Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 95: Human Sacrifice!

Transcript

Episode 95: Human Sacrifice! · Tales From Aztlantis

0:32
SPEAKER_03: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Astlantes, the podcast where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way, we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.
0:55
SPEAKER_03: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
0:58
SPEAKER_03: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatekat.
1:01
SPEAKER_03: How are you today, Dr.
1:03
SPEAKER_03: Tlakatekat?
1:05
SPEAKER_03: You know, just such a loaded question these days.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, especially these days, for sure.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know if you can tell today my choice in uh t-shirt.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, I don't know if you can read it.
1:17
SPEAKER_03: It's kind of small.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: It's fria.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
1:25
SPEAKER_03: It's a cold world, buddy.
1:27
SPEAKER_03: It is, truly.
1:31
SPEAKER_03: And uh, yeah, what more can you say about that, right?
1:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:35
SPEAKER_03: You've got fucking morons in charge, and things seem only to be getting worse.
1:41
SPEAKER_03: But in the heat of all of this, dear listeners, we are here.
1:46
SPEAKER_03: We continue to try to do our best.
1:48
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
1:49
SPEAKER_03: To best as the kids say, we are back on our bullshit.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: So is that what the kids are saying?
1:55
SPEAKER_03: I think so.
1:55
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
1:56
SPEAKER_03: I don't hang out with kids.
1:57
SPEAKER_03: I'm assuming that's what they say.
2:00
SPEAKER_03: They say something.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: Los muchachos.
2:04
SPEAKER_03: Los chicos.
2:05
SPEAKER_03: So for today's episode, we're finally getting to it, sir.
2:09
SPEAKER_03: We're finally getting to it.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: We're finally gonna talk about it.
2:15
SPEAKER_03: And it's one of those topics that people have been asking for since season one.
2:22
SPEAKER_03: And honestly, you know, we came to the realization, dear listeners, that it's it's not a topic that can be boiled down to just one episode.
2:33
SPEAKER_03: It's um it's a lot to tackle.
2:36
SPEAKER_03: And so today, this episode is going to represent the very first part of a multi-part series about the topic of human sacrifice.
2:50
SPEAKER_03: And so think of this as like the introductory episode of what we're gonna be talking about and the direction that we think this uh this series is going to go.
3:02
SPEAKER_03: And we've got other episodes already written.
3:04
SPEAKER_03: Uh, we're trying to get some interviews lined up, and I think it's going to be a worthwhile endeavor.
3:10
SPEAKER_03: I think uh I think it's gonna be worth the wait, dear listeners.
3:16
SPEAKER_03: I know some of you out there have been like hitting us up for a while.
3:19
SPEAKER_03: Like, when the hell are you guys gonna get around to human sexual?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think some of those people have already dropped off.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: They just lost patience with us.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: So maybe this will bring them back.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: We'll come back, folks.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: Please, if you know anybody out there, dear listener, that did uh kind of go by the wayside because we weren't getting to this topic soon enough.
3:39
SPEAKER_03: Tell them, hey, they're finally they finally got off their asses.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: You know that topic you wanted them to discuss so bad me on?
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
3:49
SPEAKER_03: They finally didn't be doing it.
3:54
SPEAKER_03: So we present to you human sacrifice.
4:02
SPEAKER_03: It was the season of Tonalco, the time for sacred warfare.
4:09
SPEAKER_03: The Meshika warriors had marched far from their capital city of Meshiko Tenochtitlan, driven by a cause that they considered sacred.
4:19
SPEAKER_03: Deep in unfamiliar lands, they eventually arrived upon a fortified Purepecha city.
4:27
SPEAKER_03: Surrender, the Mexica war captain called out.
4:30
SPEAKER_03: But the Purepecha are a proud people, and surrender simply wasn't on the table.
4:38
SPEAKER_03: The siege dragged on for weeks.
4:41
SPEAKER_03: The defenders resisted fiercely, but they had become weakened and exhausted, and finally, after much deliberation, they yielded under the promise that their lives would be spared.
4:56
SPEAKER_03: But when the victorious Mexica forces entered the city, all hell broke loose.
5:04
SPEAKER_03: The streets erupted with violence.
5:07
SPEAKER_03: The city's inhabitants, men, women, and children, were cut down in great numbers, literally butchered where they stood, killed in the name of the Meshika god.
5:20
SPEAKER_03: The city, expected to be rich in food and tribute, offered little, and hunger set in quickly among the exhausted victors.
5:31
SPEAKER_03: And that's when things got even worse for the Purepacha.
5:36
SPEAKER_03: In a calculated act of humiliation and psychological terror, the Mexica warriors began to consume the bodies of their dead enemies.
5:47
SPEAKER_03: Flesh was ritualistically stripped away, cooked, and even put on public display, an act meant to strike terror into the hearts of the surviving Purepecha.
6:00
SPEAKER_03: And it worked.
6:01
SPEAKER_03: The wholesale slaughter and cannibalism sent shockwaves beyond the city's walls.
6:08
SPEAKER_03: Nearby communities, hearing of what had happened, soon feared these warriors as something more than human.
6:16
SPEAKER_03: They were merciless and capable of horrors beyond imagination.
6:22
SPEAKER_03: Eventually, the Mexica's holy military campaign continued, but the memory of that siege lingered across much of Anawak.
6:34
SPEAKER_03: Oh wait, hold on.
6:35
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
6:36
SPEAKER_03: That actually wasn't a story about the Mexica or the Purepecha.
6:41
SPEAKER_03: No, dear listeners, the historical event I just told you about is actually the true story of the siege of Ma'ara, where European Christian crusaders besieged a Syrian city and, according to multiple contemporary accounts, carried out acts of mass slaughter and cannibalism against their Muslim enemies.
7:08
SPEAKER_03: Sanctified Christian slaughter.
7:12
SPEAKER_03: Divine Christian cannibalism.
7:16
SPEAKER_03: Now I apologize for the misdirection, but let's be honest here.
7:20
SPEAKER_03: When people hear phrases like human sacrifice or cannibalism, their minds don't immediately jump to the crusades, Rome, medieval Europe, or the Bible.
7:34
SPEAKER_03: They jump straight to brown skin, feathered headdresses, and temples drenched in blood.
7:42
SPEAKER_03: Type in a quick Google search for the phrase human sacrifice, and Mesoamericans, the Mexica slash Aztec in particular, become humanity's favorite villains.
7:55
SPEAKER_03: Savage, bloodthirsty, barbaric, and rest assured, this narrative didn't just happen by accident.
8:04
SPEAKER_03: No, dear listeners, it was deliberately engineered.
