Questions and Answers and the Aztecs

No surprise, history is on my mind again this time of year.  And the questions about history are coming back too.  Why?  When?  How?  What if?  Why not?  
In honor of this, I will tell you a story from my life a few years ago.  Back when I was 23.

The first year I was teaching at St. Croix Prep, I had a class period that wanted to discuss (and would have happily kept discussing) the outcomes of ritual sacrifice by Aztec priests.  Specifically, the ritual sacrifice of warriors who were offered to the sun god.   

The question at hand became this....what happened to their heartless bodies? We were covering 'Chapter 24: The Aztecs'.  This is your basic Central Mexico in the 1400s scenario.  And we were discussing the importance of religious ceremonies, post-combat, for this people group. Who and why and how.



Do you want to know something I find really interesting?  (I think you do, or you wouldn't be reading this blog.)  The fact that Aztecs viewed prisoners of war as more victorious than killing opponents in combat directly influenced the Spanish conquistadors' ability to conquer this people group with a limited army.  They were fighting differently.  Aztecs wanted to capture conquistadors, and conquistadors wanted to kill them straight out.  And storm the city.  With guns.  And enemies from neighboring tribes.  None of that was real great for the Aztecs around 1520.

In the past few years, each class has wondered about something specific regarding sacrifice.  Why did the warriors go to the temple so willingly at all?  Was the heart still beating when it was taken from their chest?  Are you technically brainwashed if you agree to this in the first place?  Why is warrior blood the best?  Why did they think the sun needed help in its flight across the sky?  Who was holding the knife?  How long did it take to die?  

But the first year I taught, they wondered about the rest of the body.  Everything but the heart.  Where did it go?   Were the bodies stacked?  Were they hurled down the back of the temple?  Were they incinerated?  (And how did we all eventually feel about this?)  They had many theories. 

To keep this from being too gruesome I tried to edge things toward 'every culture has a different view of how to honor the body after death'.  Every year we discuss a bunch of things....mostly, to be honest, what comes to me in that moment. 

 I do this as well to keep that one queasy person in the back row from actually having to leave to go barf.  I see it in their eyes.  (Eyes say so much, you know.)  At that point, they're about done in.  Especially after lunch.  

Viking funerals and funerals at sea and the importance of closure for everyone, how they chose to bury Genghis Khan, what we say when presidents lie in state, and how in this country even 75 years ago it was not uncommon for people to take pictures of their loved ones in a casket. 

And then frame it and put it on the mantle. 

That REALLY gives them the heebie-jeebies.  But with limited access to the luxury of a camera, I guess you want any glimpse of them you can....?  And there is closure.  I don't claim to understand this either.  I just know it happened. 

As you can imagine, this slows the Aztec gears turning in their 7th grade minds, but only a little.

Today, I learned the answer.  Fives years later!  Something that directly answers the question my first students asked.  Back then, I looked for an answer, but what I found was still vague.  And now, instead of hedging around it and marveling along with them, I know.

What did the Aztecs do with the rest of the bodies?

They removed the beating hearts, and then fed the bodies to the snakes that guarded their temples.  I imagine well-fed snakes in about 1487, let me tell you, because this was about the time that 20,000 people were estimated to have been killed.  In a big giant ceremony, in the course of 4 days, with 19 temples, in order to show power. 

Hello, fairly ferocious Aztecs. 
  

If you're reading this far, it means that you might have begun to wonder about ritual sacrifice in the late 1400s too.  I show this to my students every year, and it helps to sort things out a little.   Maybe it can help you too.




We SKIP Part IV (no negotiations, kids) every year because I am NOT talking about cults with 7th graders.  And then.....this.

So there you go.  And even though this sounds insane, I am much more (theoretically) comfortable watching Discovery Civilisation break down the 'what ifs' of sacrifice in the 1400s than I am with watching someone insert an IV into any one's vein right now.  (Yes, nurses in my life, even someone with good veins.)

Go figure.