04 - Human Sacrifice by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

In this intriguing essay, Lord Acton responds to the exchange of letters between Sir Robert Peel and Lord Macaulay, aiming to challenge the widely held belief that human sacrifice was solely the practice of barbaric and uncivilized societies. Acton argues that in some instances, such rituals may stem from sophisticated theological developments. At the urging of Lord Stanhope, Acton‚s thought-provoking piece was published in the Home and Foreign Review in 1863. Summary by Jeff Allen.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part four of Human Sacrifice. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Jeff Allen. Human Sacrifice by John Emirich Edward Dalber.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Part four. The most perfect spectacle of the natural development
of human sacrifice is afforded by America for during fifteen
centuries after the birth of Christ, and probably for as
long a period before, the gods of idolatry retained their
authority unmolested by those influences which in the Old World

(00:45):
interrupted or altered the progress of paganism, such as the
contact of nations not equally civilized, the rise of commerce,
philosophy and political freedom, the presence of a chosen people,
and the action of month theism, polytheism, and pantheism upon
each other. The people of the New World, separated from

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the rest of mankind, lived for ages on their original
stock of religious ideas, which they, with persevering consistency, pushed
to their extremest consequences. There is no other example of
a civilized people whose religion was abandoned in tie away
to the action of its own laws, without the restraint

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of literature or speculation, and therefore without any recorded theological
reform such as those of Buddha and Zoaaster, or philosophical
opposition like that of Socrates or Zeno. Here, then the
natural history of human sacrifice may be most distinctly traced

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from its conjectual origin to a development which is far
beyond the last extreme ever reached in the regions of
the Eastern Hemisphere. The multitude and variety of phenomena supplied
by the universality of the custom and its tendency to
indefinite increase, render the study easy. So strictly do the

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essential qualities of American pagotism correspond with those of the
Old World that they have been justly quoted as a
proof of original unity. They both display the remnants of
the same primitive traditions acting on the same human nature,
and the different stages of American civilization resemble each other
far less closely than they resemble the corresponding stages of

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the civilization of the other continents. The similarity is not external,
imported or artificial, but the spontaneous fruit of similar principles
and a common origin. Those facts which broadly divide the
society of America from that of the rest of mankind,
and prove how early the separation must have been effected.

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The absence of domestic animals and the ignorance of the
past are the same which most deeply marked the character
of their religious worship. This shows that the continent was
not peopled by the nomads who inhabit Eastern Asia, for
they from time immemorial have had flocks and herds, and

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have known the use of iron, which was first made
known in America by the European adventurers. The conquistadors found
some civilized states surrounded by savage tribes of hunters and fishermen,
but without the intermediate phase of pastoral life. This is
the great feature that gives its peculiar character to their

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form of worship, as well as to their whole existence.
Without the domestication of animals, the tribes of the New
World lacked that powerful instrument for softening the wild nature
of man, which is not only a division of labour
and an economy of strength, but a perpetual occasion for
the exercise of self control and unbought kindness. The Indian

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knew dumb animals only as food, and pursued them only
to destroy them. His wars were as ferocious as his
treatment of animals, for he could not learn in the
violence of war fear the lesson of humanity, which was
never taught him in ordinary life. As the Indians had
no domestic animals, so they had no slaves, they killed

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their prisoners just as they killed the beast they caught.
To men whose means of existence were so precarious, every
additional mouth to be fed added to their difficulty. Their
enemies were put to death for the same reason which
made a Pennsylvania chief at the end of the last century.
Foresee their own extinction. The white man lives on green,

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and we on flesh. This flesh takes thirty months to grow,
and it is often hard to find. But every one
of those wonderful seeds they sow into the earth returns
them more than one hundredfold. The flesh on which we
live has four legs to run away upon, and we
have only two to catch it with. But the seeds

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remains where it is sown. That is why the white
men has more children and lives longer than we. Therefore,
I say before the cedars of our village are dead,
and the maple trees in the valley cease to yield sugar,
the little race of the sowers of grain will have
exterminated the race of the eaters of meat unless the

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hunters begin to sow. Every war threatened them with starvation.
They had no time to spare from the pursuit of game.
No idlers could stay at home and provide them with food,
nothing which the woman could prepare. When many of them
came together to fight an enemy, the places through which

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they passed did not contain food enough for their number,
even if they had had time to catch it. They
were therefore compelled to make the war support them, and
to live upon what they could get from their enemies.
But these were in the same plight, and the conquerors
could obtain nothing but the bodies of the captives and
the slain. In this extremity. In very early times, famine