8:10
SPEAKER_03: Take for example, Fray Diego Durán, a Dominican friar who saw it as his personal, God-ordained mission to convert our heathen ancestors to Christianity.
8:23
SPEAKER_03: In his book of the gods and rites and the ancient calendar, he had this to say about our ancestral traditions.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: I am moved, O Christian reader, to begin the task of writing this work with the realization that we who have been chosen to instruct the Indians will never reveal the true God to them until the heathen ceremonies and false cults of their counterfeit deities are extinguished, erased.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: Here I shall set down a written account of the ancient idolatries and false religion with which the devil was worshipped until the holy gospel was brought to this land.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: Fields of grain and fruit trees do not prosper on uncultivated rocky soil covered with brambles and brush, unless all roots and stumps are eradicated.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: This becomes clear when we study the characteristics of our Catholic faith.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: Since it is one, one church, adoring one true God, it cannot coexist with any other religions or belief in other gods.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: Deodoran, Book of the Gods and Rites, and the Ancient Calendar, page 51.
11:31
SPEAKER_03: What an asshole.
11:34
SPEAKER_03: Like to to compare the Mexica, the Mesoamerican in general, cosmovision traditions to uncultivated rocky soil covered with brambles and brush, and they were roots and stumps to be eradicated so that they could plant you know the grain and fruit of the holy gospel.
11:58
SPEAKER_03: Like, goddamn.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, it also speaks to that quote right there, speaks to the the um the mission, right?
12:09
SPEAKER_01: The the mission that these people were on and the missions that still continue today under Christianity.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm sure you meet these people all the time.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: I meet them from on occasion as well, where they they like to brag and they like to boast, and and they're very proud of the fact that they're going on a mission to some far-flung area of the world where Christianity still hasn't been, you know, cemented, and so they feel like they're justified in what they're doing because they're spreading the gospel of the one true God and the one true church, right?
12:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so all those other people's religious uh religions and and and spiritual beliefs be damned because they're doing it wrong, and we're doing it right, and therefore it's our mission to bring the good word to you and eradicate those those uh you know beliefs and and and and Satan, right?
13:03
SPEAKER_01: It's all about Satan worship, right?
13:06
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: Not much has changed, people.
13:10
SPEAKER_03: Nope.
13:11
SPEAKER_03: It's clear that this man had an agenda.
13:16
SPEAKER_03: That's putting it lightly, one that directly shaped how he recorded the history of our people.
13:24
SPEAKER_03: That agenda must always be kept in mind when we critically evaluate his work and the work of other like-minded Catholic chroniclers of the Spanish invasion of Mexico and the entirety of the Americas.
13:40
SPEAKER_03: Now, before we get into it, let's start off by addressing the elephant in the room.
13:47
SPEAKER_03: Yes, ritual killing existed in Mesoamerica.
13:53
SPEAKER_03: Surprise, our ancestors were human beings.
13:57
SPEAKER_03: No serious scholar denies the existence of these killings.
14:03
SPEAKER_03: But what most people think they know, quote unquote, about Mexica Aztec sacrifice is colonial propaganda, weaponized storytelling, and sensationalist nonsense repeated for over 500 years in order to demonize indigenous people and justify everything done to them in the name of Christianity.
14:29
SPEAKER_03: I mean, let's face it, sacrifice is a loaded word, and the settler colonialist machine loves to trot it out front and center whenever talking about our Mesoamerican ancestors, as if this were the single defining characteristic of our cultural inheritance.
14:48
SPEAKER_03: But the word sacrifice falls short when it comes to Mesoamerican worldviews.
14:54
SPEAKER_03: As David Carrasco and other leading scholars have pointed out, payment and reciprocity are far more accurate ways to describe these ancestral worldviews, which were built on a social system of giving back.
15:12
SPEAKER_03: In Nahuat, this is known as Neshtlawistli, or paying the debt.
15:19
SPEAKER_03: The universe gives you life, breath, rain, maze, sunlight, and existence itself.
15:27
SPEAKER_03: You, therefore, owe something in return.
15:31
SPEAKER_03: It was a sacred obligation of cosmic maintenance meant to keep the world in motion.
15:38
SPEAKER_03: You didn't whine about it, you fulfilled your duty.
15:41
SPEAKER_03: So let's ditch the sacrifice talk and start using words that better describe the philosophical worldview that undergirded these sacred acts of ritual killing.
15:55
SPEAKER_03: Let's use the words our ancestors used, words like nestlawalisli, debt payment, or teomiki, a sacred death.
16:05
SPEAKER_03: It's no accident that colonial narratives ignore the fact that the vast majority of ritual offerings were not human beings.
16:15
SPEAKER_03: In fact, the most common offerings were the same things that humans offer everywhere, to things that they consider sacred.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: Things like flowers, precious stones, pottery, incense, food, music, and dance.
16:29
SPEAKER_03: At the Templo Mayor alone, archaeologists have uncovered thousands of such offerings.
16:36
SPEAKER_03: And if ancient Mexicans were supposedly obsessed with slaughter, explain the literal mountains of flowers, ritual objects, and other ceremonial gifts in lieu of human bodies.
16:51
SPEAKER_03: There was also auto-sacrifice or ritual bloodletting.
16:56
SPEAKER_03: This sacred act was controlled, symbolic, and meaningful.
17:01
SPEAKER_03: Ritual specialists bled themselves using the spines of the Magay cactus, their earlobes, tongues, shins, sometimes genitals, to demonstrate responsibility, humility, and commitment.
17:15
SPEAKER_03: Leadership came with obligations.
17:19
SPEAKER_03: Pain meant effort.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: Effort meant sincerity.
17:25
SPEAKER_03: Blood is sacred life force, and giving the drop is giving energy back into the cosmic system.
17:34
SPEAKER_03: Now, if that sounds weird, just take a look around the world.
17:39
SPEAKER_03: Catholics take communion, believing that they symbolically consume divine flesh and blood every Sunday while kneeling before images of human sacrifice.
17:50
SPEAKER_03: Pain and devotion are universal themes.
17:54
SPEAKER_03: The Meshika just expressed them differently.
17:59
SPEAKER_03: Animal offerings were also common.
18:02
SPEAKER_03: Archaeology at the Templo Mayor has revealed hundreds of animal deposits.
18:07
SPEAKER_03: Eagles, crocodiles, jaguars, fish, hummingbirds, all carefully adorned and placed with great care.
18:17
SPEAKER_03: So where does all this leave human offerings?
18:21
SPEAKER_03: Well, they happened.
18:22
SPEAKER_03: Let's not sugarcoat it.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: But they were relatively rare, ritually specific, and nowhere near the Hollywood narrative of non-stop blood orgies.
