to burning coals:

Before death could intervene to put an end to their suffering the priests fished out the captives with large hooks and wrenched the hearts from their blistered bodies.[13]

Many sacrificial rites included ceremonial cannibalism, though mercifully, the Aztecs waited until the heart had been removed before carving up the meal.[14]


Perhaps more distressing to the Spaniards were the sacrifices not of adults, but of children. Ten of the eighteen 20-day months of the Aztec year had human sacrifices as part of the ritual calendar; four of the ten involved children. Even the driest description of the rituals is horrifying: "Child sacrifice to Tlálocs to bring rain;... fertility rite, drowning boy and girl in canoe filled with hearts of sacrificial victims;... sacrifice of slave girl impersonating goddess..."[15] A nearly contemporary account indicates that child sacrifice to the rain god also included sealing slave children five or six years of age in a cave to die.[16] Recent archaeological digs at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan corroborate both written and drawn accounts of such sacrifices. One recent discovery includes the skeletal remains of 42 children apparently sacrificed to Tláloc, from infants up to the age of 7 or 8.[17]

There is an element to Aztec human sacrifice that complicates simple outrage at this callous and bloody disregard for human life. One historian claims that the sacrifices appear to have accepted their fate as either inevitable or even desirable. At least for some types of sacrifice, the captives were regarded as a "personification of the god." Furthermore, there was a fatalism associated with the Indian religions that caused many captives to accept calmly deaths that must have been extraordinarily painful. In addition, those sacrificed to the god of rain believed that they were going directly to a paradise not available to those who died of old age.[18]

Motolinía's account of Aztec sacrifice (done closer in time to the events in question, but also when outrage at human sacrifice was more strongly felt) denies the willingness of the victims:

Let no one think that any of those whom they sacrificed by killing them and cutting out their hearts, or by any other form of death, were voluntary victims. On the contrary, they were sacrificed by force, bitterly mourning their death and frightful suffering.[19]


With the gruesome details now having been laid out on the table, what is their significance from the standpoint of the Spanish destruction of the Aztec culture? It seems clear that the Spanish felt a genuine repulsion at these bloody rites. From the standpoint of the moral code of Christianity, the destruction of this culture as an abomination would have been completely justified. Indeed, the Old Testament gave sanction to the extermination of entire tribes that engaged in child sacrifice. To the Spaniards, merely destroying the Aztec temples and religion must have seemed generous and merciful.

Bibliography

Besom, Thomas, "Another Mummy," Natural History 100:4 [April, 1991] 66-67.

Broda, Johanna, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1987).

Coles, Bryony, and John Coles, People of the Wetlands: Bogs, Bodies, and Lake-Dwellers (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989).

Davies, Nigel, The Aztecs: A History (London: Sphere Books, 1977).

Dillon, Myles, "Celtic Religion." Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 3:1071.

Faherty, Robert L., "Sacrifice," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 16:128-135.

Lamb, Harold, The March of the Barbarians (New York: Literary Guild of America, Inc., 1940).

Linwen, Lou, "Living Buried With Dead 5,200 Years Ago," Beijing Review 33:5-6 [January 29, 1990], 44-45.

Moctezuma, Eduardo Matos, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, transl. Doris Heyden, (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1988), 77.

Motolinía, Toribio, Motolinía's History of the Indians of New Spain, transl. Elizabeth Andros Foster, (Berkeley: The Cortes Society, 1950; reprinted Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).

Monaghan, John, "Sacrifice, Death, and the Origins of Agriculture in the Codex Vienna," American Antiquity 55:3 [July, 1990], 559-569.

Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, Alvar, Relation of Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, transl. Buckingham Smith (New York: 1871; reprinted Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966).

Rice, Tamara Talbot, "Scythians," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 16:438-442.

"Sati," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), VIII:913.

Schobinger, Juan, "Sacrifices of the High Andes," Natural History 100:4 [April, 1991] 62-69.

Vaillant, George C., Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise, and Fall of the Aztec Nation, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966).

Warmington, Brian H., "History of North Africa," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 13:145-155.

Widengren, Geo, "Iranian Religions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 9:867-872.

