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So I saw this article today about thendiscovery of a temple in Mexico dedicated to the "flayed lord" Xipe Totec.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/mexico-finds-first-flayed-god-temple-priests-wore-dead-people-n954241

One aspect of worship was reportedly skinning humans and wearing said skins.

Also of note is that depictions of this god have been found in other cultured, including the Aztecs.

So I got to pondering...with the violent and bloody cultures of the past (our present modern day violent and bloody cultures can be discussed elsewhere)....do you think humans actually felt anything akin to a sense of guilt in these societies?

It seems like human life was not as valued as it is in modern society.

Which I find to be a bit of a dichotomy.

On one hand, humanity was not as populous in those times....would it not have made sense to protect human life based on the scarcity of the species?

And yet it seems that killing and death were celebrated and encouraged in some ways.

It is a....curiosity....

Thoughts?

Human life in valued in different ways. In absolute terms, the Nazis murdered and incinerated millions, and a lot of them had no remorse. So it’s not a modern phenomenon to not feel guilt for killing people.

But as for ancient societies, their acceptance of death was quite different. In some cultures it was an honour to be chosen for sacrifice. I could guess that some may believe that being skinned and worn by others for many years afterwards was a form of immortality.

Ancient people’s arent so different from us, only separated by a few thousand years I’m sure they suffered guilt and shame, for things they did wrong like lying and stealing, or wrongfully killing people. But in things like war and human sacrifices, the context is rather different to what we have today. It wasn’t seen as something to be guilty about.

Wonder if I could wear the flayed skin of others and still pass work dress code. After all, they have to allow for turbans and such.

Well, first things first, there may have been less people back then, but humanity certainly wasn't a rare or scarce species. Besides, people back then did not have any idea of how many people there are on the world, especially not in South America where people had little to no awareness of the rest of the world outside of the Americas until said rest of the world showed up in the form of a bunch of pale bearded strangers with an unnatural lust for gold (and carrying a truly frightening arsenal of dangerous diseases).

Secondly, it must be noted that society in the past wasn't more violent, nor were people more cruel. Back then people were flayed to appease the mighty lord Xipe Totec, nowadays people are beheaded with chainsaws to appease the mighty lord Mammon.
People are inherently violent, and have always been capable of astonishing cruelty. The reasons for said violence and cruelty change from culture to culture, but it happens everywhere.

Finally, the question as to whether people back then felt guilt over human sacrifices? That is ultimately impossible to answer, but I would assume not. Generally, in cultures that practice human sacrifice, being chosen as victim is seen as a great honour and noble duty, and the sacrifice was viewed as a necessity to bring about a good harvest (or some other boon from the gods) and therefore food security for the entire population.
In Aztec culture particularly, human sacrifice played a massive role. In Aztec mythology, even the gods had to sacrifice themselves for the sake of keeping the universe running. Therefore, the people were indebted to the gods. The gods gave everything they had to provide life and sustenance for the people, sacrificing things was seen as a way to pay back those debts, and a human sacrifice was the most precious of all. Aztecs also sacrificed parts of themselves, such as a jar of their own blood, a finger or an earlobe or even their genitals. So no, I am pretty certain that the Aztecs did not feel guilt over something they saw as necessary and honourable.

However, from the fact that a human sacrifice was seen as the most valuable type of sacrifice, more valuable than gold or precious objects, we can see that the Aztecs did value human life to a great degree, greater than material wealth. That is not something we can say of many contemporary cultures where it seems that Mammon has replaced any other god as the chief deity and people are killed frequently over a bit money.
Perhaps the Aztecs actually valued human life more than we do.

You need only look at how the rich and powerful today treat the poor and the needy.

Compassion it would seem is not a universal trait.

I always found the aztec beliefs to be a little odd. I can't think of many other belief systems that required the ritual murder of humans for the sun to keep rising in the morning.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
Human life in valued in different ways. In absolute terms, the Nazis murdered and incinerated millions, and a lot of them had no remorse. So it’s not a modern phenomenon to not feel guilt for killing people.

But as for ancient societies, their acceptance of death was quite different. In some cultures it was an honour to be chosen for sacrifice. I could guess that some may believe that being skinned and worn by others for many years afterwards was a form of immortality.

Ancient people’s arent so different from us, only separated by a few thousand years I’m sure they suffered guilt and shame, for things they did wrong like lying and stealing, or wrongfully killing people. But in things like war and human sacrifices, the context is rather different to what we have today. It wasn’t seen as something to be guilty about.

Dehumanisation, the phenomenons name.