18:34
SPEAKER_03: Colonial chroniclers threw out absurd numbers, tens of thousands brutally slaughtered over a single weekend, millions sacrificed over centuries, numbers that make great horror stories, but collapse under archaeological scrutiny.
18:54
SPEAKER_03: After decades of meticulous excavation in the very heart of Mexica ritual space, the physical evidence doesn't even come close to the colonial claims.
19:06
SPEAKER_03: Instead of oceans of skulls, we find limited remains, small comparative numbers, and an archaeological reality reminding us that the Spanish, and those who later mythologized them, lied a lot.
19:24
SPEAKER_03: And when paying the debt does involve humans, it was often tied to the concept of the Ishipla, the physical representation of the teteo in human form.
19:37
SPEAKER_03: Highly meritorious individuals were selected to embody the teteo during certain ceremonies.
19:46
SPEAKER_03: They were lavished with admiration, acknowledged for their bravery, and honored for fulfilling their duty.
19:53
SPEAKER_03: Again, this was a sacred obligation rooted in reciprocity.
19:59
SPEAKER_03: At other times, the ishitla weren't even human at all, but they were images crafted from amaranth dough, paper, or wood.
20:08
SPEAKER_03: At the end of the ceremony, the Ishitla are ritually disposed of after completing their duties.
20:16
SPEAKER_03: And when we understand these things, we develop a better appreciation without judgment or acceptance of the significance of Neshtlawisli, of debt payment.
20:29
SPEAKER_03: So why are the Mexica still painted as the monsters of world history?
20:34
SPEAKER_03: Well, because colonial propaganda works, because demonizing indigenous people made conquest morally comfortable, because Hollywood prefers gore to nuance.
20:47
SPEAKER_03: It's easier to condemn indigenous ritual than it is to confront Europe's own towering legacy of torture chambers, inquisitions, witch burnings, enslavement, and the weaponization of industry to enact genocide.
21:04
SPEAKER_03: We didn't invade, enslave, torture, rape, burn, and annihilate cities, the story goes.
21:10
SPEAKER_03: We saved them.
21:12
SPEAKER_03: But as we know, that's pure nonsense.
21:16
SPEAKER_03: The part that everyone seems to forget is that every major civilization on earth has practiced ritual killing.
21:23
SPEAKER_03: Hell, we live in one right now.
21:27
SPEAKER_03: Romans fed humans to animals, burned them alive, and crucified them by the thousands.
21:32
SPEAKER_03: The Greeks sacrificed humans in myth and rituals.
21:36
SPEAKER_03: Egyptians buried servants to accompany rulers.
21:40
SPEAKER_03: Shang and Zhu dynasty China buried their retainers alive.
21:45
SPEAKER_03: Celts burned people in wicker structures.
21:48
SPEAKER_03: Medieval Europe tortured and burned people publicly while crowds cheered.
21:53
SPEAKER_03: Assyrians skinned people alive.
21:56
SPEAKER_03: Europeans industrialized torture technology simply because they could.
22:02
SPEAKER_03: The difference is that Europeans have wrapped their violence in sanctified rhetoric and state power, all while pointing at indigenous people and screaming, look at those savages.
22:15
SPEAKER_03: Even the Bible, the foundation of Western morality, is soaked in blood and sacrifice.
22:23
SPEAKER_03: Children burned alive, sons nearly slaughtered at divine command, priests killing animals as ritual offerings, a god who demands blood to forgive sin.
22:35
SPEAKER_03: The central symbol of Christianity is a literal human sacrifice.
22:41
SPEAKER_03: A divine human figure, brutally tortured and killed so his blood could redeem the world.
22:50
SPEAKER_03: Christians literally venerate a sacrifice narrative every single day, yet indigenous rituals are considered monstrous.
23:00
SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, the Inquisition burned people, dismembered them, boiled them, tore bodies apart, and unleashed centuries of terror across continents in the name of God.
23:11
SPEAKER_03: And yet Europe walks away with museums, cathedrals, and a smug sense of unearned moral superiority, while the Mexica inherit the label of bloodthirsty savages.
23:24
SPEAKER_03: The ancient Romans are glamorized.
23:28
SPEAKER_03: The ancient Mexicans are demonized.
23:31
SPEAKER_03: Context matters.
23:33
SPEAKER_03: Mexica offerings came from a worldview rooted in reciprocity, balance, and writ mutual obligation.
23:42
SPEAKER_03: Life requires death.
23:44
SPEAKER_03: Everything feeds everything else.
23:47
SPEAKER_03: Humans make offerings, and the Fail sustain.
23:51
SPEAKER_03: Humans die, life continues.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: This was a philosophy embodied in ritual.
23:58
SPEAKER_03: We may not agree with it, and we don't have to, but we do owe it honesty.
24:04
SPEAKER_03: And honesty tells us that Aztec human sacrifice has been exaggerated beyond recognition.
24:11
SPEAKER_03: It has been sensationalized, racialized, and weaponized to justify genocide, colonization, and the continued dehumanization of the Mexican people.
24:24
SPEAKER_03: Colonial chroniclers, sensationalist historians, Hollywood directors, and racist school curricula have built a monstrous caricature and called it the truth.
24:36
SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, archaeology and indigenous voices keep reminding us that the Mexica weren't uniquely brutal, they were uniquely targeted.
24:48
SPEAKER_03: So let's stop parroting the lazy propaganda created by conquerors to make themselves look righteous.
24:54
SPEAKER_03: Let's understand Mesoamerican ritual life on its own terms, rather than through the lens of colonial horror fantasy.
25:03
SPEAKER_03: Other cultures don't get to burn people alive for centuries, torture thousands, wage holy wars, crucify rebels, sanctify executions, celebrate celebrate blood narratives, and then stand on a moral pedestal pointing fingers at our ancestors.
25:19
SPEAKER_03: If the world is going to talk about human sacrifice, then it's time to tell the whole story and finally admit who really benefits from keeping the Aztecs forever frozen in time as humanity's favorite monsters.
25:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so that's our little intro.
25:41
SPEAKER_03: And for that intro I draw heavily from uh my new book, by the way, dear listeners, uh Never Will It Be Lost.
25:49
SPEAKER_03: Because a lot of people have asked about human sacrifice, and I wanted to give people um just a different perspective, a a way to look at it.
25:58
SPEAKER_03: That's because I I used to be this way myself, right?
26:03
SPEAKER_03: We have deniers, just flat out sacrifice deniers who were like, No, no, it never happened because that's just uh used to demonize our ancestors.
26:12
SPEAKER_03: Right.
26:13
SPEAKER_03: And then we on the other side we have people who are like, everything is fucking sacrifice, right?
