It is difficult to celebrate historical achievements of our ancestors, when we read about them, passages similar to this.
".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …."
"...
Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children.
Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.
…"
But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past...
I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes...
May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?
If you ever visit Chichen Itza, you can see murals depicting their ceremonies. One of them shows how two teams would compete in some kind of sport involving hoops and balls, and the leader of the winning team would be sacrificed.
And everyone involved thought this was awesome, because it was a great honour something something the gods something sacrifice for your people something.
With our modern sensibilities and rationality, it's absolutely mindboggling.
It's really not mindboggling at all, in regards to modern sensibilities. It's still regularly going on today.
It's identical to blowing yourself up to kill infidels (argued as a great honor by those advocating it, you're the chosen one). And it's similar to crashing your plane into a ship as part of the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai, commiting suicide, sacrificing your life to defend the empire and emperor. To be clear, I'm not adding any commentary on the practices, merely noting the historically recent nature of very similar concepts.
One of the most universal tenets of popular religions, and typically most spiritual belief in general, is self-sacrifice.
With these forms of suicide, it's an other-world calling that is meant to be greater than the value of your own life. Modern sensibilities perhaps make it more shocking, however I don't see anything changing about this core concept and its practice in the next century. So long as most religions function on degrees of self-sacrifice, somewhere someone will be taking that to the next step and demanding people sacrifice their lives to some proclaimed higher calling.
I think that such self sacrifice among the Aztecs is very different to the politically and militarily oriented sacrifices you mention.
The former has no reasonable or practical reasoning.
The later - does, as I think any service member will understand. Every mission has some degree of likelihood that one will face death, some are just willing to up the ante to . a much greater level. The belief in some kind of 'special heaven' is not really the motivating force, it just kind of makes it easier to do.
> how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman..., staring into their eyes.
Why would the gender of the victim make the killing easier or harder? The act of ritualistic killing an other human being and pulling out their beating hearth uncomprehendable regardless of what gender the victim is. What ever method the priests used to bring themselves to perform such act its questionable if gender was any factor.
How do you know that the priest was all male? The Aztec had both female and male gods, and Wikipedia talks about male and female priests. The article does not claim that all the priests were male.
How could they? It was just their job. One of my brother's college friends ended up as a USAF bomber pilot in Iraq and over some beers one night he described his job. It sounded much like a video game. On the screen where many small blips and his job was to try to hit the areas where they were most dense.
What did the blips represent? "Each blip was a person."
No indication beyond that. Could have been kids, women, old people. This is a lot different than soldiers shooting other soldiers on a battlefield. These weren't battlefields at all, and no one was (or could have) firing back at him up there at 10,000 feet or whatever....
How the fuck could he perform this?
People can be programmed or convinced to be monsters.
".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …."
"... Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children.
Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.
…"
But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past...
I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes...
May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?