rtez was that of a liberator.Slide--after the sacrifice--a victim thrown down the steps of the pyramid. The bodies of the excardiated victims were flung down the steps of the pyramid, perhaps as a rough and ready form of tenderizing the meat. The trunk and limbs would be severed, and the tender parts, the thighs and the hands reserved for ritual feasting. Moctezuma was said to be partial to the thighs of young men, served with a nice tomato and chili pepper sauce. Prescott captures the European sense of horror"This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who, as we shall see hereafter, conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. Surely, never were refinement and the extreme of barbarism brought so closely in contact with each other!" reader Ritual sacrifice and cannibalism: pros and cons Indeed, the Aztecs don't seem so bad if you put their habits next to those of the Spanish inquisition. At least the Aztec sacrificed their victims to their gods and into heaven; the inquisition burned its victims and consigned them to hell.And modern writers stress the centrality, the necessity, of human sacrifice in Aztec society. If you believe what they did, that the sun needed a daily ration of human blood, then humans had to be sacrificed to the sun. It was a tough job, in other words, but somebody had to do it. The victims, some say, were well cared for and honored before their deaths. And they were not individuals in our modern western sense--they were honored themselves to be chosen, to do their bit, as it were, to keep the sun going for the rest of humanity. Another rationale is that human sacrifice--mostly, but not always, of young males captured in war, was a cultural device to eliminate surplus males from the population. The ones unskillful enough in war got caught, the more clever ones survived to repr...