26:18
SPEAKER_03: Any body you find, any remain of anything is like, oh, this must be the result of human sacrifice.
26:25
SPEAKER_03: And both of those things really m miss the mark, both of those perspectives miss the mark because it it creates these barriers, it creates this narrative that keeps us from really meaningfully investigating these things and trying to develop an understanding of them.
26:42
SPEAKER_03: Like, well, let's let's find out why this stuff happened and and for what reasons and how often it happened, and what purpose did it serve?
26:54
SPEAKER_03: Because that humanizes our ancestors, right?
26:58
SPEAKER_03: It it's the the whole thing that, you know, well, sacrifice never happened.
27:04
SPEAKER_03: And I get it, because it's like this knee-jerk response because it's the first fucking thing that people bring up.
27:10
SPEAKER_03: Like they can't help it.
27:12
SPEAKER_03: Right.
27:12
SPEAKER_03: It's like it's forever attached, even though everybody else did it, and continue, you know, a lot of people still continue to do it, for for some reason, it's just attached to our ancestors.
27:23
SPEAKER_03: Like when uh we started the ulama team out here, you know, of course, the first smart ass response we get is oh, are you gonna sacrifice the losers?
27:34
SPEAKER_03: It's like, shut the fuck up, man.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, one of the things that that came up um recently, I was listening to uh some philosophers uh debate various ideas, and one of the things that came up was uh the problem of evil and the banality of evil as well.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: Uh, in regards to obviously, you know, the the reference that most people go to is the Nazis and the Holocaust, right?
28:03
SPEAKER_01: And so um one of the philosophers was commenting on how before the Holocaust, before Nazi Germany, um we didn't really have terms to describe what happened.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: Like this idea of genocide studies and and and acting genocides and ethnic cleansing are not new things in human history, but we didn't really have the proper words and and language to describe them.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, by extension, the the field of study, the philosophies to really analyze those things.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, but wait a minute, why is it just the 20th century?
28:39
SPEAKER_01: Why is it just the Holocaust?
28:41
SPEAKER_01: What about all those millions of indigenous peoples around the world, not just the Americas, but Africa and Asia and Australia, who basically were almost completely not uh eradicated because we we're still here and those people and those places still are still there, but like so many millions of people who died and came close to being completely eradicated.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: Like, how come the conversation doesn't begin there with these folks when we're talking about you know genocide uh studies?
29:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm sure that when they get into their actual classes and and the things that they teach, they do talk about these, but when they're talking about these things in public, it's usually the go-to is Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, you know, like it's like you're saying, like, there's certain tropes that um have been popularized in the media and in our culture.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: And when we're talking about sacrifice, it's the Aztecs, it's Mesoamerican societies, because that's what they've been portrayed as.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: And when it comes to genocide and holocaust, it's the Nazis and it's against the Jewish people, right?
29:47
SPEAKER_01: So we have these we call these things dominant narratives in history.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: Like there's these dominant narratives that people go to, that's what they know, that's what's been taught, that's what's been repeated and ingrained in people's heads.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: And so going back to this individual who made that snarky comment about the ulama, it's like, well, yeah, of course, that's what that's the go-to, right?
30:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:08
SPEAKER_03: And and it's funny because you know, looking at modern beliefs, like just mainstream modern beliefs.
30:18
SPEAKER_03: I mean, we just had Easter, right?
30:21
SPEAKER_03: And you have like this demigod, however you want to describe him, right?
30:27
SPEAKER_03: Part human, part god walking around is sacrificed and then rises again, and the blood will be used to like cleanse people of their sins and all this.
30:38
SPEAKER_03: And then Passover, I mean, holy shit, just even the name Passover, people are like, hey, happy Passover.
30:46
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, isn't that when they slaughtered like the firstborn, like God literally sent the angel of death?
30:53
SPEAKER_03: Is that what it is?
30:54
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what it is.
30:57
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so Mo you know, the Pharaoh is like, hey, you know, well, first Moses sees a burning bush, and the burning bush is like, hey, tell Pharaoh to set your people free.
31:08
SPEAKER_03: And then Pharaoh's like, nah, fuck that.
31:10
SPEAKER_03: You're not gonna be set free.
31:12
SPEAKER_03: So then God unleashes like these ten freaking um curses on on the earth and you know, locusts and oh god, that's that's part of Passover?
31:24
SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
31:27
SPEAKER_03: And then the tenth uh is going the plagues, they're plagues.
31:32
SPEAKER_03: The plagues, right.
31:33
SPEAKER_03: The tenth plague was going to be the slaughter of all the firstborn children.
31:39
SPEAKER_03: Right.
31:39
SPEAKER_03: Okay, and so the nation of Israel goes out and they on their doors they they put blood so that the angel of death will skip their house and only kill the appropriate babies.
31:54
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
31:55
SPEAKER_03: And then they're slaughtered.
31:57
SPEAKER_03: Pharaoh finally is like, okay, get the fuck out of here, take your people, get out of here.
32:01
SPEAKER_03: Then he changes his mind and like starts to hunt them down, and then you get the parting of the Red Sea and all that.
32:06
SPEAKER_03: But at its base, like the word Passover comes from the fact that the angel of death sent by God passed over the houses that had the lamb's blood on the door and only killed the correct babies, which to me is very gruesome.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Well, it it's it's also like this idea of like a secret mystery cult type of situation where only those who knew, those in the know, right, yeah, are are going to be saved, they're gonna be spared because they have they have uh foreknowledge, they they know the secret code, whatever that may be.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: In this case, the secret code is the blood being smeared on the door so that the angel of death knows, ah, these people are part of my crew, so I'm gonna pass them over and go on to the next place.
32:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:53
SPEAKER_03: And you know, and I get it, it's a it's an origin story, yeah, but it's also very gruesome, right?
32:58
SPEAKER_03: But it's also like mainstream, nobody is nobody casts the critical eye on that story that they do on the case of Mesoamericans, right?
33:08
SPEAKER_03: Like Mesoamericans, they'll always be able to do it.
33:10
SPEAKER_03: Well, because they want to have it both ways.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: They want to have it both ways.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, if you press them on it, and some people might say, well, it's metaphorical, right?
33:18
SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, well, which one is it?
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Is the Bible true?
33:21
SPEAKER_01: And is every word of it literal?
33:24
SPEAKER_01: And are we supposed to just pretend that that this is just a story that is referencing some kind of metaphorical allegory to something else?
33:34
SPEAKER_01: Or did this actually happen?
33:37
SPEAKER_01: And if it did, even whether or not it happened or it didn't happen, the idea, right, of blood being smeared, like you're saying, it's a gory story, that also is linked to something that I've been looking into, and we're probably going to get into uh this topic in some of the episodes.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, uh this idea of the connection between blood and soil, right?
