Musings

            Everybody knows the story of the Conquest of the Americas. Everybody. Go on, ask the guy next to you what happened. Unless he's a genuine scholar of history, chances are he (or she, if you are asking a woman) will tell you a sob story about how the big mean Spaniards destroyed and subjugated the poor, innocent little Aztecs.

            We all know that. The Spaniards were the bad guys, the Aztecs were the good guys. But for some weird reason...I don't think we really believe that.

            Fantasy books show us the truth.

            As a long-time reader of fantasy, I enjoy the sword-and-sorcery epics where the hero has to knock over some evil cult which practices human sacrifice. And I have noticed that most of these evil cults take their cues from exactly one of the numerous civilizations that has, in the long history of Mankind, practiced human sacrifice.

            And that civilization is the Aztecs: the gory cutting-out of still-beating hearts.

            Fans of D&D will probably realize the Aztec connection to the Drow. And in the marvelous two-series epic by David Eddings, the Belgariad and the Mallorean, the evil god Torak is worshiped in a similar fashion. I cannot instantly think of a human-sacrifice-making fantasy cult that does not do so. If you can, tell me.

            (I do realize that certain fictional tribes make their sacrifices by offering nubile maidens to monstrous beasts, but I am not certain that has any real connections to historic human sacrifice. I will not touch on the sanctified ground of the Colosseum here.)

            This has me rather puzzled. After all, in our five-thousand-plus-years of history, mankind has come up with some creative ways to offer their sacrifices to the angry gods. The simplest method, of course, was to simply chuck the victim into the 'dwelling place' of the god in question, whether it was a volcano, the sea, a river prone to flooding, or a deep green well built for the purpose.

            The Druids were very straightforward: they slit their victims' throats. Their near cousins, the worshipers of Nordic gods, were also straightforward. Odin accepted offerings of hanged men. Some gods—Freya apparently one of them—took victims drowned in peat bogs. The Life-Tree, Yggdrasil, took victims left to bleed to death in its branches. There were also weirder cults, like the one that involved filling a giant wicker figure with living victims and then setting the whole thing on fire. Incas seemed more likely to bash their 'Chosen Ones' on the head.

            Babies were buried alive beneath ancient strongholds so that their lives would bring strength and protection to the building. They were thrown into deep pits as 'sacrifices' to the health and strength of the culture. And of course, all across Mesopotamia and parts of Africa, wherever Phoenicia came and brought its goods and its gods, infants were burned alive by the thousands as offerings to Baal, Moloch, Astarte, and the rest of the bloodthirsty pantheon.

            So I ask again: with all these colorful and gruesome means offered to us by history, why do our writers draw from the customs of one relatively small, upstart tribe? I have a few theories.

            First off, the Aztecs were famous, not only for their method, but also for their number of sacrifices. Several thousand victims were offered—sometimes in a single day. The worshipers of Moloch and Baal did this as well, but when blazing flames consume the bodies, the scale may not immediately be obvious. When you're constantly dumping blood-splashing corpses down steep temple steps, it's a little more so.

            The second thing is just how grippingly awful the Aztec sacrifices were. While being burned alive is probably more painful, and the idea of falling into a lava lake makes your skin crawl, for sheer horror factor, it's hard to beat the thought of having your heart ripped out of your chest while it's still beating. I'm pretty sure none of us would enjoy such a spectacle—well, unless you're a psycho addicted to death-torture porn—or want it to happen to us.

            There's also how dramatic, and graphic, they were. There was an element of secrecy to the other acts: the Druids tended to do their throat-slitting at night, in deep, shrouded groves. The temples of Moloch were enclosed places, lit only by the sacrificial fires. Most of them hid the truth of what they did from the rest of the world, at least in some way. Not so the Aztecs. They performed their gory rites in broad daylight, at the top of pyramids, for all to see—and often insisted that, yes, all must see.

            But finally, my thought is simply that we hate lies. And the infamous Black Legend about the Spanish Conquest is nothing more than a lie. The English, who hated the Spanish, spread this propaganda about them to make themselves look better. (The truth is that the English attitude toward other nations was responsible for the whole sorry treatment of the Indians during the American Expansion.) There were jerks among the Conquistadors, I won't deny that. Francisco Pizarro, for instance, was truly a piece of work.

            Cortez, on the other hand, was not. Yes, he fought the Axtecs, and yes, in the end there was not one stone left on another in Tenochtitlan. But he fought to save the smaller Mexican tribes from the Aztecs, who were the nastiest oppressors Mesoamerica had ever seen. Cortez was the good guy—a hero in the face of unbelievable obstacles. You won't find that in your average history book.

            But you will find that truth whispered, hinted dimly at, in sword-and-sorcery fantasy. Because, after all, that's what all worthy fantasy is: a way to whisper at truths the world refuses to hear.