Cin the Aztec Civilization Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Cin the Aztec Civilization - Essay ExampleMuch of what has long thought to be true about the long-lost Aztec empire, including their sacrificial rituals involving washstandnibalistic practices, traces back to the in word formation compiled by a Franciscan monk named Bernardino de Sahagun. Sahaguns work, the Florentine Codex, was a detailed bill of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Aztec people, designed primarily for the purpose of instructing other Christian missionaries in how best to facilitate the conversion of the indigenous tribes to Christianity. It is certainly interesting, of course, if not necessarily in truth ironic that the one of the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism is transubstantiation, or the consumption of bread and wine that has been transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. An argument can therefore be made that the religious conversion of the Aztecs was ignited in part due to their practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism was instructed by Europeans who themselves practiced a form of cannibalism and whose entire religion is based on the necessity of a human sacrifice.Almost everything that is known about Aztec human sacrifices and cannibalistic practices is, therefore, filt... s have been forwarded to endure an alternative to Sahaguns original observations of Aztec rituals that had been distorted following the original publication due to misinterpretations, exaggeration and the natural human desire to simplify actions one has trouble understanding. Although the Aztec acculturation was deemed to be a violent one, the Europeans were themselves no stranger to violence, therefore it was the human sacrifice more than anything else that assaulted their sensibilities. Perhaps s this assault was intensified by the justification and rationale of the natives that it was done in the name of religion.Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of the sun, viewed as the source of all life. The Aztecs believed that this sou rce must be kept moving in position to keep it from disappearing forever into the darkness of night and so to accomplish this (Alves 43). The way to accomplish this task had to do with the belief that the sun needed to be nourished with blood as a result, human sacrifice was a necessary ingredient for prolonging the existence of all humankind. In fact, there is an eschatological atom to the ritual in that the Aztecs believed that appeasing their gods not only ensured life, but also staved off chaos. In most cases, the victim was dressed, painted and ornamented so as to champion the god who was being worshipped and thus it was the god himself who died before his own image and in his own temple, just as all the gods had accepted final stage in the first days for the salvation of the world. And when ritual cannibalism was practiced on certain occasions, it was the gods own flesh that the faithful ate in their bloody chat (Soustelle 98). Therefore, it was probably not necessarily t he idea of consuming a human heart that so perturbed