[1] The use of the word "appears" shows a sizable problem in itself. In the absence of written accounts, archaeological evidence is insufficient to distinguish capital punishment from human sacrifice. As an example, some of the bodies recovered from Northern European peat bogs are believed to be human sacrifices, but the presence of contemporary accounts of both capital punishment and human sacrifice that roughly mirror the methods of death of these "bodies in the bog" makes it difficult to determine with any certainty how many of these victims were criminals, and how many were ritual offerings. Bryony Coles & John Coles, People of the Wetlands: Bogs, Bodies, and Lake-Dwellers (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 191-197.

[2] Robert L. Faherty, "Sacrifice," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 16:128. Lou Linwen, "Living Buried With Dead 5,200 Years Ago," Beijing Review, 33:5-6 [January 29, 1990] 44-45, describes recent discoveries of human sacrifice as part of chieftain burials in China. Unfortunately, the article is insufficiently detailed to understand how the archaeologists determined that the bodies found in the tomb were buried alive.

[3] Brian H. Warmington, "History of North Africa," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 13:148. Also see Lev. 18:21 (NIV) for prohibitions on sacrificing children to Molech, an Ammonite god similar to Baal Hammon.

[4] Tamara Talbot Rice, "Scythians," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 16:440-441. Geo Widengren, "Iranian Religions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 9:868-869.

[5] Harold Lamb, The March of the Barbarians (New York: Literary Guild of America, Inc., 1940), 92-93.

[6] Robert L. Faherty, 16:128-131. Myles Dillon, "Celtic Religion," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), 3:1071. The Indian practice of sati, in which a wife either voluntarily or under compulsion joined her husband's funeral pyre, has many components in common with other forms of human sacrifice. "Sati," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1983), VIII:913. Sati was prohibited by both Mughal rulers, and the British.

[7] Faherty, 16:128-131.

[8] Juan Schobinger, "Sacrifices of the High Andes," Natural History 100:4 [April, 1991] 64-67.

[9] Thomas Besom, "Another Mummy," Natural History 100:4 [April, 1991], 66-67.

[10] Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, Relation of Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, transl. Buckingham Smith (New York: 1871; reprinted Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966), 102-104.

[11] George C. Vaillant, Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise, and Fall of the Aztec Nation, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 76-77.

[12] Nigel Davies, The Aztecs: A History (London: Sphere Books, 1977), 169-170. John Monaghan, "Sacrifice, Death, and the Origins of Agriculture in the Codex Vienna," American Antiquity 55:3 [July, 1990] 559-569, interprets a pre-Conquest Mixtec codex concerning the relationship between agriculture and sacrifice. The Mixtecs, while sharing with the Aztec and Teotihuacan cultures the significance of blood and life as symbols of agricultural sacrifice, do not appear to have satisfied their gods with the death of humans, but regarded the burial of their dead as part of, "We eat the Earth and the Earth eats us."

[13] Vaillant, 205.

[14] Vaillant, 200-201. Toribio Motolinía, Motolinía's History of the Indians of New Spain, transl. Elizabeth Andros Foster (Berkeley: The Cortes Society, 1950; reprinted Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1973), 67.

[15] Vaillant, 200-201.

[16] Motolinía, 68. At first glance, the relationship between a god of rain, and caves, seems obscure. However, the Mixtecs believed that "cloud-forming vapor issues from the Earth in several places... The houses of the Rain are caves..." Monaghan, 564.

[17] Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, transl. Doris Heyden (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1988), 77. Johanna Broda, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 85.

[18] Davies, 171-173.

[19] Motolinía, 64.

23 comments:

  1. The last question in your Week 1 Question, "If the situations were reversed, how would the Aztecs have treated the Spanish?" is asking for something which is not explicitly contained in the readings (I assume), and to extrapolate from the material in the reading into a hypothetical situation. As such, you may want to give it some qualifiers to set it apart from the questions which are asking the students to verify that they actually read the textbook and the primary source excerpt.

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  4. The textbook goes into considerable detail about all that went wrong. It was pretty horrible.

    As it happens, the textbook and the excerpt both discuss what happened to Spaniards captured by the Aztecs.

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  5. Gregchaos quoted a pretty shocking account from The Guardian/UK - Jan 12, 2010. Article by George Mombiot about Columbus. Unfortunately, I had to delete it because of the risks of copyright infringement suits. Gregchaos: please provide a link to it.

