← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone, it's me, Maddy. I am back. Well, not quite. I will be back on the pod very soon, but in the meantime, if you've missed your fix of Anthony and me together, you can now catch us live on stage at Conway hall in London on the 7th of May. There we'll be discussing my brand new book, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, out that very same day we'll be discovering how fake news is nothing new, chatting about what it's like to spend time in the darker side of the Georgian world and meeting the three extraordinary, bizarre and often frightening characters at the heart of the book. Copies of Hoax will be available on the night, which I'll be signing after the show and hopefully chatting to as many of you as possible. So get your tickets now. The link is in the show notes. You can go to the Conway hall website or follow the link in my Instagram bio. I'm so excited about this book and I just can't wait to share it with you all. Do come along. It is going to be the most fantastic evening. See you there.
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B
This is Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab. This weekend I'm having friends over for a dinner party and I'll be serving my famous white bean escarole chicken sausage. And of course I'll be using Dietz and Watson Italian chicken sausage. This their sausage is always perfect for guests because it has no nitrates added, it's gluten free and it's just delicious. Visit dietzandwatson.com therightway to learn more about the Dietz difference. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Whether you're packing for a vacation or dressing for a wedding, Nordstrom has head to toe looks for wherever summer takes you. From swimwear in bold color to romantic florals and dresses, find the right style for every unforgettable moment. Shop new arrivals from brands you love like Farmrio, Free People, Vince, Waif and Staud. Plus free shipping and returns and styling help whenever you need it. Make everything so easy. Shop in stores@nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app.
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C
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D
Drums thunder across the temple steps of Tenochtitlan. A crowd gathers below as priests lead a captive toward the summit. He is laid back on cold stone. Hands grip his limbs. A blade of obsidian flashes. In a single practiced motion, his chest is opened and his beating heart extracted as offering to the gods. This is the image that has, for many, come to define the Aztecs. But how much of what we think we know is true and how much was written by their conquerors from the sacrificial temple of the Aztec empire? This is After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name is Anthony, and I am, of course, and have been for the last few months at this point, minus Maddie, but she will be back in the near future. But for today's episode, we are joined by Professor Caroline Dodds Pennock, who is professor of international history at the University of Sheffield and author of books including Bonds of Blood, Gender, Life Cycle, and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. And more recently, a book that I adored, and I really do highly recommend this. Go out and read this on savage sh. Indigenous Americans discovered Europe. Welcome, Caroline, to After Dark.
- [04:16]
E
Thank you very much for having me.
- [04:17]
D
And I believe. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, because this is not my area of expertise, although I am so interested in this. Are you the only person in Britain who studies Aztec culture to the extent that you do?
- [04:29]
E
Technically, I'm the only British Aztec historian, I think. Historian, because Josh Fitzgerald, who is an American, has been here for the last few years doing some Nahua, which is. Is the group of people that includes the Aztecs doing some wonderful Nahua histories. But I am the only British person,
- [04:48]
D
and until Josh arrived, he ruined the whole claim.
- [04:51]
E
I know my publisher's like, how do we still say this in a way that sounds impressive, Josh?
- [04:56]
D
Well, someday get on a plane and your publishers will be very happy. No, I'm joking, Josh. We welcome you with open arms. Okay, one of the things that I want to point out before we get into the full discussion is there's two things. The first thing is I think when people think about the Aztec empire, they may have their dates wrong. They may think that this is a much, much earlier civilization and group of communities and civilizations than it actually is. So just give us a date range for people who are very unfamiliar with this but may have heard the word Aztec before.
- [05:25]
E
Well, you're absolutely right. I think people pigeonhole this with the Egyptians and the Romans maybe. I mean, I know those aren't contemporaneous, but, like, Ancient cultures.
- [05:33]
D
Yes.
- [05:34]
E
And it's actually contemporary with Henry VIII is a better comparison. So the beginnings of what now call the Aztec empire, though they would have called themselves the Mexica or maybe the Tenocha, the people of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec, Mexica people settle where they end up having their capital in 1325. They only really begin to turn it into an empire in the 1420s and 30s, and then they're defeated by the Spanish and their indigenous allies in 1521. So it's actually kind of a Tudor period, if you want to put it in European terms.
- [06:05]
D
And I think that surprises a lot of people in terms of where this is sitting in a global timeline. And maybe that accounts for the fact that people don't necessarily know that. More broadly, maybe that accounts for the. I kind of try and pick my words carefully here, but almost the fetishize. Fetishization. If I could speak of these cultures and the ways in. And look, we are going to be talking about sacrifice today as part of this conversation, although it is really worth pointing out that this is a part of these cultures, not the defining thing. It's interesting as well, because when I think about human sacrifice, I think actually of bog bodies. I think of those finds in Ireland, which are far more ancient. But I also think you talked about Henry VIII there, and that idea of religion and violence and the cycle that goes through that. And when European colonizers were over in Central america during the 16th century and before, obviously there is this idea of going, oh, in your book hints at this, but it inverts it on savage shores, that there was this savage culture going on in terms of some human sacrif. I would point out before we start these conversations that there are people being hung, drawn and quartered in England at this very time, in very public, for what is less, you know, culturally significant things. So I think it's worth bearing that in mind, don't you, as we. As we kind of go through this.
- [07:29]
E
Yes, that was a very large question, kind of. You covered everything. Every time you said anything, I was like, which bit do I start with? Because there are so many things there. Because you're absolutely right. People have fetishized Aztec, Mexica history in a way that other cultures haven't been fetishized, even though people kill other people for religion all the time throughout history and for reasons that they claim are to do with religion, but are actually to do with other things. I mean, even today, people are killing each other over religion. It's not an unusual thing. To see deaths, even mass deaths for religion. So why is it that this particular civilization is the one that has been so demonized and is so associated with human sacrifice? And there are lots of reasons for that. But one of the big ones is, as you say, the Spanish arrive, and it's not just that they are revolted by what's happening, because they're quite used to seeing violence in their own streets, people being burned, being tortured. It's not surprising. It's part of the justification for invasion. So it's absolutely part of the Spanish invasion to say we need to civilize these people, they need to be Christianized, because look at these terrible things that they're doing. And it's actually cannibalism, which is very much entangled with human sacrifice in the popular imagination, is one of the reasons that you're allowed to get round the prohibition against slavery. So you mustn't enslave indigenous people in the Spanish Empire in this period, because they all have to be seen as potential converts, potential Christians. But there are some exceptions, and one of the big exceptions is if they're cannibals, that's in the law until, at least until the middle of the 16th century, it's an exception. And so people go around saying they are all cannibals. Yes. And that makes it easy to practice extraordinary violence of your own against these people.
- [09:21]
D
That's such a good point. And actually your book does this really well that there is extraordinary violence being perpetrated against these indigenous communities as well. And it's so easy to forget that, because. And this is coming to my next question, a lot of the ways in which we know about this in Europe particularly, is through particularly biased sources. So let's talk about that. How. How do we as a general population come to. I mean, obviously you'll be different, you're an expert in this. But for most people encountering these histories, how do we know about them? What. What are the sources that have come to us to. To give us that insight?