Basically if you can relief the conscience of people they are willing to go over graves.
Religion is one way, if you regard it as a ideology, to achieve this, in the case of mesoamerican culture (aztecs, mayans, etc.) fear that the world dies /the gods punish you for lacking sacrifice was a main motivator.

This aspect can however also have positive side effects if we compare suicide rates of catholics vs protestants /reformed.
It seems that the absolvment of sin has positive effects on the mental stability.

Ergo cultural phenomenons aswell as ideology impact what people in a society deem correct to do. In this case we are outsiders that do not have access to their society /culture and therefore judge by our standards.
That is not necessarily wrong but should be remembered.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I always found the aztec beliefs to be a little odd. I can't think of many other belief systems that required the ritual murder of humans for the sun to keep rising in the morning.

It is not only the aztecs that believed in this, alot of mesoamerican cultures had similar / same belive system.

There are a lot of key cultural influences that fundimentally affect the way we think and which ancient humans (along with isolated cutures which seem to be conflated in this thread) would not have.
e.g. the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, monotheism, currency etc.
Even cultures which rejected these types of ideas were exposed to and affected by them, as they in turn exposed us to their ideas and culture due to the exchange between European, Middle Eastern, Asian and African societies from very early on in the history of civilisation.

So yes we would have the common ground all humans share, we love and laugh and eat and poop, but beyond that I think we would have little common ground for discourse otherwise!

 Kroem wrote:
There are a lot of key cultural influences that fundimentally affect the way we think and which ancient humans (along with isolated cutures which seem to be conflated in this thread) would not have.
e.g. the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, monotheism, currency etc.
Even cultures which rejected these types of ideas were exposed to and affected by them, as they in turn exposed us to their ideas and culture due to the exchange between European, Middle Eastern, Asian and African societies from very early on in the history of civilisation.

So yes we would have the common ground all humans share, we love and laugh and eat and poop, but beyond that I think we would have little common ground for discourse otherwise!

Well said. If a contemporary and ancient person from the same geographic region sat down and discussed things I'd imagine each side would think the other insane over what each person valued. I do wonder if a good fart joke would be universal, though. Or maybe slapstick humor?


I read the article about Xipe Totec earlier today too, and one of my first thoughts was how terrifying it must have been to be a religious skeptic in that culture. Modern religious belief and ceremonies puzzle me and they are generally mundane, at least compared to ritual skinning. I cannot imagine how terrifying the prospect of being skinned in honor of gods you don't believe in would actually be.

Don't forget about the Temple to the great god Coca Cola.

An experiment done, possibly a little tongue in cheek, where, if I recall right, they used modern methods to excavate and work out what an old supermarket might have been and concluded it was a site of worship.

Which is a way of saying that archaeology is based on interpretation of evidence, some of which is direct and some of which is by proxy. So rarely do we have a complete picture. This can mean that we get things, really wrong. Or perhaps miss interpret things. I seem to recall a mention somewhere that human sacrifice wasn't as common in the Aztek cultures as one might be led to believe, but its also true that (like many long lasting cultures) our understanding (esp at the casual level) often serves to condense what might be generations of society into what we think of as a single generation. The same happens with things like the Medieval period or even the Roman Empire (which lasted some 500 years and went though vast changes during its lifespan).

What evidence is found could be the result of one generation that might have been abnormal even then; or could be showing generations of belief.


Also because of the nature of preservation we can often miss out on key things that just don't get preserved. For example the question of religious belief and how strict and strongly people did believe in it has been raised above. We can make assumptions and conclusions based on temples and surviving evidence, but its far harder to know what people really thought of at the time. Might be the temples and its peoples directly influenced by it were strong believers, but that your average person wasn't all that enthralled etc... Such things can be very hard to interpret and really understand.



However Ancient humans of that age and people today are not vastly different. We are as capable of great and terrible acts today as we were back then. Heck lets consider something many western people would consider normal - an Autopsy. Cutting into the body of the dead to determine the cause of death; or for services relating to scientific study. Such acts even just back in the early Victorian era (not that long ago) would have been considered monstrous. The stuff of nightmares. Even today there are many societies which consider such acts as desecration and they are us today.

Different cultures have different values; though, as others have mentioned already, the capacity for violence is pretty much a universal trait throughout human history. It's merely sublimated and latent (for the most part) in modern, Western civilization.

