The Harvest of Souls: Mimesis, Materiality, and Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica

Summary

The art and science of ritual human sacrifice is a fundamental axiom of Mesoamerican social violence. Accordingly, interpretive constructs for human heart excision and ritualized dismemberment remain keyed to synchronic ethnohistorical and iconographic frames of reference or practice. Though ritual dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism have been traced to remote antiquity in highland Mesoamerica, the cosmological underpinnings of human heart excision, and its corollary technologies of terror, have yet to be fully interrogated in terms of naturalistic metaphors and agricultural mimesis. This paper reviews those cosmological constructs and agricultural metaphors instrumental to the formation and validation of Mesoamerican ritual human sacrifice. As such, this study explores those agricultural metaphors identified with (a) the planting of tzompantli skull banners, (b) human heart excision, and (c) blood tribute or autosacrifice. I hereby contend that Mesoamerican agricultural practices constitute the instrumental inspiration for ritual decapitation, the installation of skull banners, and their identification with the cleft-earth ball courts of creation. This interpretive schema is operationalized via botanical metaphors identified with maguey castration, and the extraction of the agave heart and its “blood” as a corollary dimension of mimesis that fueled the ideology of human heart excision at the dawn of the Mesoamerican Classic era.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Human Sacrifice in Ancient Mesoamerica: New Evidences and Theoretical Perspectives

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