Human Sacrifice: Dark Rituals Throughout History
Human sacrifice has been a part of many cultures throughout history. But why did they do it? And more importantly, what was it like for the person being sacrificed? In this episode, we dive into ritual sacrifice in places like the Aztec Empire and Cahokia.
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SOURCES
https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150227-a-place-for-human-sacrifices
https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skull-tower-rack-evidence-aztec.html
Aztec Human Sacrifices - YouTube
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tezcatlipoca
Human Sacrifice: Why the Aztecs Practiced This Gory Ritual | HISTORY)
The Templo Mayor: A place for human sacrifices - BBC Culture
Cahokia | ORIAS (berkeley.edu)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/americas-forgotten-city
TRANSCRIPT
In the early 1960s, a group of construction workers gathered outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Technically, they were in Indiana, but at this point in time the land was so flat and empty, it was hard to tell where one state ended and one began.
They were tasked with digging out the dirt for a freeway that was meant to run through this otherwise undisturbed rural area.
The hardest part of the job was going to be razing these mounds that seemed to be concentrated here. This particular part of indiana didn’t have any hills, it was flat for miles. And yet, in this one area a few square miles big, there were all of these mounds, about 8 feet high and 30 feet long.
The workers didn’t have much time to think about that, however, because they were on a schedule. President Eisenhower had recently started a freeway initiative that was supposed to transform american commerce and travel the way the railroads did in the 1800’s, and there was a lot of work to be done.
So they started digging out the land for the road. At first, the project went off without a hitch, but once they got to the mounds, everything changed.
As the excavator cut into the mound and pulled the earth away, the contractors could not believe what they saw. The mound was not just full of dirt, but evidence of an ancient civilization. There were materials for houses, bowls, cups, weapons, clothing. Archaeologists were called to the site, and what they discovered was this area, this rural little area outside of St. Louis, was the largest city in America 1,000 years ago. Some of the mounds were built to hold massive buildings, and there was evidence that at one point there was a plaza the size of 45 football fields, used for sporting events and feasts.
One of the archaeologists called to the site is a man named Melvin Fowler, and he has his eye on one mound in particular, one that would go on to be called Mound 72. It’s smaller than some of the others, and to Melvin, it seems like it had a different use than the other ones.
So he starts digging, in hopes that he’ll find more clues as to how the people who once inhabited this city lived. And he finds so much more than that.
Mound 72 isn’t full of building material, its full of bones. Melvin is thinking he just found their burial pit, that’s a huge deal. There’s so much that can be learned from seeing how a society buried their dead.
But he starts noticing strange things about the bones. Some are full skeletons that are notably missing their heads. All of the skeletons that have not been beheaded are female, which also make up the large majority of the remains, and there was one body in the middle of it all that was wrapped in a beaded blanket in the shape of a bird.
Melvin knew what this meant. This wasn’t a normal burial mound. No, these people had been ritually sacrificed.
The discovery of the area, which came to be known as Cahokia, changed a lot about the way historians viewed indigenous communities in america. They had believed that indigenous american tribes were all small, mostly nomadic, and didn’t subscribe to the typical, violent hierarchical systems found in other civilizations. Yet here was a city that held 30,000 people, had some sort of leader, and practiced ritualistic human sacrifice. It was a pretty heavy metal discovery.
But what it further illustrated, was that ritualistic human sacrifice was something that was practiced by many civilizations throughout the world over a large amount of human history, whether we realized it or not. Because the Cahokian’s didn’t have a written language, we’ll never exactly know what they were up to, but we have some ideas. And I’ll get into those in a bit, because today’s episode is allll about ritualistic sacrifice baby.. The where, the how, and the why. And as alway, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
If you can’t tell, this is a community for those with a dark curiosity. And I loooove episodes like this. Ones that are a good dose of morbid history. Because at least at the end of indulging in our dark curiosity we can all feel like we learned something.
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I also love hearing from you guys after episodes. One listener recently reached out to me to let me know that the picture of the devil from the codex gigas, remember the episode I did around halloween. Yea someone is selling a picture of that devil on etsy that they hand drew with their own blood. And you know what, that’s fine. It’s ethically sourced blood, i feel find about this. As long as youre being safe when touching someone elses blood that they consensually gave you, live your life.
