utside their temples; the Spanish church featured auto-da-fe's staged by the Inquisition in which numerous heretics would be burned alive in wicker baskets in the town square.]The victim was led to the altar at the top of the pyramid, stretched across a stone by three priests [check number, think 4 held and 5th ripped out, would duplicate 4 cardinal points plus sun as center of Aztec wheel] who held his limbs, while a fourth ripped out the living heart, holding it up so that the spraying blood might spatter about--it was a definite honor to be sprayed with the blood, one that the priests reserved for themselves and visiting dignitaries. D: thus human sacrifice was a part of many Native American cultures on both continents, for many thousands of years. The Aztecs had come to hold it as a daily necessity to sustain the sun in its course. They levied human tribute from their vassal states--one of Cortez' first mainland experiences was to witness such a demand on the coastal cempoallans. Some states, like the tlaxcala, the Aztec refused to conquer--leaving it independent so that they might war against it. In effect the Aztecs were harvesting humans within and without their borders in their zeal for keeping the wheels of the universe well greased. For special occasions--such as the dedication of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli in our year 1486--tens of thousands of victims, harvested and kept prisoner for years--were offered up, and their lines extended for miles backward from the center of sacrifice. The pyramids glistened black with blood--a sign of great power and energy for that is how the sun god drank--and great mounds of skulls grew up. In Tenochtitln the excess bodies were fed to the animals in the zoo. Although this was a normative experience in Aztec culture--one the Aztecs felt comfortable with as they might say in Marin County, it seems clear that their neighbors were feeling oppressed and threatened. One of the guises of Co...