- [09:58]
E
Well, the sources for Aztec Mexica culture are really, really problematic. Of course, every historian will say all the sources are difficult, but this is another level entirely, because we have no alphabetic sources from before the period of the Spanish invasion. This is a literate culture, but it's a pictograph. But when the Spanish arrive, they destroy the rich literature that the indigenous people have because they're afraid that this might represent religious texts and that it might be corrupting. So they destroy vast amounts of literature, and we're left with Only a handful of pictographic documents, none of them from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, just from surrounding communities. And then we have a few pictographic texts from after the Spanish invasion which are recreated. They're copies of earlier ones, or they're continuities of the earlier tradition. But mostly what we have have are sources that are created either by the Spanish or under the aegis of the Spanish. And even if you're an indigenous person working in the colonial world, of course you're going to change what you say about your past, either because you've changed what you thought about it or for strategic purposes. So we have a set of sources from Spanish conquistadors, people who did witness Aztec Mexica society. And then we have sources from after the Spanish invasion, often put together by missionaries, these huge ethnographic texts. In particular one called the Florentine Codex, because it's held in Florence, that is put together by a Franciscan friar called Bernardino de Sahagun. And he puts together 12 incredible volumes of observations about indigenous culture. And his is just the biggest of a whole set of sources that are created in collaboration with indigenous peoples, and that is often forgotten. It's increasingly becoming known that these enormous missionary texts, these ethnographic texts, are actually created, often by indigenous informants with the collaboration of indigenous intellectuals, but they're created for quite specific purposes, usually evangelical purposes. So we have to be quite careful with that. You then have texts from a little bit later which are written by indigenous descendants of the great families, the great noble families, and they're, of course, trying to glorify their past without making it too hostile to Spanish modes of thinking and preferences. And then we do have other sources, of course, but those are the kind of the three big ones, plus then some pictography and then archaeology, which can allow us to access indigenous ways of thinking and worldviews, but tends to be focused on the big monumental archaeologies. That's what tends to have been dug up, is these big temples and palaces and so on.
- [12:45]
D
I also want people to bear in mind as we go through this, because I think there's so much left for people to really sit with that they're not generally able to access when it comes to this particular topic. But that the Aztecs are not an extinct civilization. There are people who are indigenous Aztec who are living today. I think that's really key because it just reminded me when you're talking about, you know, later generations of Aztec peoples writing certain histories, but we have those descendants today too.
- [13:13]
E
Yes, Absolutely. They wouldn't mostly call themselves Aztecs. Most of those people today would call themselves Nahua, meaning Nahuatl speaking. Nahuatl was the Aztec language. It embraces a larger cultural group than just the people of Tenochtitlan, which is the big Aztec capital that we know about. But it is about a million people still speak Nahuatl today, probably more. And so you have enormous numbers of indigenous descendants who are still invested in this culture, in this society, and who are the descendants of people who lived through colonization, adapted to colonization, recorded their own histories, in some cases traveled to Europe. That's what my more recent book was about. Came to Europe or were transported to Europe as enslaved people. There's an enormous history here that follows Aztec history, which I think people don't talk about very much and is often forgotten. I mean, of course, there are lots of historians and descendant communities doing amazing work on these cultures. I'm not claiming to be the only person who's ever mentioned them, but I think people do often pigeonhole asset culture. And in some ways, indigenous cultures altogether is sort of saying these are lost cultures or that they've died out. And that is very, very far from being the case.
- [14:24]
D
Yeah, definitely. I think it feeds back into what we were talking about earlier, about this idea that this is ancient in terms of the Egyptian time period or whatever it might be. So I think that that feeds into that. Now, one question which is coming to mind here and seems very basic, and I'm sorry to ask it because it's so simplistic, but I don't know the answer, so I'm assuming listeners won't either. So you mentioned earlier that the indigenous people that we're talking about wouldn't have known themselves as Aztecs. You mentioned that their descendants now don't call themselves Aztecs. Where do we get the word Aztec from?
- [14:53]
E
So Aztec comes from the word Aztlan, which is the mythical origin place of the Aztecs, or mytho historical, because it may be rooted in factual histories. This is a place of the white herons. It's a place in the north, some people say maybe in Texas or the southern United States. The people we know as the Aztecs migrate down from the north sometime in the 1300s. They come to the Valley of Mexico, and Aztlan is this mythical origin place. And there is some evidence that Azteca might have been the word that the people who were already there called these kind of enemy, unwelcome arrivals. There's a little bit of evidence for that. Most commonly, though, the reason that we use the term is that a man called Clavigero in the 18th century started using it as the common term meaning the people of Azklan, the people who came from Aztlan. And it was picked up by scholars and used more widely, and that's where it comes from.
- [15:52]
D
Okay, interesting. Now let's try and get as close to the Aztec world as we possibly can, particularly given the caveats that you mentioned about sources. But now we have access to archaeology and other pictorial evidence that we have got in the past, build an idea of what this world might have looked, sounded, felt like for the listeners. What are they stepping into if they step into one of these communities? Civilization. Cities.
- [16:21]
E
Well, you're saying cities, and actually what we think of as the Aztec empire is a Confederation of maybe 500 subject and allied cities that stretch all across central Mexico. It embraces, by the time the Spanish arrive, maybe 6 to 7 million vassal peoples. But when we think about the Aztecs as we know them, we're normally thinking about the city of Tenochtitlan, which laid on the site of what is now downtown Mexico City. And this was an island city in the middle of a huge lake. It was really organized and clean, including the people living around the fringes of the lake. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. There are enormous disputes about exactly how big the city was, how what the population was. It's around 13 square kilometers. You may be talking about up to around 200,000 people. It's almost certainly the largest city any of the Spaniards have ever seen. When they arrive, they talk about how wondrous it looks and as if it's a dream. And they compare it to Venice because it's a city on a lake. But unlike Venice, it's not very higgledy piggledy. Unlike these medieval European cities, it's really ordered, really structured. And so you have in Tenochtitlan, a big ceremonial center with a huge pyramid on it. And then there are straight streets with canals running alongside them that order the city and causeways reaching out to the mainland and as well as a big tidal barrier that controls the waters of the lake. So it's an enormous marvel of engineering, really. They've reclaimed a lot of land from the lake. There's a little bit of it that's still left today, which are what are often called the floating gardens, the Chinampa gardens, which are in Xochimilco in northern Mexico City. And you can go and visit them. This is where they would have farmed flowers as well as crops. The Aztecs Loved flowers. So it's a really vibrant city and it's actually a twin city. You have Tenochtitlan and then Tlateloco, a smaller city, which also on the island, which has been suppressed by the Aztecs about 50 years before the Spanish arrive, it's been embraced into the city. But at Tlatelolco, they have another temple precinct and they have an enormous marketplace that Cortes estimates 60,000 people a day pass through. It is vast. When you think that the population of Seville is about 60,000 people at that time, it gives you a sense of how huge it is. And it's also a really interesting city in that only nobles are allowed houses above one story. So the ceremonial centres would have really towered over the city, made what's happening in those centres which we're going to talk about really visible. There are craftspeople, warriors, priests, commoners. We can talk about social structure if you like, but to give a feel for it, it's a very busy city and it's also in some ways quite a cosmopolitan city because people come from all over the empire to this capital. And Tenochtitlan is much larger than any of the other cities in the region.
