The Spanish were absolutely horrified when they first landed in Mesoamerica and encountered the Mexica (a.k.a. the Aztecs).And it isn’t hard to understand why they were so horrified. Just listen to one description of what they saw when they arrived in Mesoamerica:
On the other side there was an idol, with a feather in its head, whose face was turned towards the aforesaid stone vase. Behind this idol there was a heap of large stones. Between the posts and close to the idol were the bodies of two Indians of tender age, wrapped in a painted blanket. Behind the stretched cloths there were the bodies of two other Indians. These seemed to have been dead for about three days while the first mentioned appeared to have been dead for twenty days. Close to these dead bodies and the idol there were many skulls and bones; also a quantity of bundles of pine wood and some wide stones, on which they had killed said Indians.
… After the captain and his men had seen all this, the former wished to be informed whether it had been done as a sacrifice, and sent to his ships for an Indian who was a native of this province. On his way to where the Captain awaited him, he suddenly swooned and fell, thinking that he was being brought to be killed. When he reached said tower the Captain asked him why such deeds were committed there and the Indian answered that it was done as a kind of sacrifice and gave to understand that the victims were beheaded on the wide stone; that the blood was poured into the vase and that the heart was taken out of the breast and burnt and offered to the said idol. The fleshy parts of the arms and legs were cut off and eaten. This was done to the enemies with whom they were at war.
The Island of Sacrificios by Zelia Nuttall, pg. 258
That isn’t just Spanish hyperbole to be used as the justification for colonialism, by the way. Archeology has determined that the Spanish really were telling the truth in the numerous accounts of Mesoamerican human sacrifice that they recount in myriad documents. Recent work has determined that as few as 4,000 people, and maybe as many as 84,000 people, were sacrificed in the 1487 AD consecration the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, the main temple of the Mexica’s capital city.
Though taken to an extreme degree, the act of human sacrifice was hardly unique to the Mexica. The Roman historian Titus Livius, normally Anglicized as Livy, reports repeated human sacrifices in the Roman Republican era the War with Hannibal. After the crushing defeat of the Roman forces at the Battle of Cannae, the people of Rome were terrified that Hannibal was about the march upon and sack the city, slaughtering them all. Desperate to find some justification for why the gods must be so angry with them that they were abandoned by the gods in their time of desperate need and for a way to appease these wrathful deities:
Livy notes in his History of Rome [Volume 3, Section LVII], that after Cannae, the Romans were alarmed which led to two Vestal Virgins being found guilty of being unchaste. One was buried alive, and the other committed suicide before she could be interred. Punishing of the Vestal Virgins was not entirely because of their breaking of their vows, but because the Romans experienced a disastrous loss at the Battle of Cannae. The breaking of their oaths must have meant, to the Romans, that the gods were angry and required payment, in lives, to avoid another disaster. In this same passage, Livy wrote that the Romans would bury Gauls and Greeks alive as well.
Before 97 BCE and the outlawing of human sacrifice, there are three known dates with live burials of Gauls and Greeks: 228, 216, and 114 BCE. The live burials occurred in the Forum Boarium, which is also where the gladiatorial games would have their start. Celia E. Shultz, writes that for these live burials the Romans would consult the Sibylline books, which were books of prophecies dating back to the Romans’ distant past. By consulting religious books, the Romans were looking for divine guidance to maintain their favor with the Gods.
Ritual Killing in Ancient Rome: Homicide and Roman Superiority, pg. 8
Indeed, human sacrifice seems to have been present in every part of the world at some point, and always for the same cause – to placate the angry gods with spilt human blood. Such gruesome imagery captivates us in the same way that serial killer documentaries and car crashes on the way to work do. We universally despise and denounce them, but we still have to see them. Part of the reason we take such dark delight in these sorts of stories is undoubtedly our own moral conviction that we are simply better than the people of the past. We are not trapped by such ignorance as they were. We know that the Sun won’t stop working if we don’t feed Huitzilopochtli human blood each day. We know that there is no Vesta to anger and no Jupiter whose thunderbolts we should fear and whose anger can only be satiated by burying people alive. Believers in the Progressive Theory of History we think that we are smarter, wiser, more moral, and just plain better than our ancestors ever were because history is an inevitable march towards progress, uplift, and the triumph of human development. We are modern and we are better.
Hogwash.
As Spencer W. Kimball explained, for all our delight in our supposed modern civilization, we are on the whole a wicked and idolatrous people. For all our technological improvements to human life, the reality is that we have come no farther in our moral, intellectual, and spiritual development than our ancestors. Nowhere are these truths more obvious than in the current universal prevalence of human sacrifice in modern societies.