Someone else told me that they live right by the house where Sophia Wilson kept her sons body in a coffin for 12 years in the 1860’s and they were going to try and find the brick pile the house became when it crumbled. That story is from the Halloween episode if you haven’t listened yet. If you are out there either seeing heart starts pounding being marketed in the wild or your hunting down the areas from our stories, definitely let me know. That is just so cool to me.
So, since it’s almost thanksgiving, at least for many of you listeners, tis the season to think about community, and rituals. Many people don’t really know, or even particularly care for the origins of Thanksgiving, yet each year we make the ritual trek back to our hometowns, see the one person from high school we never wanted to see again at the bar in town, we listen and politely smile when our grandparents tell us the most unhinged stories we’ve ever heard, and at the end of the day we eat a seasonal harvest. We don’t really think twice about this, but humans have been conducting seasonal rituals for thousands of years. Even if you’re not american, you may have your own kind of harvest celebration that you still partake in. There might be something innate in us as humans that feels the need to have some sort of Harvest Ritual.
For a lot of human history, one of those rituals, was human sacrifice. These were either to follow a leader into the afterlife, or try and control something humans have no control over . A sacrifice to the gods so the harvest will be bountiful that season. Or so the sun will come up the next morning. And even when those things happened regardless of blood sacrifice, it wasn’t really questioned. It was a ritual where, everyone would flock to the city center, probably see the one person from high school they didn’t want to see, and watch as a human being was killed in a brutal way for the sake of their community.
So today, I want to look at some of those rituals. And one thing I want to understand, the morbid question I had that lead me down this rabbit hole, is what was it like for the person being sacrificed? I just watched Midsummer for the 100th time, and in it, minor spoiler, the people in the community being sacrificed are so grateful, like its a huge honor to be given up for the sake of their community. And that’s the thing with hollywood movies about sacrifice, right? You’re either a member of the community who is knobley giving up their life for the greater good and is honored to do so. Or, you're the unsuspecting outsider who was tricked into coming to the community, and is sacrificed to their god. Please see exhibit A, Nicolas Cage screaming Not The Bees in the Wicker man remake.
But is that how it actually worked? Well, we’re going to get into that but I can tell you right now, I was surprised with what I found.
We’re going to take a quick ad break, and when we come back, I want to jump back into what was happening at Cahokia.
Ok, so Melvin Fowler believed he stumbled upon a thousands of years old human sacrifice mound outside of St. Louis. But let’s take a closer look at what is is he found and what it meant.
Mound 72 as it was known, had in total, 272 people buried in 25 different areas. One of the biggest areas was where he found the man wrapped in the beaded blanket who has been nicknamed birdman. Buried with birdman were 53 women found in rows, and four men that had all been decapitated. He was also surrounded by jewelry, copper, unused arrows, and thousands of shell beads that made up his blanket.
The other burial areas within mound 72 were full of people who were buried at the same time as birdman, leading archaeologists to believe that they had all been buried together, perhaps as part of a religious act, or to honor him and his family.
They also assumed that the women were perhaps sacrificed for birdman, while other people in the pit were friends and family members who chose to die with him to follow him into the after life.
There’s no written record of this, so these are conjectures. But we can guess this is accurate because in 1725, the Natchez people who lived in Mississippi lost their leader, named Tattooed Serpent. Present at the funeral was a french colonist who wrote down his account of what happened. From what we know about the Natchez, they had a very similar way of life as the Cahokians, so assumptions were made that their burial proceedings would have also been similar.
When Tattoed Serpent died, several commoners were sacrificed along with him. Most likely, these people were not given the choice on if they wanted to follow their leader into the afterlife. There were many people, however, who did choose to follow him. Two of his wives, his doctor, his nurse, one of his sisters, a few old women, amongst others chose to die with him. Two parents even gave up their child to go with him to the afterlife.
Those that wanted to follow him, as well as those who were being sacrificed, had their faces painted red and were given a large dose of nicotine and the poisonous plant Jimson Weed to ensure their deaths.
That’s probably similar to what happened at Cahokia, although, the beheaded men were clearly not sacrificed as gently. And similar to the Natchez people, it’s likely Birdman had an inner circle who chose to go with him. At mound 72, the bones of the people directly next to birdman showed they had richer diets, meaning they were probably members of an elite inner circle. This is different from the bodies further away, who could have been commoners and civilians forced to take poison to follow their leader into the next life. It was a wild discovery that unsettled how historians and archaeologists thought about these civilizations. but it wouldn't have been that wild of a discovery nearly 7000 miles away in ancient sumeria..