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soon taught the hunter, whose food was all flesh, and
who deemed all animal flesh eatable, that there was no
specific difference between that of man and beast. Thus, in
time of war and scarcity, the hunter becomes by easy
stages a cannibal. Hunger is, however, but a temporary and

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local cause of the cannibalism which may be shown to
have existed in early times throughout the continent. Other inducements
would be required in order to make it a general
and permanent custom, even in times of peace and plenty.
The first step was to regard cannibalism as the natural
mode of disposing of a slaughtered enemy. After it had

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been done, often when there was reason for it, and
done with some solemnity and rejoicing by men flushed with
victory and with the excitement of danger and bloodshed, they
became unwilling to forego the same festivity when there was
no necessity and no provocation but the presence of the captive.
The idea of feasting on the body of the enemy

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was not easily dissociated from success in war, and even
in places where there was an abundance of vegetable food,
captives and strangers were eaten as an act of vengeance
and retaliation. It spread from those who had done it
from necessity to those whom the splendid vegetation of tropical
America preserved from such necessity. Hence we find the practice

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confined in some cases to prisoners. When the Spaniards in
fifteen twenty eight, driven to extremity by famine, devoured their
dead comrades. The natives of Florida were filled with horror
at the site, though they would have rejoiced to eate
an enemy. On the other hand, we find it unusual
among the inhabitants of very fertile countries. The idea of

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revenge superseded the condition of hunger, and the idea of
sacrifice preserved the custom even in peaceful times. It was
natural to give the gods the same food which was
eaten by their worshipers. They were supposed to have the
same tastes as men, and human flesh had become a
luxury that those who had first eaten it from necessity.

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That which was eaten in moments of victory and with
a sense of triumph was especially suited for an oblation
to the spirits. Thus it became a regular habit to
offer to the gods the flesh of slaughtered captives, and
this custom is the vast background of the human sacrifices
of America. In some cases, as among Caribees, cannibalism long

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survived the sacrifice of human victims. But even here it
is certain that the custom formerly subsisted in other places.
And this is the great fact in the history of
human sacrifice in Central America. Cannibalism had long been extinct
in ordinary life, when it was still preserved as a
part of the religious rites. But if human sacrifice in

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America sprang from cannibalism and owed its extension to the
scarcity of animals, it did not disappear with the progress
of civilization and wealth. The Pawnees, who according to Gallatin,
were among the gentlest of the Indians, and who never
tortured their prisoners, nevertheless offered up a human victim annually

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at sowing time to secure a good harvest. We find
instances of captives who were killed and eaten without any
religious ceremony whatever, but were nevertheless treated with extraordinary kindness,
down to the moment of a quick and painless death.
In Brazil, the prisoner was entertained for a year, a

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wife was given him, and not a word of unkindness
was spoken to him till he was killed and eaten.
A neighboring tribe considered this not as an act of enmity,
but as an affectionate favor. They abominated those who ate
their enemies, but they killed and ate their own relations
when they saw that their end was approaching. Among the

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South American Indians, the temptation to cannibalism was so strong
that the Spanish officers felt obliged to permit even the
baptized tribes to kill and devour their enemies. The human
sacrifices of the Americas were various in intention. In its
lowest form, the right was meant to supply the dead

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with the blood for which they thirsted. The torture of
captives was intended as an expiation for the slain, and
was in some cases a substitute for ancient sacrifices. The
gods too had their share of the booty and of
the captives amongst the rest, but the idea of the
enjoyment that gods derived from the sacrifice was utterly material

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and sensual. The Iroquois prayed to Ariovski that he would
eat the flesh of the victim and reward them with victory.
In Florida, the firstborn child was sacrificed to the sun,
and one of the Peruvian tribes always immolated the first
child of every mother. On the Missouri. These sacrifices have

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occurred even in the present century. In early times, this
Syrian rite was performed all over Central America. In Chile,
they sacrificed the favorite child on every urgent occasion hey
Ortra detestable, circumstantia k munda, bien la especi del pacado

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e ace quesillo for aeos, pregantado, escosa de muchesima, importansia
metidos in Aquela, Escira, estancia biguelin Rijolo, masamato Ola, espaciosa ninya,
and sacrificio para tener al idiolo propisio. The most exalted

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instance of human sacrifice in the legends of the Indian
tribes is that of the American Epigenia Hiawatha's daughter, who
perished to save Onodagas. But the great extension of human
sacrifice in America did not take place among ignorant savages
or thriftless hunters or hungry cannibals. It was the act

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of the Mexicans, the most humane, the most highly civilized,
and the most prosperous of all the races that inhabited
the continent. It was the result not of degradation, but
of extraordinary moral energy and fidelity to religious conviction. Instead
of being an extension of a national cannibalism, it preserved

