13 HOLY KILLING

A fifteenth-century Aztec stone knife used for the ritual removal of the hearts of sacrificial victims

In the Mexican room in the British Museum there is a knife, about thirty centimetres long, with a handle made from cedro wood and a stone chalcedony blade, sharp-tipped and with carefully serrated edges. The handle is magnificent: the dark, sweet-smelling wood (prized in Mexico because it is particularly resistant to termites) is inlaid with a mosaic of pale turquoise and dark-green malachite, and enlivened by three different types of shell – mother of pearl, white conch and scarlet thorny oyster. As you admire the patterning and the contrast of colour, it can take a moment to realize that this is in fact a crouching Aztec. His face peers out from the open beak of an eagle head-dress, demonstrating that he is a high-ranking ‘eagle warrior’; his chin rests near to where the terrifying blade begins, his teeth are bared and his eyes stare with great intensity down towards the tip of the blade.

The virtuoso craftsmanship of this object, and the cool, serene galleries in which it is displayed, give almost no clue at all as to where this knife has been or what it was for. To understand its purpose, move your gaze from the handle – so finely worked that each of the warrior’s individual teeth is visible – to the blade itself. The reason for this crouching man’s eager anticipation becomes clear: he is waiting for blood – human blood.

In the years around 1500, knives like these – possibly this very knife – were used to pierce the skin on a human abdomen, working downwards from the bottom of the ribcage into the muscle fibres of the diaphragm. A temple priest would then insert his hand with swift efficiency into the newly formed cavity, reach upwards and tear the heart from its moorings. He would then deposit it, still beating, in a shallow bowl carved into a basalt stand, specially decorated for just this purpose with a sunburst and a rim of sculpted human hearts. The dying body of the victim would then be thrown down the steps of the temple.

Aztec warrior wearing an eagle mask on the handle of the sacrificial knife.

Offering vessel made of basalt, decorated with a sunburst on the front and human hearts at the rim, into which the victims’ hearts would be placed

This spectacle of blood and pain would be watched by a cheering, festive audience of thousands, while percussion orchestras played and dance troupes performed; for a sacrifice of this sort would usually be the result of a military campaign. It served as an imperial victory parade, affirming through the killing of the victim the Aztecs’ right to expand their empire under the protection of the god of sun and war, Huitzilopochtli.

Sacrifice. The Latin origins of the word mean nothing more than doing a sacred or a holy thing. It says a great deal about the religious traditions of the ancient Mediterranean, and how deeply they have shaped our habits of thought, that this ‘holy thing’ goes far beyond the idea of a mere offering or gift. Sacrifice implies not just putting something highly prized for ever beyond our reach, like the Muisca gold, but effectively destroying it, in the belief that we can propitiate a higher power and that a greater purpose can thus be served. The pouring of wine into the earth as a libation or the burning of precious incense are obvious examples – they can never again be used. But sacrifice can, and frequently does, go further: destruction can mean the spilling of blood and the taking of life.

If our – English – word, sacrifice, derives from Roman traditions and practices, the idea itself appears to be almost universal. Few topics have more exercised historians of religion over recent decades than sacrifice, and especially the public, ritual killing of animals or humans. Some scholars have seen in these practices a means of acknowledging the violence inherent in human existence, of limiting it, and assuaging or exorcising the collective guilt that results. Others have focused on the role sacrifices play in building community and solidarity. Understandably, few topics raise more uncomfortable questions about what it means to be human: few touch deeper emotions.

Jago Cooper, head of the Americas section at the British Museum, believes that to enter into the thought-world that lies behind the Aztec stone knife, and the sacrificial killings for which it was made, you have first to understand what war meant to the Aztecs:

The Aztec Empire was relatively fleeting, lasting barely a hundred years: it arose around 1428, and always had warfare at the centre of its being. It flourished and expanded, covering much of modern Mexico and parts of the southern United States, until the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1521, who quickly overwhelmed it and effectively brought it to an end. In this highly militarized state, the rank of ‘eagle warrior’ was one of the highest positions in the official hierarchy. To become an ‘eagle warrior’ you had to capture a victim in battle and bring him back to be held as a prisoner or a slave – or to be publicly sacrificed.

While the Aztec Empire was expanding, England was engaged in the Wars of the Roses. European warfare at this date generally involved very heavy casualties: deadly volleys of arrows, thousands of armed men attacking each other with sharp metal weapons, attempting to hack each other to death. Whatever the outcome, hundreds on both sides would be left wounded or mutilated, painfully dying on the battlefield. Aztec warfare was profoundly different. The brutality of European warfare and the massacring of large numbers of people on the battlefield would have been abhorrent to them. The Aztec aim was not to kill, but to conquer – and to capture. Often a group of warriors would seize one victim and bring him back to the capital city. To do otherwise would have made no sense: the Aztecs relied on tribute from the people they had subjected, tribute produced by those who came home from the war. They were taking a sample of the opposing army, rather than trying to wipe it out. The person whose heart might have been removed with this knife was most likely a prisoner of war: that was the most common form of sacrificial victim within the Aztec world.