Human sacrifice could be seen as an extreme expression of collective interest over that of the individual. In the West, we have thousands of years of philosophical and religious tradition that have led us to value the individual, and how the individual is treated, as the standard of measure in our system of ethics. So, naturally, we find it horrifying when individuals are murdered. A culture that values its collective survival and protection over the self-determination of the individual would not find it quite as hard to justify killing a few individuals if they believed it would serve that mutual interest.

 Overread wrote:
Don't forget about the Temple to the great god Coca Cola.

An experiment done, possibly a little tongue in cheek, where, if I recall right, they used modern methods to excavate and work out what an old supermarket might have been and concluded it was a site of worship.

Which is a way of saying that archaeology is based on interpretation of evidence, some of which is direct and some of which is by proxy.

As archaeology students, we often joke that we just attribute everything we don't immediately understand as "ritual site" or "religious objects".
In a few thousand years, some future archaeologists will dig up one of our Warhammer collections and assume it was a ritual deposition of religious cult statues from the Early Polymer Age.

There is somewhat of a misunderstanding about Mesoamerican human sacrifice rituals. Yes, they did sacrifice a LOT of people. Yes, they did it to captured prisoners. But nobody involved, even the prisoners(prior to any Spaniards getting sacrificed), thought it was wrong. The prisoners for the most part also worshiped the gods they were being sacrificed to. It was an honor.

It wasn't just prisoners either. The participants of the Ball Games they played got sacrificed too, and presumably they weren't being forced to play the games.

Imagine if we sacrificed the captain of the Winning/Losing team of the Super Bowl each year.

 Grey Templar wrote:
There is somewhat of a misunderstanding about Mesoamerican human sacrifice rituals. Yes, they did sacrifice a LOT of people. Yes, they did it to captured prisoners. But nobody involved, even the prisoners(prior to any Spaniards getting sacrificed), thought it was wrong. The prisoners for the most part also worshiped the gods they were being sacrificed to. It was an honor.

It wasn't just prisoners either. The participants of the Ball Games they played got sacrificed too, and presumably they weren't being forced to play the games.

Imagine if we sacrificed the captain of the Winning/Losing team of the Super Bowl each year.

It would be tough to constantly lose all of your best players

It makes you wonder how they attracted new talent

You know though, if you look for it, there are analogs even in the sports analogy. Look at American Football. The average career is 3-6 years, and generally leaves the participant with lifelong injuries, brain damage, or both. Boxers too. We are totally willing to watch 2 amazing specimens of humanity tear each other apart for our amusement. We're humans- we love bloody, dangerous spectacle.

If it brought in 100 bucks a head to fill the seats, you can bet we'd flay someone alive. Heck, we probably do far more painful things (if far less fatal) at tattoo conventions. There are folks that hang themselves from the skin of their back- for fun!

And as far as sacrificing people for their beliefs- think about the people who refuse life saving operations, blood transfusions, or vaccinations. They too, often die horrible deaths thinking they're doing the thing god wants them to.

Early man would find much in common with us.

 Grey Templar wrote:
It makes you wonder how they attracted new talent

Given that it was considered quite the honor to be sacrificed - archaeologists now think that it was the winners of the Ball Game that were sacrificed, after all - it probably wasn't that hard.

People sacrifice themselves for religious beliefs even today. Just look at the jihadists. They don't seem to have any problem attracting new 'sacrifices', even though they don't call them that.

Didn’t Nic Cage and Jon Travolta star in a movie about this?

 Vulcan wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
It makes you wonder how they attracted new talent

Given that it was considered quite the honor to be sacrificed - archaeologists now think that it was the winners of the Ball Game that were sacrificed, after all - it probably wasn't that hard.

People sacrifice themselves for religious beliefs even today. Just look at the jihadists. They don't seem to have any problem attracting new 'sacrifices', even though they don't call them that.

However, considering how fast the allies of the Aztecs turned on them when the spanish showed up it seems that said honor only applied to the validity of their ideology as long no one else could enforce a counter ideology.

Edit: jihadism, especially suicide attacks have to do with the massive, and i mean massive, glorification in the koran for martyerdom. Add that to a relative decentral religion which is missing it's head honcho (you know the Caliph , formlerly held by the ottoman sultanate) and you get these suicidal strategies that are also more of Propaganda then effective tactics.

Not Online!!! wrote:

However, considering how fast the allies of the Aztecs turned on them when the spanish showed up it seems that said honor only applied to the validity of their ideology as long no one else could enforce a counter ideology.

Don't forget when Spanish show up the Aztecs are dealing with some massive problems. First up there was a major drought that crippled a lot of their farming and led to widespread starvation. Then you've got the fact that the Spanish have a massive technological advantage through guns. That's both moral and weapon wise a very big element.