- [19:19]
D
I think what's interesting, and you just hinted at some of that structural element in sighting, we will touch on that again in a second, just to give people an idea of society is ordered and ruled. But before we go on to that more everyday, tangible idea, you mentioned Venice, and so I just want to plant this as well. So if you went to VENICE in the 16th century, you would find that a lot of that society, a lot of that kind of geopolitical idea that's happening there is centering around a belief system, Catholicism, in that case, where masses are happening in certain places at certain times, the movement of people is being sometimes borne out by what's happening in terms of those Catholic practices. People are having days off because of Catholic beliefs. So in some ways, belief very much shapes the way that somewhere like Venice works. So let's go and talk about the Aztec peoples then, and how their belief systems are shaping that city that you described. What is the belief system? That's the motor behind the city here.
- [20:24]
E
So the most famous part of the belief system is the centralized cult, the centralized belief, which is exemplified by the great temple which has been excavated in Mexico City, what we call the Templo Mayor, what they would have called the Hue Teocalli, which also just means great house of Teo, which is kind of divine power, basically. So great temple is a literal translation, and this is a huge pyramid that actually has two temples on the top of it. And one temple is Tehuitzlipochtli, who is God of war, God of the sun, and is also the Aztecs patron God. And it seems like they have elevated him to a place of primacy in what is a huge proliferation. They've got an enormous pantheon of gods, and Huitzilopochtli isn't especially important until the Aztec Mexica settle at Tenochtitlan, and then they kind of elevate him as their patron God. And then the other temple on the pyramid is to an old God, which is Tlaloc, who's God of rain, God of fertility. So you have the two bases, essentially, of the economy of the empire, which are warfare for tribute, and then rain and fertility for agriculture, just epitomised at the center. And these are just the two most prominent gods in this enormous pantheon. So gods represent everything. They represent childbirth and alcoholic drink and maize, and they're everywhere. And divine power is believed to be in everything and around everyone, all the time. In particular, they believe that you need to keep the world in balance, that there is a thing called tlat soli, which is often translated, translated as sin, and that's how the Spanish translate it. But it actually means more like filth or dirt or stuff out of place. And you need some of that force that is in the world everywhere for things like childbirth and fertility and warfare. But if you have too much, the world tips over into chaos and disorder. So women in particular, are tasked with kind of keeping the world in balance. That's why they do a lot of sweeping. It's to do with ritual acts that keep the world. So you sweep away the excess Tlatzoli, and you keep the world in balance. But of course, to the outsider, from our worldview, it feels like women are just being given a domestic role, but it's actually a big spiritual role. So what you have is. It's hard to explain because there are so many aspects to the religion. I'm trying to work out which avenue to go down, really. All of them.
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D
Let's go.
- [22:51]
E
And of course, as a gender historian, I'm like, let's talk about women. And one of the fascinating things about it is that women are sort of to control the domestic space, which includes the city, which is almost a spiritual battlefield. Things that they do there impact what will happen on the real physical battlefield to men. So if you allow your tamales, which is like these little dumplings, to stick to the pot, then your husband's arrow will miss the mark on the battlefield, for example. And women do all these rituals while men are away at war. But most of what we see in the sources as religious practice is by men. We've had to dig a lot more to find women as historians. So you have male, male priests, there are priestesses, but they're not elite priests. And the male priests conduct a round of festivals that is 18 equivalent of months. And it's a regular round of festivals, just like in the Catholic Church that structure people's annual cycle, it structures their lives. You get days off, you get to go to the temple and have an enjoyable festival. You get to have family events as a result of these festivals. And of course human sacrifice, which we'll talk about, is part of many of these. But there are also animal sacrifices, there's dancing, there's dressing up, there's drinking. There are lots of different kinds of kind of mock battles and sports and festivals that it's all very ordered, but also an enormous amount of fun and entertainment. Much like in the Catholic Church at certain times. Some parts are very solemn, some parts are very vigorous and enjoyable. And that goes on regularly throughout the year. And every, every district has a calpuli, which is kind of a community as well as a district has its own temple and they have their regular round of festivals as well. Like your local church. There's a central temple and then there are local temples. And then there's a whole other layer of priestly figures who often get forgotten about, who are usually called soothsayers in English. Who are the people who you go to to get them to read the days and tell you whether it's an auspicious day to name your baby or to plant your crop. And those of the priest that most people actually have a more day to day relationship with, they're called the clamatinime, which means more like the readers of days. And they're the layer of priestly activity that probably most people have contact with on a day to day basis.
- [25:13]
D
But is, is quite every day. And it's, it's, it's not a special thing. It's not. You know, I'm thinking, okay, we're skipping forward a little bit to say 18th century England where people are, I, I dread to, to use the comparison, but where people are consulting fortune tellers as, as they would call them in England. But it's not a daily practice. But this sounds like it's far more inter daily life then.
- [25:33]
E
Yeah, the Aztec calendar underlies everything. So people will have heard Maybe about the Maya calendar in 2012 and people believing it was going to be the end of the world. The Maya didn't believe it would be the end of the world. What they believed was that all the different cycles, which like the Aztecs, they had all these different cycles, all the cycles would come to an end at the same moment. Which meant that the world might end at that moment or it might end the next time. All the cycles come or the next time or 100 times.
- [25:59]
D
It's like what, every 52 years in
- [26:01]
E
the Aztec calendar, it's every 52 years. And this is a special moment when there's a great fear that the world might come to an end. And there are huge ceremonies on the top of the. So that people put out all of the fires, they supposedly break all their pots, they fast, they abstain from sex, they stay in their houses. And at the end of the days, the elite priests light a fire in the chest of a sacrificial victim on top of a mountain. And then priests carry that fire everywhere.
- [26:32]
D
Wow.
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E
To light all these different people's houses. And of course it's a great state power spectacle as well as a great religious spectacle because the Tanakha are controlling this, the priests are. Everybody's looking to this one place telling you what you can do at that moment. But it, but the calendar is also very much something that underlies people's day to day life. Your name is taken from your first, so you have a familiar name like sister or weaver, but your official name comes from your birth date, which would be a name like one reed or one flint or two house.
- [27:04]
D
Wow, I didn't know that. That's fascinating.
- [27:07]
E
And so the date you're born on is believed to destine the kind of fate that you'll have. You can actually go on the Internet if you look up Aztec calendar, you can put in your date of birth and find out what your date name would have been.