Taking others with you has long been a reason for human sacrifice. 3300 years before the Cahokian’s were doing it, in ancient sumeria located now in eastern Iraq, leaders were taking retainers with them to the afterlife. A tomb was found with 63 skeletons which included
"six ‘soldiers’, with copper spears and wearing copper helmets. Behind them were six oxen, associated with two four-wheeled wooden vehicles. One human skeleton was found with the animals and two with the wagons (designated ‘drivers’). A row of ‘ladies’, in all their finery of elaborate headdresses, earrings, and necklaces of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian, had been placed against the short side of the chamber, in a line with heads leaning against the wall. On top of them, a lyre had been placed. In front of them and in the rest of the pit was a mass of human and animal bones…”
Initially, when this tomb was discovered, it was thought that the sacrificial victims had all drank poison to swiftly and painlessly rush into the afterlife after their leader.
However, upon closer inspection when the helmets were taken off the bodies, a lot of them had their skulls bashed in. Some of their skulls had even been rotated almost 180 degrees, something archaeologists agree was not from post mortem placement
Obviously, These wounds indicate that not everyone was a willing participant in the sacrificial game. It didn’t always feel like a great honor to go with your leader and people didn’t always go willingly. Sometimes you were just the little guy those in charge saw as free labor to take to the afterlife.
Sacrificing retainers for the afterlife can also be seen in the Ancient Egyptian first Dynasty, which was around 2950 BC. Two kings in particular seemed especially brutal when it came to forcing others to come with them into the afterlife. King Djer (Jer) and king Djet (Jet)
King Djer was found with 326 other burials around him inside of his tomb, all of them female. Historians believe that he ordered the murder of his entire harem. And their burials mostly indicated some sort of struggle, their tombs looked disturbed. It seems that they may have been stunned and then buried alive, only to wake up later and try and fight their way out.
His successor, King Djet, had 154 other graves in his funerary enclosure, including his dog, but he was the last King to have an overwhelming amount of sacrificed people along side him. The next few kings had significantly less, and after the first dynasty, it seems that the Egyptians didn’t continue the practice.
Ok, so it seems that when it comes to following your leader, peoples attitudes were split on wanting to follow the king. For those close to the leader that loved and admired him, it was maybe more of an obvious choice to accompany them to the next life.
Some retainers were promised higher status in the afterlife, so being sacrificed might have come with a promise of a better existence. But we can tell from some of the burial sites that not all of these people felt it was an honor and a privilege.
But what about when it comes to other types of sacrifices? What about when it’s not to remain your leader's servant, but as an offering to the gods for a good harvest, or to make sure the sun stays in the sky. After a short break, we’re going to look at the bloody rituals the Aztec’s used to control nature.
This part of our story starts with the Spanish Conquistador, Hernan Cortez.
Cortez arrived with his men in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and while they did a good job of writing down what they saw while they were there, historians didn’t actually believe them for a long time.
See, the spanish conquistadors were known for being, well, dramatic. They would often exaggerate and dramatize their accounts with the Aztecs as a way to justify killing and enslaving them. So years after their conquests, when historians were reading about their adventures from their personal letters to the king, they took everything with a grain of salt.
Including the grisly and violent scenes they described when talking about life in the empire. One of the conquistadors in Cortez’s expedition described seeing, two giant cylindrical structures made entirely of human skulls stuck together with Mortar near the Templo Mayo. And in between them were racks full of estimated THOUSANDS of more skulls. Each skull had holes bored into the sides which allowed them to be strung together like decorations.
This claim was never taken seriously by historians. I mean, the image it conjures feels like morbid fantasy.
But then, in 2015, archaeologists in mexico city were digging a site underneath a colonial style house near a cathedral, when they made a shocking discovery. Yea, you can probably see where I’m going with this.
Underneath the house, they found skulls. Hundreds of them, with holes in the sides as if they had been strung together.
And the deeper they dug, the more evidence they found that what the spaniards saw was accurate. There were holes from where the large posts of the rack were stuck into the ground, from which they estimated the skull rack was around 35 meters long, 14 meters wide, and 4 to 5 meters high. They also found a section of one of the large cylinders made entirely of human skulls.
