“The heart of Hummingbird Wizard!
The heart of Hummingbird Wizard!”
The crowd surrounding the pyramid erupts as the Aztec priest, with his hair turned black from dried blood, holds in his hand the still-beating heart of a man now lying motionless upon the stone altar. The corpse is kicked down the side of the temple before it is eaten by bloodthirsty onlookers. A large snakeskin drum is beaten continually, booming out into the air, as another man is brought to the altar for his blood to be spilled.
The Aztecs were some of the most brutal killers to ever walk the planet. Of all peoples to engage in the horror of human sacrifice, none were so terrible as these merciless savages. On one account, as noted by Dr. Warren H. Carroll in Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness, 89-year-old Tlacaelel ordered the sacrifice of more than eighty thousand men over the span of just four days, for what amounts to the slaying of one victim every fifteen seconds. Such a magnitude of evil is enough to make even a Planned Parenthood employee cringe.
Yet underlying this genocide is a strikingly profound reality. The Aztecs offered these sacrifices to various gods who, according to custom, were glorified by such worship. They believed that the gods might grant them favors if sacrifices were offered up in their names. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Aztecs. Remarkably, human sacrifice was present among nearly all prehistoric tribes as well. The Greeks and Romans offered animal sacrifice. Even the Jews, the inheritors of the true pre-Christian religion, in obedience to God, slew animals for adoration, thanksgiving, atonement, and petition. People of cultures who never previously came in contact with each other all felt the desire to offer sacrifice. The inclination to not only reach out to the Divine, but to sacrifice something in recognition of our own dependence on Him is universal; it is inherent in man.
Aristotle said that man is the animal with reason; it can just as truthfully be said that man is the animal who worships. Dogs do not pray for forgiveness after eating food off the table, and calves do not bow down before golden idols; only man recognizes a hole in his heart that natural pleasures cannot fill. “The eye is not filled with seeing, neither is the ear filled with hearing” (Ecclesiastes 1:8).
Sacrifice has always been the practice at the very center of worship. Just as we externalize the ideas in our minds with expressions on our faces and words from our lips, sacrifice is man’s outward manifestation of his desire for God from within.
Ultimately, however, the practice of sacrifice recognizes a certain debt ingrained into the human condition. Sacrifice can only be motivated by the sentiment that we truly owe something to the Creator. Otherwise, there would be no reason for any such rituals. Immolations serve as acknowledgements of God’s power over life, admitting the absolute ownership of existence to a Being beyond the constraint of death. Man, on the other hand, is a slave to death. It is the one thing he cannot escape. He is a finite being with a longing for the infinite.
Our position could be compared to a man being chased by a hungry bear, as he comes upon the cliff of a mile-long chasm, left with the only options of jumping to his death or letting time take its course before being devoured alive. He can leap and try to reach salvation, but unless a savior from the other side with a mile-long wingspan reaches out and grabs him, he will fall to the abyss of death.
““He is a finite being with a longing for the
infinite.””
Such is the case also with sacrifice; our attempts to reach God through the slaying of creatures cannot bridge the infinite gap between God and man. The Aztecs were driven to offer as many sacrifices as possible in hopes to pay off this burden. They sought to cross that infinite chasm with the blood of finite men, but their “gods” were never satiated and their mortality never extinguished.
Men of all ages were imminently aware of this fallen state we find ourselves in, that by Divine Revelation we know to be the product of Original Sin. The Sin of Adam and our own iniquities have placed us in this inescapable predicament that when left unaided leads straight to eternal damnation. Man is at fault, and only he can pay this infinite debt; yet man is finite, and such a debt can only be paid by the Infinite. The Roman Catechism says that “the human race, having fallen from its elevated dignity, no power of men or Angels could raise it from its fallen condition and replace it in its primitive state.” If this is the whole story, then the only reasonable reaction is despair. No matter what we do or how we do it, we cannot climb out of this pit of death; “vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” (Ecc. 1:2). But this, we know, is not the full story.
In the fullness of time, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity took on a human nature to offer the only Sacrifice that could heal this wound: Himself. “To remedy the evil and repair the loss” that came from the Sin of Adam, the Roman Catechism says that “it became necessary that the Son of God, whose power is infinite, clothed in the weakness of our flesh, should remove the infinite weight of sin and reconcile us to God in His blood.” True man, He bore the guilt of all humanity. True God, His Sacrifice alone had the efficacy to atone for all sins.
The privilege (and obligation) of the Roman Catholic is his or her ability to be really and truly present at that same Sacrifice that took place two-thousand years ago while at each and every Holy Mass. The Mass is not a mere supper nor is it a community gathering for entertainment purposes; it is quite literally the unbloody unveiling of the Sacrifice of Christ that perpetually restores mankind to the Father and reorders the cosmos. Our Lord intended to have this Sacrifice perpetuated in memory and for the application of its graces in every Church throughout the world until its consummation.
The incredible aspects of the Aztec sacrifices lay in the unlikely resemblance they had to Christian worship. The Aztecs would paint and dress up their sacrificial victims to look like the gods to whom they were offered, so that they would have the “face of a god”. They would even say that these victims were in the image of gods, so when they were killed it was like a god himself was offered up as a sacrifice. As Catholics, we believe that “the Son is the image of the invisible God”, who offered Himself as a Sacrifice (Colossians 1:15). The Aztecs believed they had to offer these finite sacrifices on a daily basis to appease the gods, whereas Catholics celebrate the One Infinite Sacrifice unveiled at Holy Mass every day. With the guidance of brave Spaniards who risked their lives for the Glory of God, the Aztecs and other natives of Mexico ended up converting to Catholicism in rapid numbers because of these similar concepts in worship. Instead of eating the legs or arms of the human sacrifices at the bottom of the temple each day, they could now eat the flesh of the God Who died in our place at Holy Communion.
““True man. He bore the guilt of all humanity. True God. His Sacrifice alone had the efficacy to atone for all sins.”
”
Although it cannot be emphasized enough that the Aztec sacrifices were Satanic acts of wicked savagery, we can clearly see that their impulse - in some sort of odd way - was correct, just carried out incorrectly. The rational faculty of man enables him to come to profound truths regarding God and His creation, as was seen with the Aztecs. Yet, in order to enter into communion with God, it is necessary that man submit to those Truths Divinely Revealed that cannot be reached by human reason alone. The Aztecs and other natives converted to Catholicism in rapid numbers, largely because they recognized the Christian faith as the true end of some of their inclinations.