- [27:18]
D
I mean, I'm literally going to do
- [27:19]
E
that after this and what your fate would have been. But they are quite fatalistic, but they're not completely bound by the fate. So for example, you're supposed to name your child, have a ceremony four days after the birth. But people might nudge that forwards or backwards a little. Like we know that the last of the binding of years, festivals which were at the end of the 52 year cycle, the Aztecs, it was supposed to fall on an inauspicious year. And so the Aztecs nudged it forward a year and just didn't tell anybody.
- [27:48]
D
We'll leave us who'll know?
- [27:49]
E
It'll be fine.
- [27:50]
D
And I love that. That's like, despite the fact we're talking about, you know, we're talking about these big concepts of belief and how this is structuring societies, and at the very heart of it, then you have these really human things, of course, going. I'm not free on Wednesday. No, we're not doing that one.
- [28:04]
E
Yes, exactly.
- [28:04]
D
I love it.
- [28:19]
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- [29:20]
B
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- [29:50]
E
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [29:51]
B
Sure.
- [29:52]
C
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- [29:54]
E
Was she brave?
- [29:55]
C
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- [30:02]
E
Did you have to find a dragon?
- [30:03]
C
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- [30:06]
E
Was it scary?
- [30:08]
C
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [30:10]
E
Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually.
- [30:13]
C
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- [30:32]
D
Now we're going to get to the point that a lot of people will associate with indigenous Aztec cultures, and that is sacrifice. And as I Say, I hope we've managed to communicate that there's an awful lot more going on here. But we mentioned that 52 year cycle.
- [30:46]
E
Can I mention one more thing before we talk about.
- [30:48]
D
Of course, of course. Yeah, go ahead.
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E
I just wanted to mention that because I think the one thing people won't know about Tenochtitlan is how human it is in very recognizable ways and how modern it is in really recognizable ways. So women have far more rights in Aztec culture than they have in contemporaneous European societies. For example, you can't beat your wife, you can get a divorce. Women inherit power and property as well as men do. There are really tangible markers of power. Women represent themselves in court. They're not legal minors. And so we have this society that we think of. Of or that has been stereotyped. I obviously don't think of it like that, but that's been stereotyped as this very barbaric, backward, savage culture, but actually in many ways is more recognizable to us than contemporaneous European societies.
- [31:36]
D
How common is something like divorce?
- [31:38]
E
Not very common. It is discouraged. But in the event that it happens, they rich families drop contracts before marriages so that they can separate property after divorce. All of those were destroyed by the Spanish. So we don't have any of those contracts. We know they existed. And fascinatingly, men take the male children and women take the female children if there's a divorce. Because gender roles are very strictly defined, but it means that women are then alleviated of the sole burden of child care. Men are expected to do a lot of child care as well.
- [32:07]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:08]
E
And so that. And they also are quite. Although they have very strict punishments for children, they're also very family oriented. There are these wonderful speeches that took place before, these kind of ritual speeches that we have records of from after the Spanish invasion. There's one that is given when a woman finds out she's pregnant. And it. It talks about how they might lose the baby. And they have to accept that, but it might be really exciting and maybe he'll look like the dad. And it's really familiar and human. And so that familiarity of it, despite that really alienating sense of sacrifice which we're going to talk about, is something I think it's really important for people to know about.
- [32:48]
D
Yeah. And I think one of the things I suppose to bear in mind as well is they don't owe us familiarity. They can do whatever they want to do.
- [32:57]
E
Absolutely.
- [32:58]
D
It is when we have been conditioned to look at these histories because of conquest and because of empire in terms of a progress narrative, and that these people are way down the scale on the progress thing. But actually what you're highlighting is that that is absolutely not the case, that there are things that we would definitely identify as societal progress, however you want to couch that, or however you want to define the boundaries of that going on in. In Aztec culture, which is so, again, one of those things. I think there's so much here, which is why, again, I know I keep saying it, but your book is so useful in that it highlights that we've been fed a narrative that's really been quite successful and sticking in terms of the Spanish conquerors. Yeah. And so we need to do a little bit more work in trying to unpack that. And it does feed into what we're gonna talk about now, which is sacrifice. And I hope we've managed to show that sacrifice is part of what human sacrifice is part of, a much broader, vibrant, lively, cultured, progressive, enlightened, intellectual, learned society. But this was also historically part of what was. Was happening there. And again, bear hanging, drawing and quartering in mind, because, you know, this is not that foreign a concept. We've come to this idea of sacrifice, then, and before we get into the different mechanics of what that might have looked like, why are sacrifices being carried out in this way?
- [34:27]
E
Of course, this is something historians have argued about a lot, and many historians would say that it's either a terror tactic of the neighbours, it's to frighten your neighbors, that it's a political strategy to keep the ordinary people in line. There has been a really widely debunked theory that it was to create protein because they didn't have enough protein and it was for cannibalism. But it really isn't supported by the evidence. I'm not sure why I mentioned it, in a way.
- [34:57]
D
Well, I'm glad you did, but I think we can dismiss even. My instinct, being not an expert on this, is to dismiss that as well.
- [35:03]
E
Yes. I mean, it was part of a moment when historians were trying to find rational explanations for sacrifice. So it almost comes out of a good place.
- [35:10]
D
Sure, sure, sure.
- [35:11]
E
But it assumes that it's not rational to do something for religious reasons. And where I come from as a cultural historian, is that while political motivations may well have affected exactly when the Aztecs did sacrifice, or on what scale, or played into some of the aspects of this, it was also completely logical to them to do things for religious reasons.
- [35:31]
D
Absolutely.
- [35:32]
E
And fundamentally, all of this is about the creation myth in Aztec creation myths and There are many of them because we have all these different sources, of course, that are complicated by the Spanish perspective. But almost every Aztec creation myth includes aspects of sacrifice in it. The Aztecs believe that we're living in what's called the fifth sun, the fifth age. So the universe has been destroyed and recreated over again. And each time the universe is recreated, they have to get a new race of humans. And the current generation of humans was created with the bones of a man and a woman from a previous incarnation. So what happens is that Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent God, goes to Mictlan, the land of the dead, dead under the disc of the Earth, where he steals the bones of a man and a woman from a previous era. Now, while he's escaping from the lord of the land of the dead, he drops the bones and they get broken and mixed up together, which, for me, as a gender historian, is really interesting, because we've got none of this creation from the rib of Adam stuff, man and woman from the same stuff. And he takes them to the realm of the gods, where a goddess called Siwakoat, the woman snake, grinds them up on. On a grinding stone. It's a really female act. And then the male gods let blood from their penises, moisten this dough, and they literally create little human figures. Oh, wow. So the gods let blood from themselves to create humanity. And so what you have is what's often called the blood debt, the idea that the gods gave blood to create humanity, and so humans have to give blood in exchange. And there are so many other myths that include sacrifice, the creation of the sun. You have these two gods. A poor God, Nanawatzin, who supposedly has sores and things on him, and a rich God, Tekistikat. And the gods create this big bonfire, and Tekistikat, as the rich God, is given the first opportunity to jump into the fire and become the sun. And he hesitates, and the poor God jumps into the fire and rises as the sun. And this is obviously a metaphor about courage and bravery and so on. The rich God follows him, and we end up with two sons. They supposedly throw a rabbit into the face of the sun, and the second God, so the second sun, so he dims and becomes the moon. But then the sun is just stuck up in the sky and it's too hot. So the gods again sacrifice themselves, let blood from themselves to give it to Eocat, who is the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl, to push the sun across the sky. Sky, even the earth itself is supposed to come from Tlaltecuhtli, who is this earth goddess being ripped into pieces to create the earth and the sky. So this sacrificing of gods, of themselves, of their blood, lies at the root of the idea that then humans have to sacrifice, have to give blood to keep the sun moving, to keep the world going, and that the world might come to an end if they don't.
