MEMORANDUM

TO: [Reporter for the Baltimore Sunpaper]

RE: Human Sacrifice -- Then and Now

I have digested the Encyclopedia Britannica* article on the Aztecs subsequent to leaving a message on your machine a couple of days ago. You must know by now I do believe in the "lessons of history".

The article turned out to be more than you want to know. So I have gone through it adding italics for your ease of reference.

Please note the following aspects contained or explained by the article or learned by me in prior research:

1. The guys who wrote the article have a vested interest in "cleaning up" and/or "glorifying" the account of this relatively medieval Mexican history. The guys they work for and their constituency would prefer not to have an extended explanation of what was going down in the period in question. Notice they made the point, "Symbolizing the future Mexico, a Christian cathedral was erected on the stones of Huitzilopochtli's temple."

2. The Aztecs did not sacrifice guys from their own tribe, but recruited guys from other peoples' tribes.

3. Human sacrifice was performed for eminently logical reasons: to guarantee the continuing nature of human existence, to make sure the stars and the moon would come out, to protect against the sun going away for good, to appease the god(s) such that drought, famine, earthquakes and insect blights would not occur for the immediate future.

4. Human sacrifice helped to extend hegemony to neighboring tribes.

5. Human sacrifice was performed at popular approval and consent -- it was a practice taken for granted and thought to be necessary.

6. The Aztec method of performing human sacrifice was to take a sharpened stone and cut the person's heart out while it was still beating. They continued by taking the heart and the blood and mixing it with a potion of peanuts, chocolate, hot peppers and other spices and eating it. (There is still such a thing as "mole poblano" except that they use duck, chicken or turkey parts instead of human hearts.) The Aztecs prided themselves on a high level of (then) modern technology.

7. Human sacrifice in the Aztec world was conducted with a great deal of ceremony and solemnity. Only selected officials were allowed to perform the act.

8. The Aztec strategy of upping the incidence of human sacrifice during bad years paid off. When Cortes and his people walked themselves into Tenochtitlan around 1517, they and only they were the bad news in years. They got to do this only because they had landed at (now) Veracruz at a precise moment of the Aztec calendar (which went in 64 year cycles and which was far more accurate than the European calendars of the day). Cortes and his crew found an estimated 168,000 skulls near the main pyramid which led them to confirm for themselves they were definitely doing this as part of a holy mission.

9. One of the first things Cortes and his pals did was to deface the architecture of the day. This can most clearly be seen at the Zcalo in Mexico City and a rather mosque-like church erected in Cholula, former shrine of Quetzalcoatl, the snake-bird god hearkening back to when they sacrificed snakes and birds. Contrast this back to the New Testament when the first thing Mary and Joseph did after the birth of their child was to sacrifice two doves.

10. Don't overlook the fact that the Aztecs were also masters at developing large and convoluted bureaucracies. "A gigantic bureaucracy, completely dominated by the king, was charged with administering the immense empire and gradually absorbed the old social groups of nobles, knights, and merchants."

It is my observation that certain common threads can be seen with our own gas chamber or lethal injection methods of human sacrifice.

I do, however, strongly advise you again to get in touch with [death candidate] Donald Thomas' attorney. He can go over the entire scenario with Merrie Olde England which most people we know tend to identify with more.

nm
*Reference: Encyclopedia Britannica: [a highly recommended CD-ROM]

• Mexico: History: PRE-COLUMBIAN MEXICO: The Aztecs.