The Lie
The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice.
The Truth
There’s no evidence for this. The story was obtained from Aztec prisoners by a man who could not speak their language, and had not the decency to admit it. He had a lot to gain by providing the hypocritical Catholic Church of his day with an excuse to crush utterly this newly encountered culture in the name of ‘Christianity’ so that it could seize their wealth and assume religious and political power over the peoples of these rich lands.
His evidence was obtained orally and could therefore never be checked by any other student of the Aztec language. No other anthropologist, linguist or student of Aztec culture ever obtained the same story from any other source than this one unverified report.
There’s never been any archaeological evidence found to support the accusation – no mass graves, no textual evidence, no evidence of the alleged practice whatsoever.
The Lie
The Aztecs worshipped a bizarre god that fed on human blood.
The Truth
There’s no evidence for this either. If you allow the possibility that the false account has some similarity to truth here and there, the highest likelihood is that the perpetrators of it either deliberately or unwittingly misunderstood a metaphor – one which is in daily use in Christian discourse: that very large numbers of people were drawn to the temple of the god, and as Christians do, they made of themselves “a living sacrifice unto the Lord”, giving to their highest conception of divine goodness their whole heart in dedication – the still beating heart in their breast – not one torn from a dying body, but the still beating heart of a loving, living person– just as Christians do to this day to their god. This evidence suggests a god like that of all the other love religions, a merciful ideal of love and compassion, one that inspires in people what is universally recognised as piety, holiness and acts of humane love.
The Lie
It doesn’t matter what we believe about the Aztecs – it was so long ago.
The Truth
The Aztec people are to this day disempowered, hurt, shocked profoundly, and unable to answer a word. They didn’t know what terrible false accusations were being levelled against them as a result of their efforts to inform their conquerors until it was too late – the cultural devastation that followed deprived them of their literature, language and most of their race memory.
This is a magical world and myth is creative. Cruel myth creates cruelly.
In the 20th Century, archaeologists and their powerful patrons focused their intensely concentrated desires on Aztec sites, demanding from them evidence to support these false accusations of mass human sacrifice. They looked for these non-existent mass graves, for references, even cryptic references, in legend and folk memories, to lost people and large-scale disappearances, and interpreted freely way beyond the evidence to condemn the Aztec civilization. The land responded helplessly, bizarrely, to their bizarre wishes. The cruel magic had its way in the land. 20th Century People disappeared in their thousands, and modern newspapers and books were full of it. Mass graves were filled. Okay, it missed out only on the time factor, it couldn’t put the mass graves and disappearances back into the past, because there just weren’t any then – nobody even contemplated them – but it tried… yeah, it tried…
