Human Sacrifice In Aztec Religion

Aztec religious rituals routinely used human sacrifice in their ceremonies. It is one of the more well know facts about Aztec religion. In this paper I will be examining the female role in these rituals as well as the symbolic nature of Aztec human sacrifice. The roles that women play in a society's religion can be an illuminating glimpse of that societies gender roles, especially, like in the case of the Aztecs, where women social roles are hard to find. Because women's roles in Aztec religion were reduced to either the sacrifice or the outside observer I will be using the four festivals that involve female sacrificial victims, as well as Aztec mythology, archeological evidence about women's spaces to draw conclusions about Aztec society and women's place therein. Human sacrifice is built into Aztec religion through their mythology. The birth of two of their most important gods, Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, and Nanauatzin the Aztec god of the sun, involve sacrifice, in one the god acts as the executioner and the other the sacrificed. In the myth of the god of war, we even see into the roles of women through a sinner/saint dichotomy of Huitzilopochtli's sister and mother. In the myth of his birth Huitzilopochtli's mother, Coatlicue the mother goddess, is the mother of at least 401 gods and goddesses. At the beginning she is subjected to a magical pregnancy like some sort of lame plot device from a Sci-Fi show. When her

In the myth some gods are all standing around a fire daring each other to jump in and create the sun. Nanauatzin is brave enough to do so and is followed by an eagle and a jaguar (which is incidentally is why they're so black). His self-sacrifice is rewarded by him become the sun. In this way sacrifice is justified by mythology because the birth of deities is through sacrifice and human sacrifice is