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in the service of the temples the practice which the
refined and wealthy people had otherwise long discarded. Far from
being prompted by revenge, it was a mode of death,
often chose as in honor by the noblest of the people.
It was not an act of cruelty, for the death
was as prompt as possible, and in certain cases the

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victim was feasted and venerated for months before his death.
Almost all the degrading accessories, all the mixture of other
than purely spiritual elements, which were inseparable from human sacrifice
in the rest of the world, were things unknown to
those ceremonials of Central America, which have greatly been called

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the most tremendous religious drama in the whole of paganism.
The scale on which the rite was performed distinguishes it
not in proportions merely, but in kind from all other
oblations of human victims, like the Hyperboreans, the Tartars, and
the Romans in the circus. They did not merely give

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their children, like the worshippers of Moloch or their captives.
Like most savage tribes, the occasion was not as among
the Greeks some actual guilt to be atoned or some
particular expiation to be commemorated. Their sacrifices included all kinds
of human victims, their own children, their nobles who freely volunteered,

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and prisoners en masse. They were constant and regular, and
the number of the victims was the very largest which
it is possible to supply. The idea from which they
sprung was that of original universal sinfulness, a guilt which
the most enormous sacrifices could hardly wipe away, a chasm

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between man and the Divinity which the very utmost efforts
would not do more than fill up. This notion of
the necessity of a universal atonement were a guilt inherited
and not incurred, independent of all actual sin, expeable only
in infinite time by the incessant immolation of men, on

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a scale which must need always increase until it must
have eventually terminated in a sort of national suicide. Was
unknown to the paganism of antiquity, and was in one
respect a deeper view of religion than the Gentiles had
hitherto attained. But there was another idea vaguely present in
the minds of the ancients, but utterly lost to the Mexicans,

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the idea that all sacrifice is insufficient, that its merit
can only be that it symbolizes, or prefigures, or commemorates
a perfect and divine sacrifice, and that it is a
sign of spiritual efforts of the soul. Hence, the stress
and value of their sacrifice was in the ritual alone.

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It was not a sign, but the actual purchase money
of human redemption. Its merit was in quantity and accumulation.
In the Mexican sacrifices, Paganism exhausted and confounded itself in
a way exactly opposite to that by which it reached
its end in the ancient world, where religion lost its

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power over men, partly through the intellectual opposition of philosophy
and partly through the moral degradation of society, and was
neither believed in nor obeyed. But the Aztecs were a
strange contrast to the Greeks and Romans. They united the
simple credulity of the Homeric age with the moral strength
of the Stoics, so far from abandoning their religion. It

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continually exacted larger sacrifices, which they willingly made. No claims
of the gods staggered their faithfulness or their zeal. They
did not fall into the extremes of ferocity or sensuality.
They still believed in their gods with a primitive sincerity,
and testified to their belief with an increasing submissiveness and earnestness.

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And yet this energetic consistency in their heathen practices would
have ended in the depopulation of the country, containing a
form of worship more contrary to nature and more constant
with the schemes of Hell than the most infamous aberrations
of declining Hellenism. If in the Old World paganism was

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confuted by the intellectual capacity of the Greeks, it may
be said that it was reduced to absurdity in the
New World by the moral energy of the Mexicans. Garcilasso
has induced many to believe that the gentle government of
the Incas extinguished human sacrifice in Peru, but in fact,

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although it was diminished and regulated, it still survived. The
mildness of the customs did not mitigate the practice any
more than Saturn's golden rain prevented him from being the
special god who was pleased with human victims. The worship
of the Sun, with which human sacrifice was connected throughout
Central America, prevailed also in Peru. At the accession of

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an inca, great numbers of children were buried alive at
the death of another, one thousand persons were immolated, and
one of the incas sacrificed his own son in the
hope of recovering his health. Yet, unquestionably there was in
Peru of restraining and opposing influence, And among the Aztecs

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alone did human sacrifice flourish without any symptom of fear
or shame or loathing among the people or the kings.
All the forms of human sacrifice prevailed in Mexico. The
innocent were put to death as the most precious oblation
to the idol. Men of rank selected this mode of death,

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sometimes for the good of the people, sometimes as an
honor to themselves. Some victims of great distinction were identified
with the god to whom they were to be sacrificed,
and represented his death by their own Decorated with the
insignia of the Sun. They led a life of luxury
and ease, and were invoked by the people as powerful means,