- [38:37]
D
And if you're thinking and listening to this or watching this on YouTube and you're thinking, wow, that's so fantastical, I will remind you that a serpent speak to a woman in Christian lore and offers apples. I. I will remind you that the godhead sacrifices his son to human beings. So, you know, again, I mean, there's
- [38:57]
E
this incredible bit of historiography. Someone says, well, what if a thousand years from now, someone just looked at Christian texts and the iconography in churches with Christ on the cross bloodied and reads that people drank blood and ate body in church with no conte? Might you not assume that actually they were eating humans and sacrificing humans?
- [39:21]
D
Well, technically, that's what we're. Well, as Catholic, I was raised Catholic. Not anymore. I thank my blessings. But we are told that we are eating flesh. It is the true flesh. It is the true blood. And that's one of the things that differentiates Catholics. Right. So these things are not as out there as you might be led to believe by initially the Spanish and then the centuries of propaganda otherwise. This is one of the learning curves for me when I was looking at this very, very briefly. Obviously in nowhere near the depths that you have, there wasn't just one type of sacrifice. So you've mentioned that it's about bloodletting, that it's about blood debt. But there were different types of sacrifice. Can you talk us through what those different types look like?
- [40:03]
E
So we have autosacrifice, which is self sacrifice, where people would stick spines or obsidian blades. You would either cut your ears, a very common place to cut, or maybe your legs. And if you were very brave and the more painful it is, kind of the more valuable the blood. You might cut your genitals if you're a man. There's one ceremony where a man makes a hole through his penis and they pass string through it. And this is considered to be a very fertile, unsurprisingly kind of blood. And also it's a demonstration of masculinity and courage. And, you know, there's all these different things tangled up together. You're sort of showing off your masculinity and priests actually, when they, the Spanish arrived, they were really struck because the priests had enormous amounts of hair all matted with blood. Because they would regularly sacrifice themselves, cut their own ears and things. And because blood is sacred, they can't wash it out. So it just collects and then moss grows on it.
- [41:02]
D
Stop it.
- [41:03]
E
So they're filthy and covered. And because they also paint black, so they're very visible, visible in the city. And this is a culture that thinks the Spanish are really dirty because they don't wash. These people take regular baths, steam baths and. But priests are very marked out by how covered with crusted blood they are. And what happens if you have, you know, things that grow on it. So auto sacrifice is practiced by most adults. It's required of adult men. Most adult women seem to do it as well. Priests do it a lot.
- [41:35]
D
One of the shocking things here, and I know this is again really basic, and it sounds like almost the Aztec question, where does the name come from? I would have assumed sacrifice meant death, but it does not. It just means giving, sacrificing one's blood. In some cases, yes.
- [41:51]
E
And the Aztecs actually don't have a direct word for sacrifice. The closest equivalent seems to mean something like debt paying or gift giving. Some people have translated it like that as being a better term. So they don't think in terms of sacrifice. Sacrifice as a single thing. It's to do with the, the giving of blood or the paying of the debt, where we have lumped it into this European kind of concept because that's how the Spanish translate it, sacrificio humano. You know, it. It's become part of a European way of thinking. And actually there is a shared way of thinking about it that cuts across other cultures, like the Egyptians or Korean or Japanese cultures or in the Bible. There's mention of people sacrificing their children. And there are to think about that giving of human life to the gods, that you can't think of it in those terms. But some of my colleagues say we shouldn't talk about sacrifice at all. We should call these delayed deaths in war. And that's a bet, when we do get to sacrifice that it's a better way of thinking about it. You take captives. Because of course, the other major form of human sacrifice is people who are executed in ritual ways. And most of those people are captives from other cities during warfare. Mostly adult men, but also women and children. Mostly adult men, young. So the excavations suggest about 75%, maybe adult, young adult men. Now, some of my colleagues in Particular Liz Graham at UCL would say that we should stop talking about sacrifice and simply say these are delayed war deaths.
- [43:25]
D
Okay?
- [43:25]
E
And that's a better way of making sense of it that you might have been killed on the battlefield in another culture. In this culture, you're taken to the temple and you're killed there. And. And it's no different. I don't disagree with many of the things she says, which are that we need to think about this in a totally different way. Not within European ways of thinking, but I do think there's something about. Distinctive about the religious aspect that means we should conceptualize it not purely as a war death.
- [43:51]
D
Let's stick with this human sacrifice because I think it's. It's what a lot of people will be intrigued by. I'm gonna. I'm gonna come back to you. Obviously you are the expert on this, but I have an image here, and often, and after dark, we will go in a little bit blind, describe what we're seeing, and then get the actual experts to see where we're differentiating from what's actually going on here. So I have this. I mean, it's a really interesting image in front of me. And from what I understand, this is created by indigenous peoples, but it is on parchment supplied by Spanish colonists. And what we have is steps up to what looked like a temple. And all around the top of the temple is. Is. It's very difficult to see what they are, but it looks to my eye like maybe a dragon. I see wings. I see some kind of a serpent creature in between the wings. Then we have this man who has a cloth on his head. He's wearing some garment over him, and he has a tool which is impaling into a man's chest. He's at the top of the steps leading up to this temple. There is blood, it seems to me, on both sides of the entrance to the temple. Actually, there is blood now pouring down the steps of the temple. And it seems that there's blood on two pillars either side as well. We have probably, I'm guessing, priests. There's 1, 2, 3, 4. I think there's something about four priests that are. Now, this is the same body that has been, I think, that has been thrown down the stairs. But the most striking thing I'm going to hand over to Carolyn because we'll get the experts insight on this. But the most striking thing there is what I think is a heart kind of held aloft or raised certainly above the whole thing. So this is the heart of the human Sacrifice. I am imagining. Right. Caroline, how badly did I do? And what is in there? What did I miss?
- [45:47]
E
No, that was pretty good. This is a famous image of sacrifice from the Codex Maglibeciano, which is mid 16th century, but it's part of a group of codices, including things like the Codex Tudela, which have very similar images. And we think they're all from copied versions from a slightly earlier source. And it does seem to pretty accurately represent indigenous forms of art, though it's becoming Europeanized because they're slightly in 3D, where indigenous art forms would have very much been in profile. And you can see that the 3D ness is starting to affect this image a little bit. It is very much an image of heart excision. It seems to be from a codex where they've asked the indigenous artists to represent these things in order to accompany a text. And there are only two priests in the image, and they're the people painting in black. And you can always. But in reality, you would probably have had five or either six priests, depending on which source you believe in. The man is stretched backwards over what is an altar.