35:20
SPEAKER_01: Blood and the space that you live in, and how it connects you to that space, and and not just the letting of blood or the spilling of blood, but also just this idea that there's uh a historical route, a historical homeland to the people, and and the only way that you can represent it is through blood, right?
35:41
SPEAKER_01: And so I think there's a connection there with Passover that maybe has been missed.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: Maybe some someone has has um you know uh talked about it before.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I'm not a scholar, I'm not a religion religious scholar of these things.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: So uh I'm just now beginning to kind of dip my toe into some of those uh ideas, but I think it's interesting that that just on the things that I've been looking at, there's a little bit of a connection that I see just on this idea of the blood and and the angel of death going to a very specific place and targeting certain people.
36:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, wiping out very specific people.
36:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
36:18
SPEAKER_03: And and I guess my my my main point with that is it's it's a very mainstream story that people, you know, hey, happy Passover.
36:26
SPEAKER_03: Oh, what are you doing for Passover?
36:28
SPEAKER_03: And it's not looked at as kids, are you?
36:33
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
36:35
SPEAKER_03: And you know, and then just look at the world we live in now, man.
36:38
SPEAKER_03: Like people are sent to die, and people are die dying literally right now over religious reasons.
36:45
SPEAKER_03: And but that's just seen as as uh it's just the way it is.
36:51
SPEAKER_03: But nobody um casts that sort of the same critical eye that they cast on Mesoamericans.
36:59
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, you know, Mesoamericans aren't committing human sacrifice anymore, so why fucking get over it?
37:05
SPEAKER_03: Like why are you still talking about it?
37:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's what they want you to believe, man.
37:13
SPEAKER_01: No, but it's also interesting that that this idea, again, going back to allegory and metaphor and uh Bible stories, you know, with Abraham and Isaac, right?
37:24
SPEAKER_01: Um the ultimate test that God gives Abraham to test his loyalty to him, right?
37:32
SPEAKER_01: To the one true and only God, even though I mean, because if we get into this whole religious debate about God and gods, the plural, like even in the Bible, there's a acknowledgement that there's other gods out there, yeah, and God of the Bible, whatever however you want to reference him as Yahweh, Jehovah, whatever it is, uh, he, right, it's a male-dominated god.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: He's saying, I'm the only one and true Lord.
37:57
SPEAKER_01: Those other ones, they're a bunch of posers, right?
38:00
SPEAKER_01: But he he acknowledges that they exist, but he's like, I'm the one and Yo soil masching one God, right?
38:06
SPEAKER_01: It's basically what he's saying, right?
38:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and so Abraham is tested.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: Do you really believe in me?
38:14
SPEAKER_01: Do you really follow me?
38:15
SPEAKER_01: Am I the only one, right?
38:17
SPEAKER_01: Am I the only Lord and Savior God that you are worshiping?
38:22
SPEAKER_01: If it's true that that um that you are that devoted to me, I want you to kill your son Isaac, right?
38:29
SPEAKER_01: So, why the metaphor?
38:31
SPEAKER_01: If even if it's a metaphor, it exists for a reason.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: What does that tell us?
38:35
SPEAKER_01: It it tells us that at the time it was commonplace to kill a child and an offering to a god, whether it was Yahweh, Jehovah, or whoever it was, but it was commonplace for people at that time in that part of the world to sacrifice their firstborn or just their their first uh their uh the elder son, whatever the case may be, however, they wanted to interpret it, that was already a thing that was in place.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: And it's in the Bible telling us this is something that people did.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: And so God in his infinite wisdom says, Oh, okay, fine.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: I believe you now you're about to cut your kid's throat.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: Don't do it, go get that lamb over there instead, and you know, shed blood with an animal instead.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: But it's it's still the killing of a sentient being, whether it's a sacrifice being, whether it's an animal, it's still a sacrifice of a sentient being, and that can only be uh um uh uh completed with the spilling of blood, right?
39:33
SPEAKER_01: So again, it's the blood that's the key element in all this.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: But I also wanted to, I didn't I don't know how much uh how much we want to get into this here in this first episode.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we could just say a few things about this, but I wanted to bring in to the discussion about sacrifice, specifically as it relates to Mesoamerican societies and the Aztecs in in particular, is uh this idea of the numbers, right?
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Because that's something that usually comes into the conversation that how many people were killed?
40:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, they killed hundreds of thousands of people.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Like, I've even heard some ridiculous numbers of millions of people a year.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, are you kidding me?
40:11
SPEAKER_01: Like, are you just think about that?
40:13
SPEAKER_01: You you said the word millions with a saying they had negative population growth.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: So the numbers that are usually cited for human sacrifice in Mesoamerica, they kind of vary and depending on whether or not uh you're consulting primary source sources from the colonial period, or if you're looking at archaeological data, like some of the things that you've been looking at, or even just a mix of modern demographic reconstructions based on historical narratives, accounts, most of the academic debates uh that I've seen in recent years that focus on the Mexica or the Aztec, um, particularly uh look at some of the uh more extreme examples of sacrificing, as for instance, the Templo Mayor, right?
40:58
SPEAKER_01: Like one of the things that we hear about the Templo Mayor uh is that they like an exaggerated amount of people were killed for that, right?
41:05
SPEAKER_01: So there's those you have those three various sources that you can look at.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: You have the primary colonial accounts, you have the archaeological findings, and then you have also like modern academic estimates, right?
41:15
SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to introduce a few things here and maybe we can discuss or you know, or leave it for a different um episode, right?
41:22
SPEAKER_01: So for the primary colonial accounts, you have the Spanish chroniclers and some indigenous uh uh accounts as well that uh provide some of those very high figures from the very beginning, right?
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Because as you mentioned in uh in the narrative, like some of those numbers we get them straight from the Spanish sources that who tended to exaggerate what they were doing for their own purposes, right?
41:45
SPEAKER_01: So the numbers are frequently debated.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh a lot of modern historians, for instance, um they they tend to question these because they they they see that there's a lot of political and religious bias that's been embedded into some of those items, as you you know pointed out.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: And so, again, back to the Templo Mayor, which I believe wasn't it like 1487 in the Gregorian count when it was supposedly dedicated.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: Um of the colonial sources, and one of the ones that that gets cited frequently is the Codex de Lediano Remenensis, I think that's how you say that, Remenses, and and the figure that um is touted from that source is 20,000 individuals sacrificed over the course of four days for the consecration or whatever you want to call it of the Templo Mayor, right?
42:31
SPEAKER_01: And then you have other chroniclers like Diego Durán and Fernando de Alba, Ishtil Shochi, who even though he did recognize and and and uh he did take pride in his indigenous ancestry, he was pretty much at that point fully immersed in in the Spanish uh society.
