Human Sacrifice and Other Delights

You don't have to be an intellectual who reads Adorno or even a rocket scientist to know that motherfuckers have been killing eachother in the rudest ways for millenia and saying to themselves "I'm just doing what God wants me to do" to feel better about it, in terms of their delicate consciences. 

 When Mel Gibson put out "Apocalypto" in 2006 he went out of his way to inform the X-tian West that the subjugated people of our continent were horrible savages who practiced the evils of human sacrifice before we enlightened them with God's only true religion. In fact, in narrative terms, it's only the arrival of the Spanish ships that spares our hero from certain doom at the hands of his fellow Indians who only wish to destroy him.

The white god pulls the strings and retells the story, canceling historical facts which are either aesthetically or politically unappealing to him.

Quetzalcoatl (the 10th century Maya king, not the god depicted above for whom he was named ) actually outlawed human sacrifice, echoing ahimsa, the Hindu/Buddhist concept on non-violence which includes vegetarianism and refraining from human or animal sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl was said to have disappeared over the waves on a raft of snakes, brokenhearted and defeated...but where did he go?

If he tried to run from men murdering one another with the name of God on their lips, he couldn't have gotten too fucking far. The end of human sacrifice in Maya culture was not the end of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica, though it was a step towards the empathy Christians at least preached, if not actually practiced. The Aztecs (not the Maya, Mel) spilled oceans of blood as their little world came to an end at the hands of Iberian gold prospectors. But was their crime any more foul than others before or after?

For the sake of argument, let us take the white god at his word for a moment.  Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, has claimed that the 1487 rededication of the pyramid of Tenochtitlan ( aka Mexico fucking city, guero) claimed the lives of 80,000 ritually sacrificed victims. Let's just say that this factually questionable claim, which is just about the most severe condemnation of "Aztec savagery" extant in modern academic literature IS TRUE. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it really happened, that the Aztecs were murdering that many people for the gods, what about the civilized world?

The firebombing of Tokyo, to just pick a name out of the hat, which was engineered specifically to take advantage of the city's wood architecture, killed between 100,000 and 1 million Japanese in March of 1945. Between 100,000 and 1 million Japanese dead. The white American and colonized Hawaiian death toll at Pearl Harbor was 2,403. That's an increased death toll of 25 to 1. An undoubtedly brutally vengeful mathematical ratio. But America most certainly had God on our side in WWII, didn't we? Harry Truman referred to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "weapon(s) in the arsenal of righteousness." If murder of noncombatants in the name of righteousness is not "human sacrifice" then the words "human sacrifice" have no meaning whatsoever.

Imagine your obnoxious corny parents saying to you: "Oh sure, if your friends jumped of a bridge, would you do it too?" Ok, well let's be real for just a moment: If god told you to kill someone, would you do it? That's a William Blake painting, btw. You should check him out. 

On the topic of things that you don't understand and are scary as fuck, which is to say, the concept of God sanctioning murder and destruction, William Blake wrote "Tyger, Tyger" in 1794, some 200 years before it became the first poem that 6 or 7 year old little me ever read out loud of his own volition. "Tyger, Tyger" asks whether "he who made the lamb" could even create something so terrible and deadly as the tiger in question.  Which begs the question, if the gore-drenched Aztec priests at Tenochtitlan were, as the horrified Christians claimed, in fact offering souls to the Dark Lord, in whose name was the "arsenal of righteousness" loosed upon half a million civilians in Tokyo? Jehovah? Or Moloch? Or Beelzebub? 

  I challenge you right now, in front of God, to read the poem out loud to yourself and tell me it sucks:

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?