Final Paper

nick naroditski

            The constant blood-letting that occurred in the Maya and Aztec cultures, whether in battle or sacrifice, is one of the more commonly known elements of Mesoamerican civilization.  Everybody knows about the bloody tearing out of the heart by a high priest on the top of the step pyramids, as famous as Egyptian pyramids in the public eye.  Yet, while everyone is fascinated (somewhat grotesquely) with the slaughter, its methods and particulars, no-one understands the symbolism behind this ritual murder, the religious significance of these religious sacrifices.  In effect, one of the main reasons that these slaughters, as well as mass cases of self-mutilation, was for the drawing of blood (itz), which was symbolic, along with milk and semen, as the food for gods.  Indeed, the reason violent death was holy and important in the Aztec and Maya traditions was for the concept that the blood would feed the living gods, and if the blood was shed violently, it was believed that it would go to the more important, more powerful gods. 

While it was true that the sacrificed themselves became messengers to their gods, their ultimate gift was the blood that was spilled, a symbol of the human connection to the gods, and a symbol for the original violence that created the world.  It was for this reason that even those Aztec and Maya people that were not sacrificed would perform ritual bloodletting, cutting holes in their tongues, ears, or penises to “feed” the gods.  This essay will attempt to explore the symbolism behind the blood and the blood-rituals of the Mesoamerican natives.

            The methodology to this mutilation is grotesque, though on par with the self-flagellation that was common in European paganism and early Christianity, and still exists in certain Muslim nations.  A cut would be with a stingray edge or a specially ornamented flint or obsidian knife, most often on the stem of the penis for men or in the center of the tongue for women.  For tongue or ear-cuts, a string, to which there would often be attached thorns or needles, would be passed through the hole, to cause more blood and to induce even more pain.  The blood would be spilled onto paper worn by the worshipper, “offered to the gods, and burned, thereby completing the sacrificial offering.”(Neumann, 156)  Why was this brutal method in use?  Why did people do this?  Contemporaries believe that there were several reasons for these rituals.  The first, was of course, to provide blood to feed the gods.  “The offering of blood, with its pain and its penance, was looked upon as the most precious and holiest of offerings.”(Neumann, 155) This was due to the violence of the Divine Being’s creation of the earth.  “According to the Maya, this fearful self-sacrifice of the Divine Being had provided the life force that created, sustained and forever re-created the universe and human beings.  For their part, human beings were obligated to participate in this original divine sacrifice by repeating it in their own self-sacrificial rituals …” (Gillete, 49)

However, there was also another reason: the enormous pain of the procedure, combined with hallucinogens taken during the ritual, permitted the blood-letter to enter into a godly world, in effect to conjure gods or ancestors for advice or favors.  “The ultimate purpose of bloodletting for the ancient Maya was to achieve enraptured oneness with the God of creation.  Through pain to divine passions, through divine passion to transcendence, bloodletting was the way to learn to live forever.” (Gillette, 57)  The bloodletting, the burning of the stained papers, the pain, the ritual itself was not just a method, but a symbol of the ever-present unity between gods and men.  After all, for what other reason would Mesoamerican people, regardless of social caste, attempt to recreate the actions of the gods?  For them, these acts of self-sacrifice symbolized the unity that they perceived their world to be.

Likewise, the sacrifice of human life was a symbol, both religious and political.  Politically, human sacrifice was a sign of power among the larger civilizations, notably the Aztec empire: “The images of the gods reified superordination (and subordination) and sacrifice to them was symbolically equal to tribute.” (Ingham, 379)  In other words, sacrificing prisoners-of-war, captives, etc. served as a symbol of the Aztec’s economic, political, and RELIGIOUS superiority to its satellite-tribes … in a way, it was the demonstration of Mesoamerica’s particular form of “divine right”.

One doesn’t need to describe the rituals of the sacrifice in great detail.  After the victim/martyr’s heart had been torn out, blood was offered to idols of the Gods while the heart was burned in a pot lined with paper, a sacred item.    The bloody stone, upon which the victim’s body had lain, was wiped away with paper that was also burned in sacrifice to the gods.  The reason for the violent sacrifice was to feed the most important of all the gods, Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun, along with other vital gods, like Tlaloc, god of harvest, and Quetzalcoatl, god of the underworld.  The human sacrifices were for ch’ulel, the essence or spirit of the individual, which resided most deeply and most richly in the human heart.  This was essentially the symbolic equivalent to the physical blood that was used in rituals:  ch’ulel was life-force, vibrancy, energy.  To re-create the gods’ torment in sacrifice for the earth’s creation, and to return to the gods some portion of one’s own spirit.  The disembowelment sent the ch’ulel to every element of the supernatural world.

In other words, the sacrifice itself was a symbol of reliving the suffering of the founding gods as well as replenishing them with human blood.  The heart that was torn from the chest of the victim/martyrs signified the human essence that was to flow from the body to the heavens (for this reason, the sacrificed were believed to be divine messengers and to spend their afterlives with the gods).  And the blood was a physical manifestation of food.  In a way, the blood was almost like the utter opposite of a Catholic communion: rather than god creating symbolic food from his body for his believers, the believers made symbolic food from their bodies for their gods.  In other words, not only was the act a symbol for some much greater event in the history of the Mesoamerican pantheon, but each item that was part of the sacrifice had its own distinctive element of symbolism.

Death is nothing if not a constant in the lives of every human being in the history of the world.  But every individual and every culture is brought up and conditioned to deal with this terrifying constant differently.  The Mesoamerican civilizations dealt with death, especially violent death, by treating it not as a horror but as a gift, from and for the gods.  The death state was equivalent in the Mesoamerican collective mentality to sleep and dreams and trances … and violent death was a symbol, to some extent, of reaching unity with divinity.They “forced themselves to stay constantly aware of death through bloodletting, the torture of captives taken in battle, and human sacrifice.  They maintained that the only authentic salvation lies in facing the worst head-on, honestly, directly, without flinching.”(Gillette, 134)  Violent death itself became a symbol of service and tribute to the pantheon and to the state … death became not a curse but an ecstasy, to the point where people would perform self-mutilation to achieve some small part of the same experience.  In the end, the sacrifice and self-mutilation that existed in great extent in Mesoamerica was both a microcosm and a symbol for the wide-spread acceptance and even the embrace of all-powerful death, which was itself a symbol of the divine unity of existence.