- [46:46]
D
Yes.
- [46:46]
E
When we think of an altar, we think kind of a big table. Right. But it's actually more like a pointy stone because you want to be able to raise the chest cavity up, which is done by four priests pulling down on the arms and legs of the person. Oh.
- [46:59]
D
And that's what this priest is doing. He's pulling down on the legs. I see.
- [47:02]
E
And so it's actually in some ways a really accurate image. Image. It's not by any means to scale if anybody looks it up, and it
- [47:09]
D
only put it on my social.
- [47:11]
E
But it very much has a lot of accurate aspects in it. So one priest is removing the heart with an obsidian knife.
- [47:18]
D
Yeah.
- [47:18]
E
Obsidian is actually the sharpest material in. In the world when it's. It's one of the few that can be shaved down to a single atom point sharper than a scalpel.
- [47:30]
D
Whoa.
- [47:30]
E
But it shattered matters too easily, which is why it doesn't do so well against steel. But it's very, very sharp. And the heart, as you say, is represented kind of top left. And it's as if it's being. It's going to the heavens is, I think, what's being shown. Some of the really amazing things about this image are that you see in the bottom left there a man taking the body away. And that is what actually happened in many of the sacrifices, because after being captured in war, a captive would live in the district of his captor. And the captor would be look after his welfare. There's quite a close bond between captor and captive because it may be that the captor would go to another city and be sacrificed there if he himself is defeated in war. The Florentine Codex talks about this ritual where they're set up metaphorically as the father and son. So the captor says, you are as my beloved son, and the captive says, you are my beloved father. And it bonds them and the courage of the captive mirrors onto to the warrior captive. They're entangled. But that ceremony takes place in the home, and so does the ceremony that happens afterwards when they take the body away to the home. And you can see in the bottom right there, there's a woman. And you don't see women in images of sacrifice very much. So I love this image because you actually see that women would have been witnessing it, and women would have been part of the ceremony that took place when the captive's body was taken back to the home. This is not in every case, but it's in certain kind of warrior ceremonies. And they would. Then you'd take the best bit, which is the thigh, which is supposedly sent to the emperor or to the tlattuani, the ruler. And the family and friends of the captive would consume a small part of the body in ceremonial cannibalism.
- [49:15]
D
Okay.
- [49:16]
E
But the captor stands apart, and he's dressed in white, and he gives honor to the captive, to his metaphorical son. And he's also sort of reminding his family that this could happen to him because he's going to go off to war. And might be because this isn't only practiced in t land. It's practiced in the cities around.
- [49:32]
D
Yes, yes, It's.
- [49:33]
E
It's a regional practice. The blood on the pillars, they would put blood on the mouths of the gods. They put blood on door frames.
- [49:41]
D
Yeah, we see that.
- [49:41]
E
Yeah. So, yeah, there's an awful lot going on here. That. That represents the reality of sacrifice. The throwing of bodies down the temple steps is incredibly important because it mirrors a mythical history. According to the histories of the ass Aztecs, the first sacrifice, in a way, was Huitzilopochtli defeating his sister Coylzhauki. And there are different versions of this mythical history. In one, she's an actual challenger to Huitzilopochtli during the migration. Huitzilopochtli is a sort of priest ruler figure who's leading the Aztecs. Cuyolxauqui, his sister, rises up against him, leads a challenge and he kills her. In the more religious version of the myth, his mother is sweeping on a mountain called Snake Mountain Coatepec, and a ball of feathers falls from the sky and she becomes miraculously pregnant and annoyed by her mother's shameful pregnancy. Coylxauki and the 400 gods of the southern stars, who are her brothers, come to kill her. And Huitzilopochtli is born, fully formed, conveniently and in warrior array from his mother. And he defeats Koyolzhauki and he cuts her into pieces and throws her down the mountain. And that is mirrored over and over again on the temple of Mayor, on the Great Temple. Because what they do is they throw the body down the temple and they decapitate the body. And it's a. And then at the bottom we know of the temple was an enormous monolith called now called the Koyoshalki Monolith, which shows her cut into pieces. And the bodies would have been falling near to that monolith. So it's a really deliberate. It's a mytho historical landscape. They're replaying these important histories over and over again on the Temple Mount. And I guess one thing I would want to say something that is often forgotten is that people would have understood these stories and they would have understood why all these things were happening. And the reason we know that is they are the only non Muslim pre modern culture I know of to have a universal education system. Ah yes, boys and girls went to school, boys more than girls. There were two. There was a priestly school and warrior school for boys. But then the Kwik Kakali, the House of Song, all teen boys and girls would go there. They would learn religion, rhetoric, the ritual speeches. They would learn about the histories. They would learn about proper behavior, all these kinds of things. And so to take the Catholic comparison, it's not like in a Catholic church where the fact everything's happening in Latin and you're not quite sure what's going on is part of the point. The mystery isn't part of the point. People are supposed to know why all this is going on. So good, so good, so good.
- [52:30]
G
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- [52:58]
H
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- [53:25]
G
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
- [53:40]
D
How does that inform ideas of authority? How is this playing into. Because if I understand correctly, and again, as ever, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the reasons for this blood sacrifice, for this blood debt is we Talked about this 52 year cycle and it feeds into that idea that when that 52 years is up, it's part of different processes that feed into that that go, we've done everything we can to make sure that we go again into another 52 years. Is that more or less correct?
- [54:06]
E
So you can keep everything going up to 52 years. I think at the end of 52 years, it's kind of out of your hands whether it carries on to the
- [54:13]
D
next one, if that makes sense.
- [54:14]
E
Yes, yes, yes.
- [54:15]
D
So it's up to the gods, right, if we go again.
- [54:18]
E
But you kind of, you have to keep doing it every morning. They believe the sun may not rise if they haven't given it the energy.
- [54:23]
D
Yeah. So this is all feeding into this idea. But are people invited to see this? So you're saying they're understanding it, but are they turning up to this? Or is this happening behind closed doors? Or is it supposed to be public so that there's an element of. It's not like an execution, because execution is supposed to put you off doing that action. But they were public for a reason. Are these things public for similar ish reasons or linked reasons?
- [54:48]
E
Sacrifice is very, very public in most cases. So there are some that take place outside of the city, but the majority of sacrifices take place on the top of the temple. And remember that it's a very crowded city. People are invited to the temple precinct to witness the sacrifices. And also only noble houses are above two stories, so it's very, very visible from all the city. So yeah, the publicity of it is exactly the point. And I'm a cultural historian, so I come from the point of view that we should be asking ourselves, why did people say they were doing the things they were doing? You know, that's what I'm interested in. What what is it they think's happening? But another historian might say that this is indoctrination, that all that education is indoctrination.
- [55:29]
D
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [55:29]
E
That you're being trained to do as you're told, to be part of this war machine. That was very much the way that Aztec society worked. And it's. Tenochtitlan is very organized, very cooperative, structured culture in which warfare is absolutely vital to the way they see themselves and the way they project themselves to other people and the way that the elite project themselves to commoners.
