The Harvest of Souls: Mimesis, Materiality, and Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica

The art and science of ritual human sacrifice was a fundamental axiom of Mesoamerican social violence and remains a subject fraught with ambiguity and competing frameworks of analysis. Interpretive constructs for human heart excision or evisceration and ritualized dismemberment remain keyed to synchronic ethnohistorical and iconographic frames of reference or practice. Though ritual dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism have been traced to remote antiquity in highland Mesoamerica, the cosmological underpinnings of human heart excision, and its corollary technologies of terror, have yet to be fully interrogated in terms of naturalistic metaphors and agricultural mimesis. This paper reviews those cosmological constructs and agricultural metaphors deemed instrumental to the formation and validation of Mesoamerican ritual human sacrifice. This study explores those agricultural metaphors identified with (a) the planting of tzompantli skull banners, (b) human heart excision, and (c) other forms of blood tribute or autosacrifice. I contend that Mesoamerican agricultural practices constitute the instrumental inspiration or motivating force for those mimetic practices that underpin the harvesting of the excised human heart, ritual decapitation, the installation of skull banners, and the latter’s identification with the cleft-earth ball courts of creation. This interpretive schema is operationalized via botanical metaphors identified with maguey castration and the extraction of the agave heart and its “blood” as a corollary dimension of mimesis that fueled the ideology of human heart excision at the dawn of the Mesoamerican Classic era.