42:50
SPEAKER_01: Right, sure.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: So so we we can't really take him uh at his word necessarily just because he's an indigenous uh uh scribe or or chronicler, but he was the one that pushed the number as high as 80,000.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: Um that was something that was kind of surprised me when I started licking it, and it's like, wow, Alba Sochi, come on, man.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Settle down, bro.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: Right.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't know what if you have anything to say about that, or um did is this something that jives me.
43:20
SPEAKER_03: With you, or what do you think?
43:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, those numbers just on face value, and and I don't know any archaeologist who looks at those numbers and says, Oh, yeah, that's that stands within reason.
43:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:30
SPEAKER_03: Um mainly because of, I mean, one, lack of archaeological evidence that something like that ever occurred.
43:36
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you would find bodies everywhere.
43:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:41
SPEAKER_03: Like you wouldn't be able to stick a shovel into the ground in Mexico City without hitting bodies, you know?
43:48
SPEAKER_03: Right.
43:49
SPEAKER_03: And then, you know, if you just cast a critical eye on that, 80,000 over four days.
43:54
SPEAKER_03: So 20,000 people a day?
43:57
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:58
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's not enough time in the day to get that done.
44:02
SPEAKER_03: Like, talk about a logistical nightmare.
44:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you use a map, how many, how many, you know, uh priests, uh death priests would have to have been engaged in in this ritual sacrifice of 20,000 people a day?
44:17
SPEAKER_01: Right?
44:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a lot.
44:18
SPEAKER_03: And then, I mean, just look at it in terms of what do we know about cities that have mass amounts, massive amounts of dead bodies in them.
44:29
SPEAKER_03: You know, not even on the order of 80,000.
44:32
SPEAKER_03: But you start piling up dead bodies in a city, you're gonna start having some serious public health issues spreading through that city in a in a pretty short period of time.
44:48
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you're you're talking about like disease and sickness, um, just running rampant through a city that has that many freaking freshly killed, yeah, and then left.
45:03
SPEAKER_03: I mean, because you gotta do something with those bodies, right?
45:05
SPEAKER_03: Where are you putting them?
45:08
SPEAKER_01: You gotta get a little chain going, you know, and uh just carry them out to the edge of the city and cart them out.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: But but this is just for the for the the dedication of the Templo Mayor.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: It would have been those four days, right?
45:22
SPEAKER_01: But then you have scholars who then sort of extrapolate from that and they say, well, if it's true, right, based on these colonial sources that that's what's going on, then they're saying, then the estimates are that perhaps between 20,000 to 50,000 uh ritual sacrifices of humans were being conducted annually throughout the Aztec Empire, right?
45:43
SPEAKER_01: So just think about that, like between 20 to 50,000 people a year collectively, right, throughout Mesoamerica, supposedly, right, based on these uh colonial accounts, that's how many people they claim, the people who were looking at this early on.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: And I have to say, I have to I have to uh qualify, were looking at this, because nowadays the thing uh that a lot of historians have been debating is that is that really true, like you're saying, just think about this, you know, use some reason and some logic to to really analyze these numbers and and is does it really you know uh uh ring true that we had these many people being killed, right?
46:19
SPEAKER_01: And so another example, and I'm sure that this is probably gonna come up in a in a later episode, uh, is that the skull rack, right?
46:26
SPEAKER_01: The way uh Sompatli that supposedly uh according to uh Fray Bernardino de Sagun and other witnesses described as this massive rack that used to have like thousands of skulls, right?
46:41
SPEAKER_01: And um in and and some of the things that I was looking at, supposedly this individual by the name of Andrés de Tapia, was he a uh conquistador or was he just a chronicler?
46:51
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember what he was.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: I think he was I'm pretty sure he was just a chronic uh chronista, but I'm 100% sure.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: So he claimed, right?
46:59
SPEAKER_01: He claimed based on on um, I don't know if he was a witness or if he just like gathered information from what others had said, but he counted 136,000 skulls on.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: The main rack in Tenochtitlan.
47:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you as the archaeologist, I mean, haven't there been some recent developments on this?
47:18
SPEAKER_01: And and what do they say?
47:20
SPEAKER_03: So they found the the Weitz on Pantli.
47:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
47:25
SPEAKER_03: And they've excavated it.
47:27
SPEAKER_03: Uh Raul Barrera is uh, I believe the name of the archaeologist that headed it.
47:32
SPEAKER_03: Um the excavation is for the most part complete and now it's all lab work, right?
47:37
SPEAKER_03: They're doing uh like isotopic analysis of the skulls to try to figure out what they were eating and what parts of a Nawak they may have come from and how old they were and stuff.
47:48
SPEAKER_03: But they've found 600, I think it's like 675 skulls.
47:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
47:55
SPEAKER_03: So a far cry from Yeah.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: 675 Man, can you I mean, how big does this skull wreck have to be to have 136,000 skulls?
48:05
SPEAKER_03: Well, and then not only that, but my favorite thing is is people will qualify and be like, well, it could have held this many.
48:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
48:12
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, yeah, but that doesn't mean it did.
48:14
SPEAKER_03: Right.
48:15
SPEAKER_03: You know, especially if it was used as a symbol of like imperial dominance.
48:22
SPEAKER_03: If you build a massive structure and you just throw some skulls on it, that's that's pretty imposing on its own.
48:29
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't have to be full of skulls to get the message across.
48:33
SPEAKER_03: Like, hey, this is you fuck with us, and this is your future right here, right?
48:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
48:39
SPEAKER_03: Um, there's definitely some psychology that went into um how the Mexica organized their empire, because if you look at it, they didn't leave garrisons in different communities, right?
48:52
SPEAKER_03: So, like uh the way empires are are typically built is you have your your main city, your imperial capital, and then you have the outposts of the empire, but you leave garrisons there.
49:03
SPEAKER_03: There's like soldiers and representatives and and people there in those communities maintaining control, but the mexica didn't do that, they didn't leave people in other communities to like exert that sort of authority and control.
49:17
SPEAKER_03: So, how do you keep those people in control?
49:21
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, a lot of it could be done through fear, right?
49:25
SPEAKER_03: Right, like and and it might have even behooved the the the mexica to allow these stories about themselves to be created, and this this image of themselves is like, no, we will fucking eat you if you if you get out of hand, you know, not that they meant it, but it was enough to be like, oh shit, like don't mess with these guys because they don't screw around.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: Instilling fear in them.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: So so yeah, I mean you've you've basically described the archaeological um factor in in this uh the the three categories that I mentioned.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna skip over to the modern academic estimates.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Um so contemporary scholars generally view the extreme colonial numbers uh that you know range between 50 to 80 or as low as 20, even 20 is too much, right?
