Cin the Aztec Civilization - Essay Example

Much of what has long thought to be true about the long-lost Aztec empire, including their sacrificial rituals involving cannibalistic practices, traces back to the information compiled by a Franciscan monk named Bernardino de Sahagun. Sahagun's work, the Florentine Codex, was a detailed accounting of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Aztec people, designed primarily for the purpose of instructing other Christian missionaries in how best to facilitate the conversion of the indigenous tribes to Christianity.

It is certainly interesting, of course, if not necessarily truly ironic that the one of the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism is transubstantiation, or the consumption of bread and wine that has been transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. An argument can therefore be made that the religious conversion of the Aztecs was ignited in part due to their practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism was instructed by Europeans who themselves practiced a form of cannibalism and whose entire religion is based on the necessity of a human sacrifice.

Almost everything that is known about Aztec human sacrifices and cannibalistic practices is, therefore, filt. s have been forwarded to offer an alternative to Sahagun's original observations of Aztec rituals that had been distorted following the original publication due to misinterpretations, exaggeration and the natural human desire to simplify actions one has trouble understanding. Although the Aztec civilization was deemed to be a violent one, the Europeans were themselves no stranger to violence, therefore it was the human sacrifice more than anything else that assaulted their sensibilities.

Perhaps s this assault was intensified by the justification and rationale of the natives that it was done in the name of religion. Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of the sun, viewed as the source of all life. The Aztecs believed that this source must be kept moving in order to keep it from disappearing forever into the darkness of night and so to accomplish this (Alves 43). The way to accomplish this task had to do with the belief that the sun needed to be nourished with blood; as a result, human sacrifice was a necessary ingredient for prolonging the existence of all humankind.

In fact, there is an eschatological element to the ritual in that the Aztecs believed that appeasing their gods not only ensured life, but also staved off chaos. "In most cases, the victim was dressed, painted and ornamented so as to represent the god who was being worshipped; and thus it was the god himself who died before his own image and in his own temple, just as all the gods had accepted death in the first days for the salvation of the world. And when ritual cannibalism was practiced on certain occasions, it was the god's own flesh that the faithful ate in their bloody communion" (Soustelle 98).

Therefore, it was probably not necessarily the idea of consuming a human heart that so perturbed