Sacrifice In The Aztecs

Human sacrifice was a religious practice characteristic of the Aztec civilization, and much of Mesoamerica. Spanish conquistadors, Hernan Cortes, made observations of and wrote reports about the practice of human sacrifice. These reports tended to be great exaggerations of what they saw, nor did they comprehend the significance of sacrifice among the Aztec culture. These tales were fabricated to convince the people of the world that the Aztecs were less than human. An array of reasons and interpretations of the Aztec practice of human sacrifice have been proposed by modern scientists.

While unsure whether the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice before reaching Tenochtitlan, the first report sacrifice was that of the killing and skinning of the daughter of the

After that, the Aztec would usually perform their rituals on war prisoners, sacrificing them with sharp obsidian blades, and then offer the blood to the god Acolnahuacatl. The ritual killing would end when the god was appeased. The Legend of the Five Suns tells the doctrine of the Aztec and other Nahua people in which the present world was preceded by four other cycles of creation and destruction. It is a mixture of mythological, cosmological, and eschatological (a part of theology concerned with the end of the world) beliefs and traditions of earlier cultures. In this legend, Quetzalcoatl would not accept the destruction of his people so he stole their bones from the underworld and dipped them in his blood to resurrect them. They reopened their eyes to the current sun, Huitzilopochtli. The other children of Ometeotl became jealous of Huitzilopochtli, and the