50:14
SPEAKER_01: As physically and logistically impossible, and given the population density at the time required for such rituals.
50:21
SPEAKER_01: And so one of the more contemporary views by scholars suggest that actual annual number for the entire basin of Mexico was likely in the low thousands.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: So between roughly a thousand to three thousand people were being ritually sacrificed for various things in in Mesoamerica and Central Mexico.
50:43
SPEAKER_01: Um and but you also have people like you were saying at the beginning, like you have people that are on the extreme.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: Some people go to one extreme uh on one side of the argument, and then you have the opposite extreme on the other side of the argument, and then you have that middle ground, and that middle ground has a varied spectrum.
51:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's people who, you know, want to argue that, yeah, well, maybe the 80,000 I mean figure is hyperbolic.
51:08
SPEAKER_01: The practice they will claim is uh was centralized and was intensified during specific festivals, like for instance the dedication of the temple, things like that, um, and potentially reaching several thousand during major uh events.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, well, you know, that's still up for debate.
51:26
SPEAKER_01: But if you're comparing estimates, right?
51:28
SPEAKER_01: So you have these categories, the colonial chroniclers, the early archaeologists, and now you have the modern scholars.
51:35
SPEAKER_01: So the first category, the chroniclers, they their estimates were between 20 to 80,000.
51:41
SPEAKER_01: And then the the archaeologists, the early ones were saying, well, thousands, just based on the racks.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: So maybe 10,000 plus a year were being sacrificed.
51:49
SPEAKER_01: And then now, as I said uh just a minute ago, uh, now you have modern scholars who are saying, well, maybe 10,000 is even way too high based on what we have found.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I think content the contemporary consensus, as far as I understand, and maybe you have a different number, but what I've gathered is that it's between a thousand and maybe up to four thousand people uh were being sacrificed uh on a yearly basis.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and again, depending on where you were, what part of the uh Mesoamerican um uh society you were in, if you were part of the empire, if you were outside of the empire, if you were the Purepacha beginning with that story that you you conflate it right on purpose with a different one.
52:33
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's say that that was a true thing and they had captured people from the Purepacha.
52:37
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, like how many of those people would have been sacrificed?
52:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe a couple hundred, you know, just to you know uh set an example.
52:45
SPEAKER_01: This is what's gonna happen to y'all if you still fear.
52:49
SPEAKER_03: And then you have to understand the way that, you know, the way that Meso warfare in Mesoamerica took place is you didn't kill or you you could kill your enemies on the battlefield, but certain warrior classes were expected to take captives, and then you'd be killed later.
53:07
SPEAKER_03: And people always like to point that out, like, yeah, they were sacrificing, and I'm like, well, what's the difference between if I shoot the enemy soldier in the head in the field, or I take him and I take him back to my village and we shoot him in the head there?
53:20
SPEAKER_03: Like we the end result is the same.
53:22
SPEAKER_03: We killed the enemy soldier.
53:24
SPEAKER_01: It's the method, it's the way that it's done.
53:26
SPEAKER_01: That that's because it's it's looking at it from a religious perspective, right?
53:31
SPEAKER_01: Like, you're doing this for the the pleasing of your God for the wrong reason, because you have a bloodthirsty God.
53:38
SPEAKER_01: And it's again, it's it's coming at it like you were saying at the beginning, it's coming at it from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: It's a westernized, Europeanized version of Judeo-Christianity, but it's still Judeo-Christianity nonetheless, it's still part of that same milieu as the scholars like to say, Melieu.
53:58
SPEAKER_03: And then if you look at, I forget which book it is, but we're gonna get into this in a later episode.
54:03
SPEAKER_03: Um, the Florentine Codex documents the different crimes, like the legal system, and certain crimes were punishable by death.
54:14
SPEAKER_03: So, how many of those are attributed to quote unquote human sacrifice?
54:20
SPEAKER_03: Um, whereas, you know, they they were actually removed from that the context of that um, you know, the the systematic ritual killing is is a form of debt payment to the tetheo.
54:36
SPEAKER_03: This wasn't part of that structure, it was part of the legal system where if you committed certain crimes, you know, it was sort of like the debt you were paying to your community be for for breaking these crimes.
54:49
SPEAKER_03: Right.
54:49
SPEAKER_03: And a lot is said, like there's man, there's one dude who um they share a lot of people share this guy's videos online, and I think he's from Austin.
55:00
SPEAKER_03: Oh no.
55:02
SPEAKER_03: And he's a very good speaker, like he says everything with a lot of confidence and he tells these stories, these fantastical stories.
55:11
SPEAKER_03: And he's granted, you know, keep this in mind, he is not an expert in in history, in archaeology, in ethnohistory, anthropology, any of this.
55:25
SPEAKER_03: But he gives these talks where he's got this series about the Mexica, and he's like, Yeah, you know, they had a death sentence and if you went into the marketplace and they would weigh out on the scales, you know, how much you were buying, and if they found out that you you they weighed it out incorrectly, they were tipping the scale, then those those uh merchants would be beheaded right then and there, and like just absolute bullshit, like totally made up right then and there, huh?
56:03
SPEAKER_03: Right then and there, at one, like how stupid is that, and then two, spoiler alert, the Mexica didn't have scales.
56:10
SPEAKER_01: I know I was thinking they had scales.
56:12
SPEAKER_01: Man, I mean I mean I need me a Mexica scale.
56:17
SPEAKER_03: So I mean, just on the face, it's like, yeah, this never where are you getting this information from?
56:23
SPEAKER_03: But people, man, they see it on on TikTok or they see it on Instagram and they just hit share.
56:28
SPEAKER_03: Blink, blink, they hit like and they hit share, and then it just disinformation just gets spread all over the place.
56:35
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
56:38
SPEAKER_03: And then I think you wanted to bring up uh what's his name?
56:43
SPEAKER_03: Michael Harner.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, was that his name?
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Right.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wanted I wanted to get your uh because I'm I'm not sure like if this is gonna be it, if it if we have enough information for it to merit its own separate episode, but but there was also like the motives, right, that were behind the supposed uh sacrifices that that scholars have explained.
57:03
SPEAKER_01: And uh they have, of course, religious, we kind of already touched on that a bit, political, yeah.
57:08
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of uh something that we've also already kind of touched upon, but the one that we haven't really talked about is the dietary angle to it.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, uh I mean I remember when I was in school and in college, um, I took a uh course with uh of aesthetic history and and society.
57:26
SPEAKER_01: And uh we when we got to the the the topic of of sacrifice, I remember my instructor, she gave us like a bunch of different you know, handouts.