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  6. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/11/the-holocaust-we-will-not-see/ points to the Monbiot article, which seems to rely on Stannard's work. Stannard appears to be of those "100 million Indians" claimers--a position which is unsupportable, and largely exists to argue for a much larger slaughter than happened. (And what happened was pretty darn bad.)

    Stannard's account relies on Bartholomew De La Casas (the Spanish priest who suggested that the enslavement of the Indians was cruel and unfair, and should be replaced with African slaves instead). This book tells much the same story, but its account of what happened with the Aztecs is very one-sided. A full account shows that the Aztecs were so easily defeated by the Spanish because so many of the Aztecs' prey were quite willing to help the Spanish against a common foe.

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  7. "By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero..."

    That really can't be true. There are many native people in the Dominican Republic. Also, there are many indigenous people in South and Central America, contradicting Monbiot's claims.

    If you go to Monbiot's article in CiF, there is a lot wrong, and many errors are noted in the comments that follow. For example, the quote from Theodore Roosevelt, calling a horrendous act of mass murder "rightful and beneficial", is something Monbiot made up.

    Monbiot, by the way, should always be read with a grain of salt. He has been found to be wrong on a number of occasions.

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  8. Isn't Monbiot who wrote the piece on the 100th anniversary of the invention of the airplane criticizing as an instrument of the American desire to kill people? I know it was in the Guardian.

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  9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/11/mawkish-maybe-avatar-profound-important links to the original article. An amusing comment there:

    "Once there was a legend that Europe's arrival in the Americas brought goodness and light to a world of evil and darkness.

    "Now there is a legend that Europe's arrival in the Americas brought evil and darkness to a world of goodness and light."

    Sad to say, this is very true. It is difficult to get man past oversimplified models of Good and Evil.

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  10. I said that Monbiot needs to be read with a grain of salt. Here is another example;

    Monbiot, in the CiF article cited above: "Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi".

    What Jefferson actually wrote (http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=advanced_search.php): "...we make to them this solemn declaration of our unalterable determination, that we wish them to live in peace with all nations as well as with us, and we have no intention ever to strike them or to do them an injury of any sort, unless first attacked or threatened; but that learning that some of them meditate war on us, we too are preparing for war against those, & those only who shall seek it; and that if ever we are constrained to life the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi. Adjuring them, therefore, if they wish to remain on the land which covers the bones of their fathers, to keep the peace with a people who ask their friendship without needing it, who wish to avoid war without fearing it. In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them. Let them then continue quiet at home, take care of their women & children, & remove from among them the agents of any nation persuading them to war, and let them declare to us explicitly & categorically that they will do this: in which case, they will have nothing to fear from the preparations we are now unwillingly making to secure our own safety."

    The quote was meant as a warning to any Indian nation that decided to side with the British. Not at all what Monbiot intended.

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  11. Good catch. Generally, I have not found Monbiot a particularly trustworthy writer on a number of topics. I'm not surprised to see him quoting out of context.

    There's a lot to be ashamed of with respect to the conquest of the New World. But too many people simplify it down to "Evil Europeans, innocent Indians." The Aztecs were a pretty evil bunch, and while there were tribes that were victims, the Aztecs aren't one of them.

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  12. Clayton, Thanks for putting up the link to Monbiot. As you point out, both the Conquistadores and their conquered had serious flaws when seen in the light of today's moral paradigm.

    I recently read that the Aztecs originally sacrificed fruit and flowers to their Sun god. This prompted me, perhaps whimsically, to look at the Aztecs perceived need for fresh sacrificial hearts as the WMD of their day - a trumped up but effective basis for spreading fear and submission.

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  13. "I recently read that the Aztecs originally sacrificed fruit and flowers to their Sun god."

    I'm skeptical. When the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico in the 1200s or so, they kidnapped the daughter of one of the local chieftains--and then offered to return her if he and his warriors came to a banquet. One of the Aztec warriors arrived at dinner wearing the daughter's skin, and a general slaughter of the local chieftain and his warriors then started.

    How do we know about this? The Aztecs were proud of it, and the cult of the flayed god. What's amazing about the Aztecs is that they identified two of their gods with good and evil--and followed the one that they considered evil. They misidentified Cortez with the good one.

