You must log in or # to comment.
Someone at the evil empire noted that this was by “Jose Ignacio Redondo,” but I’m still not sure.
What does stand out is that there might be slight racial-agenda overtones here, with the victim being so much lighter-skinned, and the priests unusually course-faced in nature. If I didn’t know better, it seems like there might be a distinctly Christian-type influence in striving to depict this situation as barbaric and savage, which of course, it could be argued as being such, anyway. Just that there might be an agenda here.
Definitely there’s a Christian vibe in both posture and theme, but at the left, the man holding the victim’s hand is showing compassion, they are looking at each other’s eyes, and the earlier shows grief in his facial expression. The way he holds his arm and hand is gentle, and he is placed in a lower position than the victim. In fact, all three men holding him are genuflecting, denoting reverence for what is happening rather than glee, with somber faces.
I want to consider this a case where they tried to add more light to the victim and it backfired, but it is true that often Aztec’s human sacrifice practices were used to handwave the terrible acts done by the European colonists.
rather than glee
Well… there is absolutely no reason for glee in this ceremony if one understands the bare basics.
I agree with most of what you say, but to my eye those are some very weird-looking “Aztecs,” almost as if they were being depicted as Africans for some reason. And not exactly handsome ones, at that. No, this and this (etc) are much closer to what I’d expect them to look like, not unlike their modern descendants.
What you suggest might be true, but the depiction still reeks to me of agenda.
Couldn’t they have given him a wider surface to lay on? That looks uncomfortable.
It’s probably this lack of attention to ergonomic issues that ultimately lead to their downfall.
He has deeper cutting problems than the surface he’s being held down on.
Were sacrifices ever willing? Movies always show them as captives but i can see people getting into it and offering themselves.
I’m not an expert on the region or period, but I believe they were usually war captives. The Aztecs ritually made war on their vassals, with those captured in combat sacrificed afterwards. The Aztecs believed being sacrificed like this was a great honor, but it apparently was not quite so popular amongst the vassals.
Now i realize how ignorant of history i am. Did more peaceful civs have human sacrifice too, or was it a “war tribe” thing?
I think human sacrifice in general was a common practice of the region (and, honestly, of many regions of the world - even the Romans noted, with distaste, a history of human sacrifice in Italy), but basically no one around them even came close to the scale or regularity of Aztec human sacrifice, which was done to the tune of thousands of victims yearly.