A sixteenth-century Spanish view of Aztec eagle and jaguar warriors

Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of change through conflict, takes the heart of a sacrificial victim, in a fourteenth-century Aztec codex.

It is easy to imagine what a deterrent effect on potential opponents of the Aztec state witnessing a sacrificial murder like this might have had. And it is an intriguing, if counter-intuitive, thought that this wilfully bloodthirsty ritual may have been specifically designed to limit the killing and suffering inherent in warfare. What we can be certain of is that it suited the Spaniards to make much of the brutalities of the people they were slaughtering, and of the empire they were plundering.

The knife both dramatically symbolizes and physically embodies the two central aspects of Aztec warfare: the sacrifice of their selected victims and the tribute system they then imposed on their subject peoples. The different components of its decoration – turquoise and malachite, thorny oyster and mother of pearl – were all highly prized materials. They come from sites in different parts of the empire, many hundreds of miles apart, and they feature regularly in surviving tribute lists. Collected locally, they were transported to the capital, and there the wealth of the whole empire was combined and fashioned into magnificent ceremonial objects.

Alongside the sound psychology and economics of this way of making war, Jago Cooper describes, there was also powerful religious significance for the Aztecs in sacrificing human life.

The Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli, god of war, was associated with the burning sun. Aztecs believed that the gods had once sacrificed themselves, letting out their own blood in order to create human life. The human heart was held to represent a drop of the essence of the power of the sun here on earth. So by removing the heart from a human body, Aztec priests were offering it up to the gods, in part payment of an enormous debt owed by all humanity. It was a payment that would also help keep the sun moving through its appointed cycles – hence the sunburst on the stand to receive the recently removed hearts. To die as a sacrificial victim was therefore considered a good and useful death, in a society where the manner of one’s dying mattered a great deal.

As we saw in the previous chapter, gifts to the gods are often given to elicit benefits in return. For the Aztecs, the outcome hoped for was the maintenance of order in both the empire and the cosmos, secured through the spilling of human blood.

The Nereid Monument is an enormous sculptured tomb from Xanthos, in what is now western Turkey, so named because of the many dancing figures of sea-nymphs, Nereids, which adorn it. It was built in the early fourth century BCE as a tomb for Erbinna, the local dynast, in the form of a Greek Ionic temple, and was richly decorated with many sculptured panels, now pale grey, but originally brightly coloured. They show Erbinna in various political and military roles, greeting ambassadors, banqueting and so on; and two of them show another key aspect of the kingdom’s public life – the sacrifice of animals.

Seated under a parasol, Erbinna, ruler of Xanthos in western Turkey, greets arriving ambassadors. From the Nereid Monument, c.390–380 BCE

After the spectacular ritual murders of the Aztecs, we might think that the Nereid Monument returns us to the reassuringly calm embrace of the Greeks: classical robes and tunics and a lucid, chiselled aesthetic. But we find there is brutal violence here as well. One of the figures is trying to drag a goat by its horns, which the animal resists with all its strength, digging in its hooves and leaning back as the man tries to haul it forward. A bull is being led along just behind. In the second panel it becomes clear what is in store for them both: a sacrificial altar. A priestly figure stands on one side; on the other is a man who has taken off his top to keep it clean. We are seconds away here from the screams of animals as the ritual unfolds: the shredding of flesh; the blood spurting and flies swarming; the reek of animal entrails publicly exposed. The precinct of a Greek temple could often be a sacred public slaughterhouse.

Beasts to the slaughter: animals are dragged to the sacrificial altar. From the Nereid Monument, c.390–380 BCE

Sacrifices like this, involving the regular killing of domestic animals, were common everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean – among Greeks, Romans and Phoenicians, and in the Temple at Jerusalem for the Jews. It was clearly a nasty business, inevitably smelly with much animal waste, but it was at the heart of serious religious activity, domestic or public. Esther Eidinow, Professor of Ancient History at Bristol University, explains:

This is a key ritual, through which you communicate with the gods, whom you cannot see: it is through animal sacrifices that you worship and thank them. Through the entrails of the animals, you find out whether they are on your side, and you ask them for things.

