Why was sacrificed so important to the aztecs

Through an oxygen isotopic analysis of human remains, she and her team found that the people selected for sacrifice belonged to diverse areas of Mesoamerica. But the link to pandemics as what inspired the sacrifices made in these social media posts is historically unfounded. The Mexica and the Aztecs did conduct sacrifices in the event of famines or environmental critical situations such as droughts here.

As another example, she pointed to the sacrificed individuals at the Templo R in Tlatelolco. Mesoamerican cultures did not sacrifice their own leaders. Experts say evidence shows most victims were slaves or war-spoil.

Verano says that these battles provided an important venue for young Aztec warriors to gain social status by bringing home a gaggle of captives, some of whom would ultimately be sacrificed. Sixteenth-century illustrations depict body parts being cooked in large pots and archeologists have identified telltale butcher marks on the bones of human remains in Aztec sites around Mexico City.

While it was long theorized that Aztecs only engaged in ritual cannibalism during times of famine, another explanation is that consuming the flesh of a person offered to the gods was like communing with the gods, themselves. As off-putting as it sounds, Verano says that ritual cannibalism most likely existed among the Aztecs and would have been considered not only normal, but a great honor.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. She was supposedly ripped in half to create the land, and then humans had to feed her with blood in order to sustain her and pay back the original debt.

Then the male gods let blood from their penises to moisten the dough in order to form little human figures out of it. The Aztecs believed that up to this point there had been five ages of the world and that they were living in the fifth age, and that is how this incarnation of humanity came to be. Human sacrifice was intended to pay back the debt that was formed when the gods let blood from themselves to create the world. It was kind of like feeding the gods. Essentially, it was an altruistic act — human sacrifice was necessary for all of humanity.

This was a communal response to a collective debt. A: In theory, there were some voluntary victims of human sacrifice. The majority of victims were people mostly men, but sometimes women and children captured in war.

Some of them were sacrificed as generic victims — if they needed to sacrifice say five people. Some were sacrificed as impersonators of the gods, known as ixiptla ; they took on the mantle of a god and were killed in honour of the gods they were impersonating. These ixiptla formed a prominent part of the regular festivals. Children were sacrificed in particular for Tlaloc, the rain god. These children were mostly from within the Aztec group — they came from Tenochtitlan , the ancient capital of the Aztec empire.