- [55:52]
D
Yeah. One of the things. Talking about projections, my mind goes straight to numbers. How regular is this? Because I know this is where we talked at the very top of the episode about sources. And this is one of the places where things get a bit murky, if I'm not mistaken, because the number numbers vary quite a bit, don't they, in terms of how often this is happening?
- [56:14]
E
Yes, we know that it's happening all the time. Well, not every day, but on a regular round of festivals. These 18 bay antennas, which we translate as months, and that each of those has aspects of human sacrifice within it. I. A number of years ago, in an article which people can get online, I think it's called mass murder or religious sacrifice, something like that. But it is free anyway. But I kind of. I'm hesitant to recommend it because the framing was part of a lingerie project about violence in Latin America. And then it ended up being by itself. And it kind of doesn't. The framing doesn't make sense. But the big part of what I do in it is to try and calculate how many sacrifices there were.
- [56:53]
D
Oh, okay.
- [56:54]
E
And the reality is that we have absolutely no clue and that the numbers lead us to somewhere between 1,000 or 20,000 annually, which is either compared to Europe at that time, not very many, or quite a lot when you think of it in terms of whether it's a violent place.
- [57:13]
D
Sure.
- [57:14]
E
So people have tried to calculate this number. 20,000 is a number that comes up a lot, but that is a number that seems to have been plucked out of the air, as far as anybody can tell, by the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Samaraga. And then other people take it and they claim 20,000 children are killed and that. That goes down that route. 80,400 is a number that is given for how many people were killed during the rededication of the temple in 1487.
- [57:42]
D
18,400.
- [57:43]
E
But people have worked out that it's complet impossible, the kind of infrastructure you would need to sacrifice 80,000 people is totally impossible. What we do know is that at that event it clearly made a massive impression in people's minds and it was far more than usual. So the likelihood is that you probably have a few hundred to a few thousand annually usually and that at these enormous events, numbers for that have, that could be a practical. Have varied between. Between like around 11,000 and 20,000. And it certainly made a massive impression in people's minds. Although Camilla Townsend, whose book Fifth Son People might have come across, which is in Waters and places, very good book. She also has a book called Aztec Myths, a nice small book that came out recently and is a really good book. But one of the things she argues in that is that the Aztecs are victims of their own propaganda, that they tell these stories of themselves as this terrifying warlike culture and then other people believe it and then they perpetuate it after.
- [58:48]
D
Okay, that makes sense.
- [58:49]
E
After colonization.
- [58:50]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [58:51]
E
So the problem is we don't. We know it's a regular ritual that people would have been very exposed to it, but in terms of the numbers. Yeah, we really don't know.
- [59:01]
D
Again, you're gonna have to correct me here if I've picked something up along the years that's totally inaccurate, but was there an archaeological discovery relatively recently of pillars of skulls that would have been something linked to temples and there. How out of line am I here? But I remember something about like a round structure and there's mortar in it. I think holding the skulls together was that feeding into this idea of human sacrifice.
- [59:29]
E
What you're thinking of is the discovery of the Tsompantli, the skull rack at the Templar Mayor dig. It was an enormous discovery and for a long time actually people had said if there was all this human sacrifice, where are all the remains going? But this shock showed that there is relatively large scale sacrifice. But the archaeology certainly doesn't bear out anything like the numbers that anybody said. But given that cremation was a common way of disposing of remains, it doesn't get us very far to say there are no bones because if you're cremating them or there aren't going to be. What they did find though, and this was in a dig that went on from 2015. And then I think the big findings were announced in maybe 2018, 2019, was an enormous skull rack which is about the size of a basketball court, they estimated, and about 4 or 5 meters high. And. And this would have had wooden poles with skulls stuck on them essentially all the way across conquistadors describe seeing these enormous skull racks. And then I think it's what you're thinking of. It had towers at either end, that skulls were stuck into the mortar. And this is where they were able to get figures for the kind of proportion of people who were male and female and children that were in sacrifice, because they were able to analyze the skulls and trace the DNA and understand the origins of these sacrifices victims. The coverage of that was very depressing. As someone who tries to illuminate, highlight everything else as set culture, because I work on human sacrifice, I am a historian of violence as well as gender, but it confirms savage stereotype, bloodthirsty. And you think, well, I mean, they found a few thousand skulls at most. I actually think it's only in the hundreds that they've excavated so far. And is it important actually, for us as historians that this confirms many of the things that are said about sacrifice? I think. I think it is because there's been a real argument that archeology doesn't support the practice of sacrifice. And I know that some indigenous scholars, Curly Tlapoyawa, who I have a lot of respect for, for example, would say we shouldn't talk about sacrifice this much because it obscures and leads to the oppression, kind of fuels the oppression and stereotyping of indigenous cultures in unhelpful ways. And my colleague Matthew Restall would say the numbers are far, far smaller than we would say they are. I share their goal, their aspiration that indigenous culture should be better understood, shouldn't be seen as exceptional in terms of their violence, that they shouldn't be dehumanized, that they shouldn't be scapegoated or forgotten or oppressed. But for me, I feel like that we do that by understanding that this is part of a wider worldview that isn't, as we've been talking about, a million miles away from what's happening in Europe at that time, where violence is also very much a part of political and religious practice.
- [62:27]
D
Yeah, it's so easy for us to not make that very simple link sometimes. Can I ask you then, as a way of finishing just to maybe. I'm interested to hear of indigenous scholars saying that maybe we shouldn't talk about sacrifice so much, or then that there's
- [62:42]
E
other people, or even that it's invented
- [62:44]
D
by Europeans, the whole idea at all
- [62:47]
E
that it maybe happened a bit. But basically the Spaniards say this is an enormous sacrificial cult in order to purely justify the conquest.
- [62:56]
D
Do we know, in terms of contemporary reception, to how indigenous People were viewing these sacrificial events, so I can imagine what European reception is, that they're seeing this as barbaric or whatever. And I think we've worked relatively hard today to try and draw comparisons that there are similar things, maybe in different contexts, happening in Europe. So that's a weak argument in itself. But do we have an idea of how it's being viewed by indigenous cultures? Do we know how important this is to them or not important? Do we know how they're structuring their lives around this? I know there's an idea. Again, correct me if I'm wrong and I keep saying this, but I'm very aware that you're the expert, because we know that there is this idea that if you are, as part of the sacrifice, that you are receiving some of the sacrificial victim to take part in the cannibalistic ritual, that that's an honor, it's honorific. Is that the only real way we can see that this is a really important part of their culture to them?
