Cannibals and Kings (17 page)

Once the prisoner has been brought back to the village, the treatment he can expect is determined largely by the capacity of his hosts to absorb and regulate servile labor, the decisive difference being that between pre- and post-state political systems. When prisoners are few and far between, their temporary treatment as honored guests is not surprising. Whatever deep psychological
ambivalences may exist in the minds of the captors, the prisoner is a valuable possession—one for whom his hosts have literally risked their lives. Yet there is usually no way to absorb him into the group; since he can’t be sent back to the enemy, he must be killed. And torture has its own gruesome economy. If to be tortured is, as we say, to die a thousand deaths, then to torture one poor captive is to kill a thousand enemies. Torture is also a spectacle—an entertainment—which has been time-tested for audience approval down through the ages. I have no intention of asserting that it is part of human nature to enjoy seeing people bruised, burned, and dismembered. But it is part of human nature to pay rapt attention to unusual sights and sounds such as blood spurting from wounds and loud shrieking and howling. (And even then, many of us turn away in horror.)

The point once again is not that we instinctively enjoy watching another person suffer but that we have the capacity to learn to enjoy it. The realization of that capacity was important for societies such as the Tupinamba and Huron. These were societies that had to teach their youths to be remorselessly brutal toward their enemies on the battlefield. Such lessons are more readily learned when you realize that the enemy will do unto you what you have done to him should you fall into his hands. Add to the prisoner’s value his living body, standing to warriors in training as cadavers to doctors in training. Next we come to the rituals of the killing—sacrifice to please the gods, executioners with their sacred equipment, abstention from sexual intercourse. To understand all this is to understand that warfare in band and village societies is ritual murder, regardless of whether the enemy is killed on the battle-field
or at home. Before leaving for battle, the warriors paint and decorate themselves, invoke the ancestors, take hallucinogenic drugs to contact tutelary spirits, and strengthen their weapons with magical spells. Enemies slain on the field of battle are “sacrifices” in the sense that their deaths are said to please the ancestors or the war gods, just as the ancestors or the war gods are said to be pleased by the torture and death of a prisoner. Finally, there is the question of cannibalism—a question which, when asked, in itself reveals a profound misunderstanding on the part of the asker. People can learn to like or dislike the taste of human flesh, just as they can learn to be amused or horrified by torture. Obviously, there are many circumstances under which an acquired taste for human flesh can be integrated into the motivational system that inspires human societies to go to war. Moreover, to eat the enemy is literally to derive strength from his annihilation. What has to be explained, therefore, is why cultures that have no scruples about killing enemies should ever refrain from eating them. But that is a puzzle we are not yet ready to face.

If this digression into military cost-accounting as an explanation for the torture-sacrifice-cannibalism complex seems a bit too mechanical, let me point out that I do not deny the existence of ambivalent psychological motivations such as those engendered by the Oedipal situation in militaristic male-supremacist societies. I expect warfare to produce contradictory emotions and to mean many different things simultaneously to the participants. And I do not deny that cannibalism may express both affection and hatred toward the victim. What I definitely reject is the view that specific patterns of intergroup aggression can be explained by vague and
contradictory psychic elements boldly abstracted from the specific ecological and reproductive pressures that induced people to make war in the first place.

Returning to the Aztecs, we can see that the unique contribution of their religion was not the introduction of human sacrifice but its elaboration along certain destructive pathways. Most notably, the Aztecs transformed human sacrifice from an occasional by-product of luck on the battlefield to a routine in which not a day went by when someone was not spread-eagled on the altars of the great temples such as Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. And sacrifices also took place at dozens of lesser temples ranging down to what might be called neighborhood chapels. One such neighborhood facility—a low, circular, flat-topped structure about twenty feet in diameter was excavated during the construction of Mexico City’s subway. It now stands, preserved behind glass, at one of the busiest stations. For the less-than-total enlightenment of the crowds of commuters who pass it every day, an accompanying plaque notes only that the ancient Mexicans were “very religious.”

Since the Aztec armies were thousands of times bigger than those of the Huron or the Tupinamba, they could capture thousands of prisoners in a single battle. In addition to daily sacrifices of small numbers of prisoners and slaves at major and minor shrines, then, mass sacrifices involving hundreds and thousands of victims could be carried out to commemorate special events. The Spanish chroniclers were told, for example, that at the dedication in 1487 of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlán four lines of prisoners stretching for two miles each were sacrificed by a team of executioners who worked night and day for four days. Allotting two minutes per sacrifice, the demographer and historian Sherburne Cook estimated that the number of victims
associated with that single event was 14,100. The scale of these rituals could be dismissed as exaggerations were it not for the encounters of Bemal Díaz and Andrés de Tapia with methodically racked and hence easily counted rows of human skulls in the plazas of the Aztec cities. Diaz writes that in the plaza of Xocotlan

Of his encounter with the great skull rack in the center of Tenochtitlán, Tapia wrote:

But that was not all. Tapia also describes two tall towers made entirely out of skulls held together by lime in which there was an uncountable number of crania and jaws.

