The Hitler-obsessed gunman who murdered a Canadian tourist and wounded 13 others at an ancient Mexican temple apparently tried to recreate the gory rituals of the ancient people who built it nearly 2,000 years ago.
“Don’t move or I will sacrifice you,” 27-year-old Julio César Jasso was heard shouting in a video taken by one of his hostages, who huddled on the platform of the 43-meter-high Pyramid of the Moon in the ruined city of Teotihuacan on Monday.
Teotihuacan—once the largest civilization in the Americas before collapsing around 600 AD—began construction of the Moon Pyramid around 100 AD, in honor of the city’s eponymous goddess of water and fertility.
Over the centuries, new temples were built on top of the old ones, with treasures, animals and foreign prisoners buried in each layer of earth and stone.
Archaeologists have unearthed skeletons with their hands apparently tied behind their backs, which had been decapitated or had spear wounds.
Chemical signatures suggest that these victims were brought in from far reaches of Central America.
The people who inhabited it believed that Teotihuacan was 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 that the debt to the gods was paid. People helped make the sun rise,” said David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who helped excavate parts of the pyramid.
But if the Moon Pyramid bled – as Jasso might have imagined – it happened a long time ago – centuries before the Aztecs settled Teotihuacan around 1300 CE.
The Aztecs revered the city as a sacred site, but there is no evidence they sacrificed people there, Carballo said.
Not that the Aztecs themselves did not practice blood sacrifices in other parts of their civilization; in fact, they’ve taken it up a notch.
“The Aztecs seem to have taken it to a militarized level. They had an incentive system where you had no honor in killing someone on the battlefield. You were supposed to capture people,” Carballo said.
Carballo does not believe modern theories that claim that the entire concept of human sacrifice was created by the Spanish to portray indigenous peoples as bloodthirsty savages.
On the other hand, he said that the Teotihuacanos, the Aztecs or any other Mesoamerican people 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 say, ‘Rome is civilized, the Aztecs are not.’ Education was compulsory in Aztec society. Women had a much higher social status than in Europe at the time. These are the other sides that are not often covered in popular media stories.”