Then you've got the biggest issue - disease*. Just like the Native Americans, the Aztecs had no natural immunities to many of the diseases brought to the new world. So they died. In vast numbers that I think we are only now coming to really realise. Those dead civilizations were only dead because disease spread through them like wildfire through dry grass.

note - I accept that my understanding on this is at the casual end of things and not highly detailed/likely to be highly accurate.

* from my understanding the high death rate is because many of the diseases that were the most damaging came from generations of close contact and raising of livestock which resulted in diseases jumping the species gap and winding up in the wrong host species.

 Overread wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

However, considering how fast the allies of the Aztecs turned on them when the spanish showed up it seems that said honor only applied to the validity of their ideology as long no one else could enforce a counter ideology.

Don't forget when Spanish show up the Aztecs are dealing with some massive problems. First up there was a major drought that crippled a lot of their farming and led to widespread starvation. Then you've got the fact that the Spanish have a massive technological advantage through guns. That's both moral and weapon wise a very big element.

Then you've got the biggest issue - disease*. Just like the Native Americans, the Aztecs had no natural immunities to many of the diseases brought to the new world. So they died. In vast numbers that I think we are only now coming to really realise. Those dead civilizations were only dead because disease spread through them like wildfire through dry grass.

note - I accept that my understanding on this is at the casual end of things and not highly detailed/likely to be highly accurate.

* from my understanding the high death rate is because many of the diseases that were the most damaging came from generations of close contact and raising of livestock which resulted in diseases jumping the species gap and winding up in the wrong host species.

Diseases were also a keyfactor, but to my knowledge the Mayans got wiped out indeed by a drought. Another point is that the increased trade in europe with the rest of the world, always meant that diseases in Eurasia and Africa spread around more easily, leading to a somewhat larger pool of resistances for Europeans, didn't help us though when the plague hit like a train. To my knowledge however Syphiliis is what the Native americans were more resistant to, well their strain of deadly syphilis unlike europeans.

Basically it goes both ways, we just "got lucky " in europe that we allready had trade connections all over the place so that we had more resistances in our population.

However, and that is important to mention, the Aztec religion/ideology only prospered so long they were the ones with the bigger Sticks and were more or less unopposed, as in there was no rival ideology until the spanish show up.

Someone could have invented a rival ideology, though, and didn't.

The Aztec Empire was only the last of a series of meso-American cultures which had similar religions and religious practices. Their contemporaries and rivals had very similar religions too.

Who knows if Christianity would have succeeded in supplanting the native religion if it was not rigorously enforced at the point of the pike and musket?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Someone could have invented a rival ideology, though, and didn't.

The Aztec Empire was only the last of a series of meso-American cultures which had similar religions and religious practices. Their contemporaries and rivals had very similar religions too.

Who knows if Christianity would have succeeded in supplanting the native religion if it was not rigorously enforced at the point of the pike and musket?

That's my point, softpower requires either a bigger stick behind it or needs to be usefull for big parts of society.
Also christianity is wrong catholicism is correct.

Don't forget that in europe differing ideologies of religious nature tried to Stab, shoot and butcher the living gak out of each other in a series of conflicts including the thirty years war.

Apparently the Saxons were brought to Christianity by persuasion, not by the sword.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently the Saxons were brought to Christianity by persuasion, not by the sword.

Yes because the leading elite stood to benefit from it.

And another counter exemple is the teutonic order, invited by the polish king to convert the lithuanians, by force. Both the Catholic church and the Polish king stood to profit. the lithaunians, ehh not so much.
( ofcourse those that chose to willingly convert stood to profit massively)

Ideology/ religion are usefull tools for controll of the masses, always were.
Not to say that you can't persuade someone by your beliefs, but belief turned into mass phenomen (religion/ideology) is a controll instrument ever since the first human societies.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently the Saxons were brought to Christianity by persuasion, not by the sword.

Yes because the leading elite stood to benefit from it.

...

How did the elite stand to benefit from it?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently the Saxons were brought to Christianity by persuasion, not by the sword.

Yes because the leading elite stood to benefit from it.

...

How did the elite stand to benefit from it?

Feudalism.

Edit:
Additionally the saxons were not converted peacefull.

The Franks destroyed their religious sites.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Power, needs legitimation.
legitimation is achieved via softpower, (ideology, religion, cultural benefits, trade, etc.)

Tribal leadership, revolving around a pollythestic religion is more difficult to defend then monothestic.