The Blood is the Life
Brian Zahnd is credited with the observation, that “A nation does not metastasize into an empire without shedding rivers of innocent blood. This is what the myths and monuments try to hide.” He is correct as far as he goes, he just doesn’t go far enough. It is not merely the empires and superpowers that are built on death, a fact which they endless try to hide by glorifying the slaughter that gained them their wealth and power. The truth is the nation itself – all nations, all countries, everyplace upon the planet – are built on the bones of human sacrifices.
What else is war if not an elaborate act of human sacrifice?
Just consider it. We mock the ancients because they sacrificed people to beings which had no existence outside of the beliefs of the people doing the sacrificing. They killed people in the name of an idea. Is this not what nations do in war? After all, nations do not exist. There is no place where you can go, take hold of the pure essence of the “nation,” and physically give it to others to show them it definitively exists. Nations are ideas, things of faith that exist only in the minds of the faithful whose shared beliefs in the social rituals and ideals that define the nation and its culture, thereby conjuring the nation into existence. Nations have no bodies, no parts, no passions. They are everywhere the believers are and yet no where at all as no place is the nation itself. It is everywhere and yet nowhere at all. David Gornoski put the truth of the matter very well:
Don’t be blinded by our modern sensibilities. Sure, we’ve made objective refinements. But these gods [which demand human sacrifice] still exist. They’re called Germany, France, United States, Japan, and so on: nation-states. And we’ve devised myths—social contract theories, the will of the people, majority rule, the thin blue line, and so on—to justify feeding them more sacrificial victims.
For the politicians who serve as the masters of the complex rituals of institutional power to demand that your child must go and suffer and bleed and kill and die in order to further ensure the continuance of the institutions of political power and in the name of national perseverance is to demand that humans be sacrificed for the good of the nation and its powermongers. For you to believe that you should sacrifice your children for the good of the nation, for its continued existence and power in the face of some existential outside threat is to believe in human sacrifice. When you talk about soldiers and families sacrificing their liberty and their lives for the common good all you’re saying is that you believe in sacrificing human lives for the nation – you are defending, promoting, and honoring human sacrifice. And on a massive scale far bloodier and destructive than anything the ancient Aztecs ever accomplished because this doesn’t even account for the millions of humans sacrifices made when the nation’s military oppresses, bombs, and slaughters others outside the country. Not only are you saying you are willing to sacrifice your own children to the Gods of War when you “support the troops/the military/the nation/the government,” you’re saying you’re okay sacrificing the children of complete strangers on the Altars of War. No wonder Boyd K. Packer compared war to sacrificing people to the bloodthirsty idol Moloch.
But it is not only in war that nations and the people living within them demand human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is the very basis of the law and legal system in a nation-state. Don’t believe me? Just ask Eric Garner, throttled to death by plains cloths police for the dastardly and civilization threatening crime of selling individual cigarettes. Ask George Floyd, throttled to death in the gutter like a mangy rat for the unbearable crime of falling over while stepping off a curb. Ask Philando Castile, murdered like a rabid dog in front of his girlfriend and daughter for putting his hands up. Ask Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man who suffocated because the police beat him so severely it caved in his chest all because he was incapable of remaining absolutely still. Ask Ryan Whittaker, shot down in cold blood while kneeling in his door way in front of the police. The list of people killed by the police is endless. The list of human sacrifices to the God of the Legal System is innumerable. And make no mistake. When you suggest that it is acceptable for anyone to kill another human in order to enforce the artificially constructed thing that is man-made law then you are saying you are okay sacrificing human lives to support it. By saying the sacrifice of human lives is worth what you think the end result is then you are literally engaging in human sacrifice. Just because you aren’t pulling the trigger or locking people in cages personally is irrelevant when you take part in the system that justifies it and does it in your name. Most of the Mexica never swung the sacrificial dagger either. That doesn’t mean they weren’t part of the system of human sacrifice. Neither are you.
How To End Human Sacrifice
Violence is at the core of how the legal system works and reveals the true nature of the legal system for what it is – human sacrifice. Once you understand this truth you’ll begin to see how the entire system itself is based on violence, brutality, and human sacrifice. There is no law so minor that the police will not murder you to enforce it and there is no error so small that those in power will not criminalize it. The end result is that there is no error so unimportant that you cannot be beaten, caged, robbed, and killed for it, i.e. arrested, imprisoned, fined, and killed by the police or other law enforcement agents. In such a system where every decision and action of the government boils down to a choice between obedience or death – submission or be the next human sacrificed to the gods of government – how could one ever morally take part in such brutality? The system itself is violent, corrupt, and evil. Participation in it doesn’t make it better, it only empowers it and corrupts the participant. It is like imagining that you could transform the entire Aztec religion away from human sacrifice while keeping the job of handing the high priest his obsidian knife as he stands over the next victim.