- [64:01]
E
It's really difficult because we can't access people's thoughts and feelings. Even if you today asked someone on the street what they believed, they might not tell you the truth. And then you take a context, a colonial context, where you, if you ask someone what did you believe or they're not going to tell you, oh, I believed in human sacrifice because that's an awful thing to be believed. And they know quite quickly what the Spanish want to hear, what is Christianized. And people adapt very, very quickly. So it's very hard to access people's thoughts and feelings. What we do know, though, is that sacrifice was seen as an honor and it was certainly presented as a great honor. So for most people in the Aztec world, after death, you would go to a place called Mictlan. I mentioned the Land of the Dead, not hell, though that's the Spanish presentation of it, but a sort of dark place under the disk of the earth, which is kind of miserable and damp and wet. And that's where you wait for the end of the world to come. There are only a few ways to avoid that death, though, and one of those is to die in sacrifice or in battle. And if you die as a sacrifice, then you would gain a lot of honour in life, but you also would go to a privileged afterlife where you would first spend four years accompanied, accompanying the sun, and then you would become a butterfly or hummingbird, dancing in the sun, sipping nectar. Living drunk is how it's described. This kind of blissful oblivion One of the fascinating things is that the parallel afterlife goes to women who die in childbirth. They spend four years accompanying the sun, they carry it from the zenith to the setting where warriors carry it from rising to the zenith. And then the women become these incredibly powerful but kind of dark goddesses who live at the crossroads and vest ill will on people and will rise and devour humanity at the end of the fifth age. So men who die and sacrifice become these sort of trivial but very happy animals and women become dark, powerful goddesses. This is a subject for an entirely different podcast.
- [65:59]
D
Yeah, it sounds interesting though.
- [66:00]
E
But the point is that sacrifice gains you an honoured afterlife. So does death in battle. And men are supposed to assume aspire to dying as sacrifices. That's the aspirational death. You're supposed to want to die by the flowered death, by the obsidian knife. In reality, consent is very hard to trace. And the sources suggest that some people went gloriously and other people were dragged kicking and screaming and losing control of their bowels, which is exactly what you'd expect. It's one thing to valorize a glorious death and it's another thing to face it. This is a time when people in Europe are literally saying, I want to go and become a martyr as a missionary. Not just I'll accept if that happens, but I want to be martyred. But I bet not all of them were quite so keen when it happened to them. Yeah, yeah, you know, so. But consent is very, very murky. But it is certainly an idealized death and people would have accepted this as part of the reality of life in a culture and at a time when death was very common. That said, death is not an easy thing for Aztec people. They don't take this lightly. Priests are trained. The closest equivalent I can think of is kind of El military forces trained to perform under very difficult circumstances without questioning the orders they're being given. That's what the training reflects. A boy who goes to become a sacrificial priest, the speeches say is told, this part of your life is over. Don't look back to your family. You were. The temple is your life. Now you're separated from us. It's a different. So these are a very different kind of person. And if at any point you fail during the training, you're shuffled off. You can't become a sacrificial priest. So they don't take it lightly. They don't think it's an easy thing to do. The most prominent death of children doesn't take place in the city. It takes place in the mountains. The sacrifice to the water gods, the Tlalocs, is in the mountains of the lake. It's a very upsetting sacrifice where they pull children's nails out to make them cry. If they're not crying, it's a sympathetic magic to bring the reins. They have to cry. And it is not lost on me that that is the one sacrifice that does not take place where everybody can see it. I see some people can see it, but a majority of the population do not see that. And I think maybe I'm seeing this in a modern way and reading too much into it. But it feels notable to me that the death of children is not so common.
- [68:16]
D
If it's removed and that is the one that is different, then the difference is important, I would imagine. Listen, we're going to have to leave it there. Caroline, you've mentioned so many things. I could have gone on 700 different tangents with this. But before we go and please stretch this to beyond sacrifice, beyond whatever else, if there was one thing that you would say to a general audience, our listeners who are not experts in, in this area, who may never have read a book on this particular topic or these culture, these, these peoples. What was, what is the one myth or, or, or misconception about Indigenous Aztec peoples that you would like to dispel?
- [68:54]
E
What comes to mind? Because of the work that I've been doing lately, which is working with Indigenous American partners, not mostly Nawat, but some Latin American, some from the US and Canada, and with teachers in the UK and as well as with other academics, I've been working, producing resources for schools in the UK And I think the one main thing I would want people to know about Indigenous American cultures is that they are living societies with opinions about their own pasts, with deep knowledge of their own histories, and they often get marginalized. In any of these discussions, you have academics talking to each other and not talking to Indigenous peoples about their own past, not caring that they're there, that they have knowledge keepers and historians of their own, that they have sources of their own, not all of which they may want to share with us, which is completely fine, but that these are living, vibrant, ongoing civilizations that while they were devastated in many cases by colonialism, have adapted and in some cases preserved their traditions or changed their traditions, but that they're still here. Year the Aztecs are not still here, but their descendants, as we said, are still here. The descendants of the there are 6 million Maya people in what was Mesoamerica, Guatemala and the countries around There were hundreds of languages in Mexico before the Spanish invasion. There are now only 63, but that's still a very large number. And each of those groups represents many more different, distinctive living.
- [70:33]
D
I said that was the last question, but I lied. This is my last question. How did you come to this topic? Because it's not the most obvious topic for somebody who's based in Britain and who's British to come across, but it is, I think it's really important that we also, as Western Europeans, put our voices in this, because it's not like our hands are clean of these histories. We've played a very destructive part often in these. So what brought you to this topic?
- [70:57]
E
I have a very boring origin story where I was always really fascinated by history. And I started studying Aztec Mexica history before I went to university. I think, because I was so struck by how modern it was, if I. I'd read things about Assyrians and Egyptians. And then I started reading about indigenous Mexican cultures and. And I was thinking, as we said at the start, this is contemporary with Henry viii. We. We have the meeting of what we consider a modern, or at least early modern European civilization. Civilization with what is often pigeonholed as this kind of ancient civilization. And once I started looking into Aztec culture, I realized that it's so different to what we think that it is. It's so different to the stereotypes. And so I just got hooked and then carried on. But it's not a very grand origin story.
- [71:45]
D
I don't know. I think that's grand enough for me because what it says is it inspires interest. Right? And that's what we're all just hoping for when we come to look at any particular historical topic, that it inspires interest and that you might run with that. And I know for me, me talking to you about this today, which is something that, again, I'm by no means an expert in, but there are so many tangents that I will now be going to look at, not least of all that my birthday name, but all of the other different things. Those goddesses, the women who died in childbirth and how they then come back to gorge people. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. But also this idea of education, that's one of the things that sticks with me very plainly of this egalitarian, let's say, idea that both boys and girls are being educated, that we are given access to knowledge. Knowledge equals power. Sure, we can talk about indoctrination, but I could go on. This could be a whole other podcast. So thank you, Caroline, so much for coming in. If you want to learn more about this, you can look up Caroline's work. And we have I'm giving two books here, one of which you'll get more easily on. Caroline was telling me it's nearly 20 years old and I was like, where is the time going? Because I remember this book, Bonds of Blood, Gender, Life Cycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. And then more recently on Savage How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. Think about that title. It's a really, really clever title. Go and have a look at those if you want to learn more. Caroline, thank you so much for coming on After Dark. Until next time, happy reading and happy listen.
- [73:23]
E
So good, so good, so good.
- [73:25]
G
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G
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