[Source: Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness By James A. Haught; Prometheus Books]
It boggles the modern mind to realize that, in some past cultures dominated by religion and priests, people sent their children to be strangled, beheaded, burned, drowned, skinned, crushed, and otherwise killed as appeasement offerings to gods now known to be imaginary.
Human sacrifice seems insane in retrospect, but it was routine to people taught endlessly to dread feathered-serpent gods, invisible crop gods, unseen goddesses of destruction, and the like. The slaughter wasn't confined to Old Testament times, but reached a heyday relatively recently in the elaborate Mayan, Incan, and Aztec societies of Latin America and the Thuggee cult of India.
Over the centuries, sacrifice had many varieties. In ancient Phoenicia, boys were burned to satisfy Adonis and other gods--and the fall of Carthage was blamed on the faithlessness of nobles who substituted children of slaves for their own on altars. In ancient Gaul, the Druids allegedly put victims into large wicker figures of men and set them afire. In Tibet, Bon shamans performed ritual killing. In Africa, the Ashanti offered about 100 victims each September to assure a good yam harvest. In Borneo, builders of pile-houses drove the first pile through the body of a maiden to pacify the earth goddess.
The golden age of sacrifice came with highly organized theocracies in Central America. After the Mayans amalgamated with fierce neighbor tribes in the 11th century, ritual killings proliferated to appease the plumed serpent Kulkucan (later called Quetzalcoatl by the Aztecs) and sundry other gods. Maidens were drowned in sacred wells, and other victims were beheaded, shot with arrows, or had their hearts cut out.
In Peru, pre-Inca tribes killed children in "houses of the moon." Beginning in the 1200s, the Incas built a complex theocracy dominated by preists who read daily magical signs and offered sacrifices to many gods. At major cermonies, up to 200 children were burned as offerings. Mothers brought their darlings dressed in finery and flowers to be put to death. Special "chosen women"--comely virgins without blemish--sometimes were removed from their temple duties and strangled. Local rulers sent choice daughters to the capital at Cuzco as chosen women. Later they were sent back to be buried alive.
The ultimate murder religion was that of the Aztecs , which demanded about 20,000 victims per year. The chief deity was the sun [Huitzilopochtli], which might disappear, priests warned, without daily sustenance of hearts and blood. Multitudes of victims, mostly prisoners of war, were held on stone altars by clergy who ripped out their hearts with obsidian knives. Flesh from their arms was eaten ritually, and their skulls were preserved on racks holding as many as 10,000 heads. Raids called "wars of the flowers" were conducted to seize plentiful sacrifice candidates.
Priests also killed many Aztecs. Weeping children were sacrificed so that their tears might induce the rain god to water the crops. To please the maize goddess, dancing virgins were seized, decapitated, and skinned--and their skins were worn by priests in continued dancing.
In 1487, when the great Aztec temple in Tenochtitlan was dedicated, eight teams of priests worked four days sacrificing 20,000 prisoners, the entire manpower of three captured tribes.
This classic era of sacrifice ended when conquering Spaniards destroyed the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec civilizations. The Spanish forcibly converted most of these peoples to Christianity--occasionally burning backsliders--but traces of the old gods and sacrifice lingered. As late as 1868 an Indian boy was sacrificed in Chiapas.
In the Far East, five different types of human sacrifice were halted by British rulers in the 1800s. One was the yearly meriah by the Khonds of Bengal, who cut a victim into small pieces and buried the fragments in many fields to assure a good harvest. Another was a weekly rite by certain followers of the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Kali who sacrificed a male child every Friday evening at a shrine in Tanjore, India.
A third was the Hindu code of suttee, which required a widow to leap onto her dead husband's funeral pyre, willingly or unwillingly. The British banned it in 1829, but it persisted. (When Brahmans of Sind protested that suttee was their holy custom, Governor Charles Napier replied: "My nation also has a custom: When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national customs.")
In Burma, the Buddhist king moved the captial to Mandalay in 1854 and sanctified the new city walls by burying scores of "spotless" men alive in vats under the gates and bastions. In 1861, two of the vats were discovered to be empty--whereupon royal astrologers declared that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned. About 100 were actually buried before British authorities stopped the cermonies.
The worst holy slaughter halted by the British was the infamous Thuggee strangling in India. For generations, certain secretive followers of Kali, the goddess of destruction, had been ritually dispatching an estimated 20,000 victims a year. The toll since the 1500's was estimated as high as 2 million. Thug theology held that Brahma the Creator produced new lives faster than Shiva the Destroyer could end them, so Shiva's wife Kali commanded believers to hunt humans and garrote them with sashes.
Thugs usually preyed upon travelers in unpopulated places. Victims were seized, strangled, ceremonially gashed, and buried--then the Thugs ate a ritual meal over the burial spot. (They also plundered the victim's possessions--another motive for their religious ferver.) British officers finally broke Thuggee by ferreting out 3,689 cultists and hanging or imprisoning them, or branding them with "Thug" as a public warning. At a trial in 1840, one Thug was accused of strangling 931 people.
Other sacrifices lingered. In the 1800s an Ashanti king in Africa, wishing to make his new palace impregnable, sacrificed 200 girls and mixed their blood in the mortar of the walls. In 1838 a Pawnee American Indian girl was cut to pieces to fertilize new crops. During the late 1800s, bodies of sacrificed children occasionally were found at Kali shrines in India. During a Russian famine in the 1890s, a dozen Votiaks were sentenced to life imprisonment for hanging a victim upside down in a tree and tearing out his heart to appease the earth god Kourbane.
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