So you have to exit the system.
Just like you would have no hope of reforming the Aztec religion from the inside, no hope of turning Huitzilopochtli into Jesus Christ, you cannot turn the state into something it is not. The state is built upon violence. It maintains itself both at home and abroad through human sacrifice – humans ground to paste under the gears of its military machine and legal system. Its altars are constantly flowing with oppression, violation, and blood. You cannot turn a Beast into something it is not. Your only option is to exit the system entirely. Just as you would refuse the Aztec religion and reject any part of it, you must refuse the state and reject any part of it. A good first step is to refuse to vote, to refuse to hand the priest at the altar the obsidian dagger he needs to slay his next victim.
You must reject the false doctrines and lies the government feeds you as the propaganda they really are. This can be especially difficult since we are indoctrinated into these false doctrines from childhood (especially through public – state directed – education) and are constantly surrounded by the idols of the government. Relentlessly we find the religion of the state pounded into our minds and our souls. But it is essential that we recognize these false doctrines, these propaganda lies fed to us to weaken us and make us subservient, some of which Gornoski names below:
We’ve devised myths – social contract theories, the will of the people, majority rule, the thin blue line, and so on – to justify feeding them [governments and nations] more sacrificial victims. We see their political figureheads as capstones – vicarious figures by which we collectively experience a sacred body to which we belong. We ritually cast out figureheads – High Priests of a labyrinthine complex of regulatory rituals – that wear out their sacred welcome in a ritual we call voting. And we anonymously cast out, through plunder and sometimes blood, rule breakers who violate regulations – vestiges of rites of valor, sacred games, and taboos that accompanied our archaic sacrificial origins.
You’ll notice the foundational myths that justify human sacrifice to the gods of the nation listed above. The myth of majority rule, as if slavery were moral simply because the majority agreed upon it. The myth of the will of the people, as if the individuals within national boundaries were one homogeneous and mindless blob and the beliefs of such a homunculus justified anything. The myth that the opinion of the majority should be forced on the minority, as if that isn’t simply tyranny by another name. The myth of the thin blue line, as if the murderous enforcers of the oppressively laws of the state were anything other than jackbooted thugs carrying out the rituals of human sacrifice one billy club, bullet, and body at a time. You could add many others – the myth of patriotisms, the myth of nationalism, the myth of collectivism, the myth of Socialism, all are examples of the other myths used to justify human sacrifice to the gods of government.
Gornoski’s demolishing of the myth of the social contract is particularly succinct and enjoyable:
Some justify violence by pointing out that modern states have a social contract. But the social contract is just a socially contracted disease called crowd deception. It’s contagious which means it’s hard for us to find a place on Earth where it hasn’t infected the minds of those living there. Yet it is not even a contract because it is not an agreement based on mutual consent. And it is not social: prohibited vices hide and intensify in an undercurrent of envy and resentment.
But it isn’t enough merely to reject the lies of the state. One of the biggest falsehoods people have been indoctrinated with is the belief that government and statism (“state-ism”) are the same thing. They believe that the only way that governments can function is through violence, by human sacrifice. The only principles they know are the principles of the state. They have been indoctrinated to believe the myth that if a government cannot beat you, cage you, rob you, assault you, or kill you then it cannot function and the results of that would be unending mass chaos. So they have to be educated in the truth. You have to help them understand that the state and government are not synonyms and just because you get rid of the former does not mean you lose the latter. You have to explain to them how the methods and principles of consensual government can not only replace the state, but that consensual governments actually function better than statist governments. Take for example the way that consensual, non-statists policing and courts function. It is not enough to merely teardown what is, you have to give them a vision of the better tomorrow that would exist without the state. It will take time, deprogramming people from cults can take years, but it is possible. If it weren’t then none of us would have discovered the truth, that there are ways to successfully order society other than by human sacrifice.
Final Thoughts
Like Huitzilopochtli, without the sacrifice of human blood and human bodies, the great monster of the State will starve and die. The way forward is profound, yet simple. Refuse to become an ideological vector for the religion of human sacrifice and all its various gods (America, Mexico, France, Britain, China, Japan, etc.), recognize the propaganda for what it is, and speak the truth to everyone who will listen. These combined with being unwilling to take part in the political system of human sacrifice will do more to reveal it for what it is, demonstrate its oppressive nature, and help others to discover and become converted to the truth of peaceful and free societies based upon consensual government than most other things you can do and will strike at the very foundation of the system itself. As this happens the truth spreads, the monster is starved, and the religion of human sacrifice will collapse, abandoned like all the other false religions and bad ideas of humanity’s past.