57:37
SPEAKER_01: This is back when we're still doing handouts, and uh and one of them was that article from from Herner where he's uh what's his first name?
57:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to remember what his first name is now.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh Michael.
57:48
SPEAKER_01: Michael, where the argument that was being made at the time, if I'm not mistaken, was that um that if uh that to explain the high numbers that suggested maybe, and I think this is a number that he had also kind of come up with, or was a number that was popular at the time, and this is in the late 70s, I believe his article was called The Enigma of Astec Sacrifice, 1977.
58:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking at the note here that I made.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that he suggested was that upwards of 250,000 people annually were being sacrificed because they had a lack of protein.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: They had a protein deficiency, is what this guy was arguing, right?
58:33
SPEAKER_01: That they had a protein deficiency uh because they didn't have uh uh the kind of uh domesticated you know stock animals like pigs and and cattle and stuff like that, so that they had to to compensate for their lack their lack of protein, that deficiency that they had to kill an insanely amount of people and consume them, right?
58:55
SPEAKER_01: And and I think this is kind of one of those those um I don't know how to uh describe it, this these completely erroneous and fantastical interpretations that has led many people to continue the trope of the posole being made with with with human flesh, right?
59:14
SPEAKER_01: Like, are you kidding me?
59:16
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
59:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're actually gonna do a there's a whole episode on uh on that kind of stuff that got written.
59:22
SPEAKER_03: But I don't know if you wanted to say just a few words here, kind of front end.
59:25
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so Harner's idea was that, like you said, there was a profene a profene, protein deficient.
59:33
SPEAKER_03: It's a profene, it's profene.
59:35
SPEAKER_03: Um the profene hypothesis.
59:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
59:38
SPEAKER_03: And that you know, of course, people are point out like, well, one uh Aztec agriculture was super productive.
59:48
SPEAKER_03: Um there was a lot of food in in the the area around that lake, in the lake and around that lake, and then the farming techniques that were used.
59:57
SPEAKER_03: Or the fact that, you know, basically what is it, uh chili and corn and beans uh when combined a certain way create a like a perfect protein so that you know meat wasn't even like necessary to get the the the amount of protein that you would need to sustain yourself because the just the agriculture, the crops that were being grown provided for that that protein that was needed.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_03: But there's a lot of stuff wrong with with what this guy says, and it might actually be enough for uh for an entire episode because um legendary uh Bernard Ortiz de Monteano actually wrote a really cool paper in 1978.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_03: Oh, so a year after.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, where he just freaking eviscerates this guy's artist.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_03: Um I'll put a link to it.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_03: Um I'm pretty sure we've got it.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_03: It's on JSTOR, but I'm sure I could find a uh if you send me the name of the article, I can probably find it or if you could just send me the article, whatever.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_03: I can find it.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_03: But um the the article is called Aztec Cannibalism and Ecological Necessity question mark.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_03: And uh he basically says the Aztec diet was adequate in protein and cannibalism would not have contributed greatly.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_03: Oh no, you know what?
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: I think that's basically the articles that was in the packet that I got.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_01: I remember now.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I have read it.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: It's been so long.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: I didn't go through my stuff.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and Bernard, for listeners who don't know, Bernard Ortiz de Monteano um did not suffer fools.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh he's also the guy who went a you know up against Van Certima and demolished that whole black O myth mythology.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, yeah.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: I mean he was he was a badass R.I.P.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_03: Um Ortiz de Monteano.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_03: But yeah, I mean on its I guess just to say that that argument um doesn't hold up, right?
1:02:13
SPEAKER_03: This idea that they lacked protein, um, and that that was the reason that they were doing it.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_03: There was another one, and it's not particular or specific to Mesoamerica, I don't think, but at one point the claim with northern natives was uh there was a paper called Searching for a Second Harvest.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember that one?
1:02:35
SPEAKER_03: I don't.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_03: Where it talked about how uh agriculture was so limited and farming techniques were so unproductive in North America that the natives were eating their own shit to uh to try to get the nutrients that they needed.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: You know where I encountered that that idea, and and and it's not even from a uh from an academic source, it was from that fame very famous novel that it's in its upteenth uh reprinting called Astic.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_03: Gary Jennings?
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that guy.
1:03:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like he when I first read that book, uh, that was something that was in there, and I'm like, Wait, seriously?
1:03:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it just always tripped me out.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, first of all, how does he know that?
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: It's like well, that's gross.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_01: Like, I can't imagine anyone, no matter where they are, that they're so hard up on food that they eat their own excrement.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: It just it never made any sense to me, but it's in there.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I guess he might have gotten it from this, what you're talking about.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, probably.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_03: It was called Searching for a Second Harvest, I think.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_03: And it was um none other than uh Russell Means who took them to task for that article.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_03: Like he wrote a really cool uh essay, basically, yeah.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_03: Uh like tearing that argument apart.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: Good on him.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: The same way he tore apart that argument about the indio coming from Indios.
1:04:13
SPEAKER_01: Love it.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, that's uh first episode, our our little intro episode on our new series on human sacrifice.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_03: I'm excited.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_03: I think we're gonna get into some cool stuff.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_03: Um I've got a couple of episodes already written.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_03: Uh one of them touches on what you just brought up about the posole having human meat in it.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, we're we're gonna get into cannibalism, we're gonna get into sacrifice, we're gonna like basically remove the the the fog of the colonial lens and try to understand and appreciate things for what they really were.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_03: Develop a better understanding of them because when we just flat out reject it and say, no, it never happened, and I used to be one of these guys.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_03: I used to be like, nah, if I remember it never happened.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_03: Um what I found was, you know, and it and it took, you know, growing up and and reading more and becoming an archaeologist and then seeing evidence and being like, okay, I when I took that stance, I basically cut myself off from this whole body of knowledge that would have better informed my perspective on these rituals and these traditions.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_03: So, dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this introductory episode, episode one on human sacrifice.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_03: For our premium members, I'm gonna attach a little extra onto this episode.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_03: Um it's basically a perspective on how do we carry forward in our traditions by uh and honor the the traditional ways, our ancestral ways while living in a modern world.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna touch on that a little bit.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_03: Give my uh my two cents uh coming up on the other side in our bonus extended premium, I don't know what to call it, bonus premium extended content.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, premium content.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there you go.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_03: And uh if you are so inclined, dear listeners, you know, five bucks a month, you get access to our Discord server, you get premium content, you get ad-free episodes that are often released early, and and most importantly, you get to support indigenous Chicano media.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_03: So I think that is very important that we get the word out there because you know what I like to say, my friend, the truth is like medicine.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_03: Like bossole