F:E. it wasn't uncommon for these germanic kings to claim ancestry to a god, one of many, they could however easily be challanged by someone else with another "noble ancestry"

1 god solves these issues, not to mention that christianity had a advantage via it's organisational structure.

It's worth pointing out that guns were not that advantageous over traditional weapons until the effective implementation of breech loading rifles in the second half of the 19th century,.
In fact this was an amazing time for firearms where guns changed from smoothbore muzzle-loading muskets to magazine fed repeating rifles in the space of 50 years! ("The African Wars", Chris Peers, 2010)

The main battlefield advantage of the Conquistador armies, at least against the Inca, were steel weapons and armour along with mounted troops (The History of the Conquest of Peru, William H Prescott, 1847).
I've not read much about the Aztec conquest so maybe they had better materials, but the Inca could only crack Spanish armour with a two handed axe-like weapon!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

1 god solves these issues, not to mention that christianity had a advantage via it's organisational structure.

Yea agreed ,access to the legitimacy Christianity brings, the administrative benefits of the literate priest class and the aid in diplomacy with other powerful Christian states where strong pull factors for conversion.

 Kroem wrote:

Spoiler:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Overread wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

However, considering how fast the allies of the Aztecs turned on them when the spanish showed up it seems that said honor only applied to the validity of their ideology as long no one else could enforce a counter ideology.

Don't forget when Spanish show up the Aztecs are dealing with some massive problems. First up there was a major drought that crippled a lot of their farming and led to widespread starvation. Then you've got the fact that the Spanish have a massive technological advantage through guns. That's both moral and weapon wise a very big element.

Then you've got the biggest issue - disease*. Just like the Native Americans, the Aztecs had no natural immunities to many of the diseases brought to the new world. So they died. In vast numbers that I think we are only now coming to really realise. Those dead civilizations were only dead because disease spread through them like wildfire through dry grass.

note - I accept that my understanding on this is at the casual end of things and not highly detailed/likely to be highly accurate.

* from my understanding the high death rate is because many of the diseases that were the most damaging came from generations of close contact and raising of livestock which resulted in diseases jumping the species gap and winding up in the wrong host species.

Diseases were also a keyfactor, but to my knowledge the Mayans got wiped out indeed by a drought. Another point is that the increased trade in europe with the rest of the world, always meant that diseases in Eurasia and Africa spread around more easily, leading to a somewhat larger pool of resistances for Europeans, didn't help us though when the plague hit like a train. To my knowledge however Syphiliis is what the Native americans were more resistant to, well their strain of deadly syphilis unlike europeans.

Basically it goes both ways, we just "got lucky " in europe that we allready had trade connections all over the place so that we had more resistances in our population.

However, and that is important to mention, the Aztec religion/ideology only prospered so long they were the ones with the bigger Sticks and were more or less unopposed, as in there was no rival ideology until the spanish show up.

It's worth pointing out that guns were not that advantageous over traditional weapons until the effective implementation of breech loading rifles in the second half of the 19th century,.
In fact this was an amazing time for firearms where guns changed from smoothbore muzzle-loading muskets to magazine fed repeating rifles in the space of 50 years! ("The African Wars", Chris Peers, 2010)

The main battlefield advantage of the Conquistador armies, at least against the Inca, were steel weapons and armour along with mounted troops (The History of the Conquest of Peru, William H Prescott, 1847).
I've not read much about the Aztec conquest so maybe they had better materials, but the Inca could only crack Spanish armour with a two handed axe-like weapon!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

1 god solves these issues, not to mention that christianity had a advantage via it's organisational structure.

Yea agreed ,access to the legitimacy Christianity brings, the administrative benefits of the literate priest class and the aid in diplomacy with other powerful Christian states where strong pull factors for conversion.

ehh, not really, gunpoweder makes a lot of noise, and has for the uninitiated a huge morale impact, not to mention the smoke and light a volley can produce. Morale at the times was more important then shere killing power, since loss of morale meant loss of formation and chaos and that is when cavallery swoops in and wins the battle.

Not Online!!! wrote:

ehh, not really, gunpoweder makes a lot of noise, and has for the uninitiated a huge morale impact, not to mention the smoke and light a volley can produce. Morale at the times was more important then shere killing power, since loss of morale meant loss of formation and chaos and that is when cavallery swoops in and wins the battle.

That can be a factor certainly, but the the effect wears off through repeated exposure. There are pre-industrial societies that had success fighting muskets with traditional weapons.
What I was getting at is that guns are an advantage, but not an insurmountable one in this period. To quote a famous author, we need to consider guns, germs and steel!