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  14. Clayton:

    I've heard a similar story with a slightly different import.

    The early Aztecs were migrating about. They arrived in a country where they were welcomed and urged to settle. The local chief even offered one of his daughters in marriage to the Aztec chief.

    A banquet was held to celebrate the union of peoples - at which an Aztec priest came out and danced, wearing the girl's flayed skin.

    The locals then turned on the Aztecs and drove them out. Supposedly this was remembered by the Aztecs with a certain pride, as they had thus avoided being assimilated.

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  15. Dom: "There are many native people in the Dominican Republic."

    Not true. About 15% of Dominicans have some Taino (native) ancestry, but there are no pure-blood Taino and only a handful who even identify as Taino. There are traces of Taino in a few Haitians, but nearly all are black, with a bit of white.

    The pre-Columbian population was just about completely wiped out.

    However, Monbiot's assertion that Hispaniola had 8M pre-Columbian inhabitants is absurd. Most real scholars estimate from 300,000 to 700,000; and the primary cause of population decline was European diseases.

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  16. "the Aztecs were so easily defeated by the Spanish because so many of the Aztecs' prey were quite willing to help the Spanish against a common foe."

    At the battle of Otumba, Cortez had 200 Spaniards, and about 10,000 Tlaxcalan auxiliaries. He defeated the much larger Aztec army. When he subsequently laid siege to Tenochtitlan, he had about 1,000 Spaniards and 60,000 Indian allies. When the city fell, Cortez deployed his Spaniards as military police, with orders to keep the Indian allies from looting the whole city and slaughtering the population.

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  17. Rich, thanks for the correction. It is so difficult to keep facts separated from fiction. Monbiot, to me, is an example of a writer who willingly disseminates untruths that are convenient his agenda-of-the-moment.

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  18. Your week one question is good, but I think the assignment as currently written is too long. That is to say, what you've written is too long. I'm a community college history instructor, too, and I know what we're up against when it comes to student abilities--or lack thereof. And it is tempting to keep adding on clarifying questions as a means of trying to assist the students in preparing for the assignment--you have four such questions trailing after your statement of the central topic. But I think that beyond a certain point, those additional questions actually wind up confusing students about what they're supposed to be writing about. For the sake of clarity, my rule for writing up essay topics is "Keep it short." Again, you have four ancillary questions following the central topic. I try to limit myself to no more than two such questions.

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  19. Okay, good thought. I'll shorten it. I see your point.

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  20. I just started reading Slavery in Indian Country, talking about how the American Indians used and viewed slavery. The first chapter opens with a chieftian's funeral where all of his captive servants are killed to be buried with him. A man from a lowly clan sacrifices his infant in the hope that the infant will get a higher rank with the chieftian.

    The many examples of human sacrifice found in North American Indian archeology is surprising to me. The Aztecs weren't so unique in their brutality as we have previously taught. I think what makes the Aztecs so interesting to us is their evil treatment of people was at the highest level of church and state and we consider them a "developed" people. (ie good at math, building, astrology, etc.) When we look at cruel American Indian attacks, we tend to think of them as isolated incidents and therefore don't assign them to part of their culture.

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  21. Human sacrifice is actually quite common throughout human history. Judaism's stepping away from it--which Christianity of course followed--was a little different.

    Highly advanced people do the most incredibly savage things. Think Auschwitz.

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  22. Mollo: I remember seeing this comment somewhere. It was from a black man in response to some Indian activist's claims of ultimate victimization:

    "When the Cherokees were deported from Georgia to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, they took their slaves with them."

    And it's true.

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  23. This is as good as I had hoped. I've ordered the book, and it should be here within a week.

    I'm looking forward to the book, your class notes, and the discussion in comments here.

    There's a classic challenge in the gun control debate: "Imagine the world without guns."

    The classic response is, "We don't have to; just look at human history before Sam Colt: big strong males with swords doing whatever they want."

    I tried that out on my Californian brother, and he immediately replied, "Pre-Columbian North American natives," something he's looked into a bit.

    I hope I learn an answer to that, and that bit about Indians themselves keeping slaves sounds like a good start.

    August 17, 2010 9:00 PM

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