Traditional explanations of the vast scale of this slaughter depict the Aztecs as people obsessed with the idea that their gods needed to drink human blood and who piously proceeded, therefore, to wage warfare in order to fulfill their sacred duty. In the words of Jacques Soustelle:

But holy wars among states are a dime a dozen. The Jews, the Christians, the Moslems, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Romans—all went to war to please their gods or carry out god’s will. Only the Aztecs felt it was saintly to go to war in order to supply vast numbers of human sacrifices. And while all of the other archaic and not so archaic states engaged in butchery and mass atrocities, none of them did so on the pretext that the heavenly rulers had an uncontrollable desire to drink human blood. (As we shall see, it is no accident that the gods of many Old World states drank mead or ambrosia, ate honeydew, or expressed no concern at all about where their next meal was coming from.) So intent were the Aztecs on bringing back prisoners to be sacrificed that they would frequently refrain from pressing a military advantage for fear that they would kill too many enemy troops before terms of surrender could be arranged. This tactic cost them dearly in their engagements with Cortés’ troops, who from the Aztec point of view seemed to be irrationally intent upon killing everyone in sight.

Sherburne Cook was the first modern anthropologist to disavow a sentimentalist approach to the puzzle of Aztec sacrifice: “However powerful, no purely religious urge can maintain itself successfully for any material period of time counter to fundamental economic resistance.” Cook proposed that Aztec war and sacrifice
were part of a system for regulating population growth. He calculated that the combined effect of combat deaths and sacrifices produced an annual elevation of 25 percent in the death rate. Since “the population was reaching the maximum consistent with the means of subsistence … the effect of warfare and sacrifice would have been very effective in checking an undue increase in numbers.” This theory was an improvement over its predecessors, but it is clearly defective at its central point. The Aztecs could not have controlled the population of the Valley of Mexico by warfare and human sacrifice. Since almost all the combat deaths and sacrificed victims were males, the 25 percent rise in death rates refers only to males and could easily be matched by a 25 percent rise in the birth rate. If the Aztecs were systemically intent upon cutting back on the rate of population growth, they would have concentrated on sacrificing maidens instead of grown men. Moreover, even if the function of their sacrifices was population control, why didn’t the Aztecs simply kill their enemies during battle as imperial armies in other parts of the world have always found it expedient to do? Cook’s explanation fails to get at the particularity of the Mesoamerican practice—to explain why the slaughter had to be carried out on top of a pyramid instead of on the battlefield.

Conventional descriptions of the Aztec ritual of sacrifice end with the victim’s body tumbling down the pyramid. Blinded by the image of a still-beating heart held aloft in the hands of the priest, one can easily forget to ask what happened to the body when it came to rest at the bottom of the steps. Michael Harner of The New School has pursued this question with greater intelligence and courage than anyone else. Throughout the rest of this chapter I shall draw heavily upon his
work. He alone deserves the credit for solving the riddle of Aztec sacrifice.

As Harner points out, there really is no mystery concerning what happened to the bodies since all the eyewitness accounts are in fundamental agreement. Anyone with a knowledge of how Tupinamba, the Huron, and other village societies disposed of their sacrificial victims should be able to come to the same conclusion: the victims were eaten. Bernardino De Sahagún’s description leaves little room for doubt:

De Sahagún makes the same points repeatedly:

Diego Duran gives us a similar description:

These descriptions clarify a number of points about the Aztec warfare-sacrifice-cannibalism complex. Harner notes that each prisoner had an owner—probably the officer in charge of the soldiers who actually made the capture. When the prisoner was brought back to Tenochtitlán, he was housed in the owner’s compound. We know little about how long he was kept there or how he was treated, but one can guess that he was fed enough tortillas to keep him from losing weight. It even seems likely that a powerful military commander would have kept several dozen prisoners on hand, fattening them up in preparation for special feast days or important family events such as births, deaths, or marriages. When the time for sacrifice approached, the prisoners may have been tortured for the instruction and amusement of the owner’s family and neighbors. On the day of the sacrifice, the owner and his soldiers no doubt escorted the prisoner to the foot of the pyramid to watch the proceedings in the company of other dignitaries whose prisoners were being sacrificed on the same day. After the heart was removed, the body was not tumbled down the steps so much as pushed down by attendants, since the steps were not steep enough to keep the body moving all the way from top to bottom without getting stuck. The old men, whom De Sahagún refers to as Quaquacuiltin, claimed the body and took it back to the owner’s compound, where they cut it up and prepared the limbs for cooking—the favorite recipe being a stew flavored with peppers and tomatoes. De Sahagún states that they put “squash blossoms” in the flesh. The victim’s blood, as De Sahagún notes, was collected in a gourd vessel by the priests and delivered
to the owner. We know the heart was put into a brazier and burned along with copal incense, but whether or not it was burned to ashes remains unclear. There is also some question concerning the fate of the trunk with its organs and the head with its brains. Eventually, the skull ended up on display on one of the racks described by Andrés Tapia and Bernai Díaz. But since most cannibals relish brains, we can assume that these were removed—perhaps by the priests or spectators—before the skulls ended up on exhibit. Similarly, although according to Díaz the trunk was tossed to the carnivorous mammals, birds, and snakes kept in the royal zoo, I suspect that the zoo keepers—Tapia says that there were large numbers of them—first removed most of the flesh.