Preparing to kill the sacrificial beasts. From the Nereid Monument, c.390–380 BCE

In other words, animal sacrifice in some ways performed for the classical world the same function as prayer in the Christian tradition: it is the ritual language in which you may speak to, and listen to, the deity. In the Roman world, before battle, the livers of sacrificed animals were examined by experts to discover the intentions of the gods. Sacrifices could be conducted individually in the family home, or in small groups, but the great civic celebrations of course took place at the temple.

You would know that a sacrifice was going on at the temple because you would smell it. There would be a procession, leading a garlanded animal towards an altar. The animal was always carefully chosen, because it had to be a fine specimen, beautiful, valuable and pleasing to the gods. The altar was usually placed just in front of the temple – outside it, in the open air, so that the gods would be able to see and smell the sacrifice. The priest would normally be facing east, towards the rising sun. The overall effect was of a great technicolour stage set, designed for a large public.

The gods were expected to be part of the audience. A divine presence at sacrifice was always assumed – to hear and answer prayers, to smell the smoke of the incense and the burning animal remains, and to listen to the accompanying music. In theory the animals had to consent to being sacrificed (rather as the seals in Chapter 5): water was splashed on the heads of the bigger beasts to make them nod before they were killed. Esther Eidinow:

If it was a large animal like an ox, it would be stunned first and then its throat cut; if a smaller beast, its throat was simply cut very quickly with a long knife. At the point where the animal was slaughtered, the women in the audience would ululate – a kind of ritual screaming – which would have added yet another layer to the general sensory experience of the sacrifice.

Some scholars argue that elaborate rituals of this sort may have been an acknowledgement of the shocking nature of killing. If blood is to be shed, then it must be done publicly, solemnly, with the community gathered in the face of the gods. The animal killed must be honoured as it gives itself for the benefit of all within the ritual framework of the moral order. Sacralized slaughter accepts the guilt everybody should and must feel at the enormity of taking life; but it finds a way of expiating, or at least containing, it. As with Aztec ritual murder, a ceremony that seems to us brutal may carry a deep ethical charge.

In the Greek temple, once the animal had been ceremonially killed, a new element joined the assault on the senses: the sound, and the smell, of meat roasting. A sacrifice to the gods was usually followed by a feast for everyone, in which the gods were invited to join. In Book One of the Iliad, Homer gives a memorable description of a sacrificial banquet for Apollo offered by Odysseus and his fellow warriors. In Esther Eidinow’s words:

They drew back the victims’ heads, slit their throats, and flayed them. Then they cut slices from the thighs, wrapped them in layers of fat, and laid raw meat on top. These the old man burnt on the fire, sprinkling over them a libation of red wine, while the young men stood by, five-pronged forks in their hands.

Roasting the sacrificial meat for distribution to the people. The horn of an ox can be seen on the burning altar for the gods. An Attic vase made around 450–430 BCE

The sacrifice panels and the banquet scenes that accompany them on the Nereid Monument express the hope that its builder will for ever be able to take part in just such heroic celebrations, where the ruler himself often also assumed the role of priest. Viewed like this, sacrifice is not just about giving up a domestic animal for the good fortune of everyone else: it brings the community together, in political and religious solidarity, to share food with each other and with the gods. For many Greeks, this might be the only time they ever ate meat. Esther Eidinow tells how, here too, there were strict rules to be followed:

The carcass was divided up – some for the gods and some for the people. The thigh bones, sacrum and tail were taken out and burned for the gods, who consumed the smoke. The entrails were examined for signs of whether the gods had approved of the sacrifice, and then they were put on spits and barbecued. The body was carved up, and might be cooked and eaten there and then. There were sometimes dining rooms at a little distance from the main part of the sanctuary, where people could go and eat, or the meat might be taken home and eaten there. It was distributed fairly – the meat offered in sacrifice became part of how the society fed itself.

The ‘liturgy’ of animal sacrifice in the Greek world was then a process which simultaneously strengthened people’s relationships with the gods and with each other. People went together through an intensely emotional and sensually heavily laden experience. Then they ate together. They were eating in the presence of the gods, but as the gods consumed only smoke, this was a reminder that they inhabited a different cosmological realm. The order of the world, human, animal and divine – separate, yet interconnected and interdependent – had again been reaffirmed.

The enduring influence of this great Greek civic and religious ritual, later taken over by the Romans, and practised throughout their empire, can hardly be over-emphasized. A ritual sacrifice is offered by a priest, a sacrifice which the people hope may be found acceptable. The smoke of incense rises. The blood of the victim is drunk, and the body shared and eaten by the community, which is united and strengthened by the process. The Christians who emerged from this classical world described the central ritual of their new faith as the sacrifice, and the supper, of the Lamb.