Human Sacrifices

There we were, standing in front of a tour guide, this one somehow worse than the previous two. His voice was one monotone block of sound, completely devoid of emotion and expressing, droning on and on and on. Suddenly, something he said made people gasp. I looked up, trying to see what I'd missed. The guide noticed that what he'd said had gotten people's attention, and so he repeated himself: here, at this temple, they'd found the bodies of 25 people that had been sacrificed - 24 girls and one boy who was dressed as a girl.

Mesoamerican societies had a strange obsession with human sacrifice - almost every ancient society in the Americas used ritual human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed their five gods constantly sacrificed to keep their world running, so they constantly sacrificed people. The Inca rigorously selected "Chosen Women" based on their looks to be sacrificed to the gods. The Mayans usually sacrificed animals, but on special occasions, such as the ascension of a king, they would sacrifice a person for good luck.

No other civilization did this. In fact, most belief systems did without sacrifice altogether. Out of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam, none support ritual sacrifice. Even the ones that used sacrifice only sacrificed animals - Judaism tells of the sacrifice of lambs, Zoroastrianism calls for animal sacrifice, etc - but not a single Afro-Eurasian civilization ever sacrificed people.

So why did Mesoamerican cultures sacrifices humans? And why only Mesoamerica? Long story short, we don't know. There's evidence of the first major Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs, using bloodletting techniques, but there's little evidence for them using human sacrifice. Perhaps these other civilizations took the idea and ran with it? We don't really know. All I know is I'm glad I wasn't alive back then.