It appeared as if the skulls had been cleanly separated from the bodies, defleshed, and then placed on the rack. Some reports, however, say that the skulls were defleshed a while after they were placed on the rack, meaning some sections of the large rack could have held fleshy human heads
And it was universally accepted that these skulls were all from sacrificed people. So, how did the aztecs view sacrifices. Why did they do it? And more importantly, what I want to know. How did those being sacrificed feel about it?
There’s a few different iterations of the aztec religions creation myth, but the central theme is that there’s a sun god who sacrificed himself to become the sun, and each night he wages a war against the darkness, ultimately winning and starting a new day. The religion states that humans can help the sun god win his nightly war by offering him blood and human hearts
These sacrifices took place at ceremonies, one of which occurred on December 19th, 1487 at the great temple in Tenochtitlan, a 250,000 person city in the empire. Making it larger than any European city at the time.
The ceremony began with warriors dressed as eagles standing at the foot of the newly constructed pyramid, the Templo Mayor. Other men danced and sang. Rhythmic drums beat in a menacing tone while thousands of bystanders gathered in the square.
Over four days of the festival, around 4,000 prisoners of war were lead to the top of the pyramid where they were laid flat on an altar. A priest used an incredibly sharp surgical instrument made of obsidian to carve the hearts out of the living prisoners, and hold them, still beating, up to the sun god. After they decided the gods were pleased, the bodies were thrown down the steps of the temple. Leaving dark crimson impressions on the stone each time their empty chest cavities made contact with a step. Reports say that the city smelled overwhelmingly like blood during the entire festival.
If you were being sacrificed to the god Xipe Totec, as opposed to the sun god, your body would be flayd and a priest would wear your skin until the festival was over. Sometimes that was 20 days.
It seems like this ritual was as much of a warning to enemies of the empire as it was a sacrifice to the gods. It was a shocking display of brutality that illustrated they were not to be messed with. In the next few years, however, the Aztec empire would meet it’s match when Cortes and his men showed up and were not stopped by the shocking executions.
We don’t know a ton about the people that were sacrificed, but through studying the skulls found on the racks, archaeologists concluded that 75% of the skulls were of men between the ages of 20 and 35. This most likely meant that a lot of them were prisoners of war captured during various battles. 20% of the skulls were women, and 5% were children. Historians believe this could mean that the empire was specifically buying slaves for sacrificial purposes.
It was also determined that many of the people sacrificed were not from Tenochtitlan, but had spent time there leading up to their deaths, some for as long as a few years. There are some reports of prisoners of war living with families of their captors for years leading up to them being sacrificed.
We know from some pre colonial documents that there were some locals who were called upon to be sacrificed, but they were treated wayy differently than those who were not from the area.
Before a local was brought to the top of the temple, other people from Tenochtitlan would approach them and tell them their problems, so that their earthly complaints could be taken to the gods by the sacrificed person. Thus it is a huge honor as a community member to be sacrificed to the gods, and these people had minor fame during and after the ritual.
Outsiders did not always feel the same way. Some seemed to be indifferent to the event. After all, they were raised in a time where being captured and sacrificed was normal, and they probably knew the other captives who were being sacrificed. It was also widely believed that if you died a normal death, you would be caught in the many layers of the underworld before being able to ascend to the gods. Those that were sacrificed, as well as those who died in childbirth or battle, got a pass to travel straight up to the gods when they died.
There were still some that definitely did not want to die. Some would pass out on the bloody walk up to the altar and were picked up by spiritual leaders to be carried the rest of the way. Others would scream and curse the whole way up, but as a captive there was not much they could do to avoid their fate.
I mean, imagine it. You’re walking up hundreds of bloody stone steps towards a man holding a piece of surgical equipment sharper than anything we have today. You’re neighbors have just told you all of their boring problems for an hour and you have to report them to the gods when you see them. The steps smell so bad, it’s hard to walk up them without gagging, and the higher up you go, the less you hear the chants of the crowd, and the more you hear the screams of your peers, who are getting their hearts surgically removed without anesthesia. It’s SO hard to imagine people being excited about this, but for some, this was the greatest honor of their life.
The aztec empire seems the most similar to the Hollywood Movie model I referenced in the beginning. Eager locals excited to give themselves for the betterment of their community, and unsuspecting outsiders forced to die for someone elses God.
