The Hitler-obsessed gunman who murdered a Canadian tourist and wounded 13 others at an ancient Mexican temple apparently was trying to recreate the gory rituals of the ancient people who built it nearly 2,000 years ago.“Don’t move, or I’ll sacrifice you,” Julio César Jasso, 27, could be heard shouting in a video taken by one of his hostages, who huddled on the platform on the 140-foot-tall Pyramid of the Moon in the ruined city of Teotihuacan.Teotihuacan — once the grandest civilization in the Americas before its collapse around 600 CE — began building the Moon Pyramid around 100 CE, in honor of the city’s namesake goddess of water and fertility.
Over the centuries, new temples were built on top of the old, with treasure, animals, and foreign captives interred in each layer of earth and stone.
Archaeologists have unearthed skeletons with their hands apparently bound behind their backs, who were decapitated or had spear wounds.
Chemical signatures suggest these victims were brought in from far-flung reaches of Central America.
Teotihuacan was believed by the people who inhabited it to be the birthplace of time itself, where the gods sacrificed themselves to create the sun and moon and set them in motion.
“[Human sacrifice] kept the cycles of creation going, and the debt to the gods paid. People were helping to keep the sun rising,” said David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who helped excavate parts of the pyramid.
But if the Moon Pyramid ran with blood — as Jasso may have envisioned — it happened a long, long time ago — centuries before the Aztecs settled in Teotihuacan around 1300 C.E.
The Aztecs revered the city as a sacred place, but there is no evidence they sacrificed people there, Carballo said.
Not that the Aztecs didn’t make blood offerings of their own in other parts of their civilization — in fact, they kicked it up a notch.
“The Aztecs seem to have taken it to a militarized level. They had this incentive system where you had no credit for killing someone on the battlefield. You were supposed to take people captive,” Carballo said.
Carballo doesn’t believe modern theories that claim the whole concept of human sacrifice was cooked up by the Spaniards to paint native peoples as bloodthirsty savages.
On the other hand, he said the Teotihuacanos, Aztecs, or any other Mesoamerican peoples were no more bloodthirsty than, say, the Romans — who crucified prisoners en masse or slaughtered them in the Colosseum.
“I don’t look at Rome and the Aztecs and go, ‘Rome is civilized, the Aztecs aren’t.’ There was compulsory schooling in Aztec society. Women were much higher social status than in Europe at the time. These are the other sides that don’t often get told in popular media narratives.”
