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The largest human sacrifice in history. Aztec bloody festival
During a four-day ceremony in honor of the god Huitzilopochtlie in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed tens of thousands of captives. To this day, however, it is difficult to determine the exact number of victims. Different sources give different numbers of victims.
The Aztecs, who ruled Mexico from 1345 to 1521, were famous for practicing human sacrifice in their religious ceremonies. They believed that sacrifice was necessary to sustain the universe, and that only the gods had the power to keep it alive. To obtain the necessary number of sacrifices, the Aztecs waged so-called “floral wars” (xochiyaoyotl) with surrounding peoples, the purpose of which was to capture captives rather than defeat them.
The largest human sacrifice in history
In 1487, during the reign of Aztec King Ahuitzotl, there was a four-day Aztec Blood Festival and ceremony in honor of the god Huitzilopochtlie. All sources agree that on that day a huge number of captives were sacrificed to the gods on four altars set up on top of the pyramid in Tenochtitlan and 15 at other sacred sites in the city. However, the number of sacrifices offered remains a matter of debate among researchers.
The sacrificial ceremony in Tenochtitlan was very violent. The victims were led to the top of the pyramid, where four priests would stretch them out on a sacrificial stone, and the fifth would plunge an obsidian knife into the chest, remove the beating heart and, in raised hands, present it to a statue of Huitzilopochtlie, the sun god and patron saint of war and the city of Tenochtitlan. The heart was then placed in a stone bowl and burned in front of the statue of the god. The body of the victim was thrown down the steps of the pyramid, after which it was handled by butchers. Three of the four limbs were given to the warrior who captured the captive, and the fourth limb was offered to the king, and the entrails were fed to the animals in the royal zoo.
It is not known exactly how many people died during the 1487 ceremony. Diego Durán reports that it was more than 80,000, while the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada counted 72,344 victims. However, both chroniclers wrote their chronicles many years after the conquistadors arrived in Mexico, which may suggest…