However, there is one sacrificial ritual that was exciting for the person being sacrificed. We’re going to take a short break, and when we get back, I’m going to tell you about the aztec sacrificial ritual that was, can you believe it, pretty coveted.
So, it seems like the general feelings about being sacrificed were pretty positive. Neutral at worst, which is honestly better than i was expecting
There was one Aztec ritual, though, where if you were going to be sacrificed, this was probably the way to go.
This ritual pertains to the god Tezcatlipoca, a creator god. he was said to punish captors who were unkind to their slaves, he adored children. He sent sickness to wrongdoers and bestowed riches to the virtuous.
Each year one man was chosen to be the ixiptla, or the avatar of Tezcatlipoca who would be sacrificed. It was usually a prisoner of war that was chosen, but with so many captives and so many slots for execution, how did they choose who would be the Ixiptla?
Well, it was mostly based on looks. And the requirements feel like they’re straight out of a modern day tinder profile.
They were looking for a man who was not too short, but no exceedingly tall. His body should be smooth and sculpted like a pebble. No acne. No hair loss, not buck-toothed, not large-toothed, he not fang-toothed, not yellow-toothed, not ugly-toothed, not rotten-toothed.
Essentially, they were looking for the most beautiful man they had captured. And as a reward for being the most beautiful man, for one year, he got to be treated like a god.
The Ixiptla was given four wives who represented the deities of fertility, water, earth, and agriculture. He was adorned with beautiful clothes and jewelry, and was given a flute to play around town. His only job was to hang out in town being universally loved. He was the avatar of a God and he was treated as such. People would bow when they saw him.
Everywhere he went he was followed by 8 servants and 4 constables. They were there to make sure his every wish was taken care of, and also to make sure he didn’t escape. Yea, they were still a little afraid he would run away.
One month before the sacrifice (which was 20 days for the Aztecs) the chosen man would give up all of the goods he had accumulated in order to prepare himself for the sacrifice. He would also start fasting and would get a ceremonial haircut. The change in appearance was symbolic, this man arrived in Tenochtitlan as a captive, was elevated to the status of a God, was now brought back down to a captive status, and upon being sacrificed would become elevated again in the afterlife. To the Aztecs, this was a beautiful and symbolic cycle of life.
The timing of this ritual is also significant. This one took place before the harvest season, so it was believed that it was also to ensure there would be a bountiful harvest that year.
Five days before the sacrifice, the victim and his four wives would take time to visit the shrines in the area and pray. One day before the sacrifice, he was separated from his wives.
The actual day of the sacrifice, the victim would be brought to a small temple outside of the city. This is very different from the other sacrificial ceremonies that took place at the Templo Mayor. For having such an extravagant year, the ritual itself was much more humble.
First, historians believe that the ixiptla would be given a hefty dose of some of the psychedelics the aztecs had access to, like Peyote. The victim would walk up his own accord to the top of the temple, he had no chaperones to drag him if he passed out. No, he needed to go up on his own free will. As he ascended, he was to break his flute.
And then, just like in the other ceremonies, he was laid on his back on a large stone, and a priest would cut his heart out of him and raise it to the sun. Interestingly, the victim was not thrown down the steps, rather, four men would carry him down to the bottom. For a year long spectacle, this last gesture was a thoughtful acknowledgement of the man who gave his life for their community.
So, I’ll admit people seemed to be way more excited or just neutral on being sacrificed than I initially thought they would be. And I think there’s a good reason for that. Living back then was painful and people around you were constantly dying, so I think people were more used to the concept of death. And they also believed in an afterlife, so perhaps they were less worried about what went on in this life.
But I thought it was important for this episode to understand what those being sacrificed may have felt about the whole thing. There’s not much written history about those people, and we’ll probably never get personal details about the skulls on the racks found in Mexico City. These rituals wouldn’t have been possible without them, and whether it was effective or not, they fully believed they were making the ultimate sacrifice for their community. Even if they didn’t necessarily want to.
So, this holiday season when you’re doing your little family rituals, think back on the aztecs. Maybe in hundreds of years people will look bavk in horror at the things we do today. They used to celebrate their harvest season by having 10 year high school reunions? Do we need to see those people again? Who knows, but it’s a ritual we still practice.
This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons, you will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter.
Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. And thank you to Audioboom. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts Pounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.