Aztec Human Sacrifice Analysis

The Aztecs people of Central Mexico have been a controversial culture studied by many archeologist and anthropologist alike. The Aztec had an empire in central Mexico when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The Aztecs had a very controversial practice not seen in many cultures around the world and that is a human sacrifice.

To understand the practice of human sacrifice one must look at the reasons why the culture did such practices. There are three main ways of examining a cultural practice from an anthropological perspective. These ways are cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, and critical cultural relativism. The purpose of the examining the human sacrifice the way of critical cultural relativism is the best and superior way to look at foreign cultural customs and practices. That is why it is the selected term for the purposes of this paper. The first term that is used to judge cultural practices is Ethnocentric thinking. So to look at human sacrifice using the ethnocentric perspective would to

Why did the culture and customs require human blood to survive? How did high Aztec society view these sacrifice? These answers are easy to obtain using anthropology and archeology and historical documents from the time such as the infamous letters of Cortez. To the first question o why did the Aztecs practice human sacrifice to understand the reasons one must understand their epic religious beliefs. The Aztecs thought the world would end if they did not sacrifice human blood to their gods. The Gods were always locked in an epic battle and needed human blood to keep the universe from being destroyed. According to Aztec mythology, this world was the fifth and last universe so human blood was needed to continue the universe and prevent its destruction. The world had been destroyed four times before by the gods and it was up to the Aztecs who thought they were in the center of the world to stop its