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until with great ceremony they were slain before the idols.
The wives and children of the nobles were often buried
in their graves. When the victims had no special merit individually,
they gained importance by their numbers, and when this principle
was once admitted, it followed inevitably that the numbers ever
continued to increase. Any diminution in the quantity of victims

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would be an explanation of the anger of the gods,
and the successes of Cortes were actually attributed to the
relaxation in the zeal with which victims were supplied by Montezuma.
In reality, there was no diminution, except from the exhausted
supply of captives, of whom his immediate predecessor had made

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a wasteful slaughter in ordinary years. At the most probable estimate,
twenty five hundred human victims perished at Mexico. The skulls
piled up in the temple were found to amount to
one hundred and thirty six thousand, and in a town
of moderate size there were near one hundred thousand skulls.
The great Temple at Mexico was finished in fourteen eighty

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seven and inaugurated in the following year. For a long time,
captives have been collected for this occasion, and when the
time came, eighty four thousand men were sacrificed, and sixteen
thousand more were added to them before the end of
the year. The name of the monarch who perpetrated this
unexampled butchery is used to this day in Mexico as

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a synonym for a scourge prescott who has failed to
comprehend the nature of the sanguinary right of anhuac, and
to whom the very notion of sacrifice seems to be unintelligible.
In his anxiety to brand these customs by the most
degrading comparison he can conceive, borrows from Voltaire the idea

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of comparing the Mexican priests to the Dominicans and their
ceremonies to the modern in Kaziz. Even if we could
admit his supposition of quote fiendish passions as the motive
in either case, still no comparison could be more in
felicitous than that of a tribunal essentially political and serving

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after a fashion, the ends of state, with one so
entirely and intensely religious that the wealth and prosperity of
the country was deliberately sacrificed to it. And yet long
after the last victim had fallen in honor of the Sun,
god of the Aztecs, the civilized nations of Christian Europe
continued to wage wholesale destruction on a vast a scale

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against parsons accused of no crime against the civil order,
and not even convicted of the religious guilt which was
imputed to them. The parallel phenomenon of trials for witchcraft
ought to explain to us the power of superstition to
familiarize men with the most inhuman butchery of helpless beings.
Here there was no distinction of religion or of calling.

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Protestants and Catholics. Clergy and laity vied with each other
for two hundred years to provide victims, and every refinement
of legal ingenuity and torture was used in order to
increase their number. In the north of Italy, the great
jurist Alcadius saw a hundred witches burnt on one day

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in the little town of Silesia. One hundred and two
witches were executed in the year sixteen fifty one, and
in a village of Hesse with five hundred and forty inhabitants,
thirty suffered in four years. At Salzburg in sixteen seventy eight,
a murane among the cattle cost ninety seven suspected persons

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their lives. In the neighborhood of Werdenfels in Bavaria, nearly
all the women were exterminated. In two villages near Trevs,
all but two were put to death. The Jesuit speed,
whose hair turned prematurely gray in his terrible calling, attended
two hundred and two years, every one of whom had

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confessed in order to escape torture. He tells us of
a single judge who had sent five hundred witches to
the flames, and another had caused seven hundred to be
burnt in the course of nineteen years. At Quittelmburg in
the year fifteen eighty nine, on one day, one hundred
and thirty three witches were put to death in two

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villages of the diocese of Menz. The dean condemned three
hundred persons to die for the crime of witchcraft. A
single bishop of Wurzburg condemned two hundred nineteen, and the
Bishop of Bamberg, where the population did not exceed one
hundred thousand, foster a report to be published in sixteen
fifty nine of the death of six hundred witches in

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his episcopate. In England alone, under the tutors and the stewarts,
the victims of this superstition amounted to thirty thousand. Yet
from the apparently of speeds Cautio in sixteen thirty one
to the burning of the last witch in seventeen eighty three,
all sensible men were persuaded that the victims were innocent

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of the crimes for which they suffered intolerable torments and
in agonizing death. But those who hunted them out with
cunning perseverance, and the inflexible judges who never spared their lives,
firmly believed that their execution was pleasing in the sight
of God, and that their sin could not be forgiven
by men. If this was done amid the civilization of

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modern Europe by experienced jurists and by Christian bishops from
an erroneous interpretation of the precepts of religion, it is
surely ridiculous to attribute to unintelligent barbarity, and to treat
with a contemptuous horror the enormous efforts of expiation which
were made by the unhappy Mexicans, who for fifteen hundred

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years were deprived of the Gospel of redemption, and who
sacrificed the most precious thing on earth, because they were
ignorant of the death of that victim who alone could
take away the sins of the world. And of Part
four and of human sacrifice by John Emrich Edward Dalberg