Author: C .T.

Recently I was in the bookstore of the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA), which I had not visited for years, and the cover of a DVD for sell caught my attention. Although it was about human sacrifice in pre-Columbian America, the back cover of this BBC documentary claimed that “women had more rights” in the pre-Hispanic world than in the West. I immediately put the DVD, which before reading that had tempted me to purchase it, back to the shelf.

It is unbelievable the level of chutzpah and blatant historical lies that presently are broadcasted to the unsuspecting masses. As I wrote in my book rebutting similar, outrageous claims by renowned British historians, unlike pre-Columbian women “European women were not deceived to be sacrificed, decapitated and skinned punctually according to rituals of the Gregorian calendar.”

In my chapter of Hojas Susurrantes dealing with the Aztecs I did not include references because the format of that chapter is literary, not academic. But now that I was in the MNA I obtained a copy of what could be regarded as the most up-to-date academic work on human sacrifice in Mesoamerica.

El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana is a 600-page, academic treatise authored by 28 scholars on the subject of pre-Columbian sacrifice: Mexican, European and American archeologists, historians and anthropologists. Published in 2010 by both the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), this can be the ultimate source to validate what I wrote in my book about the Aztecs. In addition to the sources I already knew, El Sacrificio Humano includes some new archeological evidence corroborating the 16th century claims of the Spaniards about Amerind infanticide, sacrifice and cannibalism.

Of course: the Mexicans who coordinated the publishing of this major work are politically-correct idiots whose main objective is that the readers continue to subscribe the non-judgmental ethos so fashionable in anthropology today, an ethos that takes Boasian anthropology as axiomatic. This can be gathered from the presentations to this collaborative work by the director of the INAH (“Accepting the reality of the sacrificial practices in ancient Mexico does not mean to rule in favor or against them”—my translation); those who coordinate the MNA (“…the Hispanist fundamentalism that sees only the most barbaric aspects of this practice”), and the director of the Institute of Historical Research of the UNAM (“…among the non-specialist public often circulates reductionist ideas about it [the Mesoamerican sacrifice]… the papers presented here allow a more accurate and nuanced approach”).

Take note that these men and women and all Mexican and non-Mexican anthropologists and historians that contributed with academic papers to El Sacrificio Humano don’t deny the facts about what the pre-Hispanic Amerinds did. What modern academics do is, like their guru the Jew Franz Boas, abstaining from value judgments about such practices. In today’s historiography you can say everything you want against whites, the Germans and the Nazis, but even the slightest condemnation of non-white cultures is considered disloyal.

In one of the first chapters after the above-mentioned presentations, the archeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma presents the archeological evidences of sacrificial rituals—skeleton remains of the victims, stony bases for the sacrifice, the instruments used in the immolations, etc.—that Leonardo López Luján, the main coordinator of the book, acknowledges in the very first chapter as “having their referents in the historical sources from the 16th century.” This scholar is thus acknowledging that what the Spanish chroniclers saw and recorded in the 16th century is now being corroborated by archeology. López Luján of course uses the passive voice, “fueron muertos” instead of the natural “los mataron” (they killed them) in that introductory chapter when writing about the sacrificial victims.

In the next entries of these new series I will be examining the naked facts that the scholars of El Sacrificio Humano present about how these little angels, the Amerinds, behaved before any substantial contact with the Europeans.

Tenochtitlan, the world’s most beautiful city in the 16th century.
For my interpretation of Aztec human sacrifice see my book: here.