The Myth of the Willing Human Sacrificial Victim: The Complex Nature of Human Sacrifice in Aztec Ceremonialism

Mesoamerican scholarship is a collaborative effort that consistently delivers fresh theoretical interpretations based on new findings, but on occasion classical perspectives become obdurate, concretized traditions that are a challenge to dislodge from the scholarly imagination. This has been the case with discourse on Aztec human sacrifice. Following broader trends in religious and anthropological studies, some Aztec scholars have advanced monolithic theories and generalized speculation regarding the mechanics and complexities of Aztec sacrificial rituals. Oversimplification has led to a privileged model of human sacrifice that indexes victims as voluntary, apotheosized subjects. This preconception privileges the notion that all or most sacrificial victims were alacritous offerings of abnegation and simultaneously solemnized as equal participants with the executioner (the officiant and the social structures supporting the officiant) in a communal operation of reciprocity with the gods. This construction ignores the issues of power relations and the centrality of warfare involved in Aztec human sacrifice, and minimizes the multifaceted, contextual, and dynamic nature of the sacrificial complex. In this chapter, I examine the plausible sources for this mythical construction and its perpetuation, and by extension a more nuanced and contextualized interpretation of sacrifice as it was conducted in the 18 paramount monthly Aztec sacrificial ceremonies. I contend that as captives of war and demoted slaves, victims of sacrifice were predominantly recalcitrant participants. As part of this argument, I conjecture that the Aztec (specifically, the Mexica) not only utilized the sacrifice of captives to reify their gods, but also to terrorize and humiliate their enemies.