Our Terminal Classic period
In reading about ritual sacrifices made by the Maya and Aztecs in Latin America in pre-columbian days, I was struck by the thought that these deaths made to ensure the gods sent good hunting, bountiful harvests and victory in battle were really more about political theater than placating bloodthirsty deities. In murdering virgins or children, those who actually put them to death became the demons they were ostensibly seeking to keep at bay. We now know, of course, that all those deaths really had nothing to do with whether the rains came on time, the birds and deer were more plentiful, or the foes easier to vanquish.
Don’t we?
The same is true to those holy people now governing us: they’ve sacrificed tens of thousands of their own young countrymen, 4,000 by killing and many, many more by psychological or physical maiming, at the altar of OIL.
Now, as in the days before Columbus and Cortez brought Christianity, slavery and death to the savages, there are those who believe our modern sacrifice is keeping the stock market healthy, our women and churches free of Moslem stains, and our country free of terrorism. They truly believe, and will not be moved. With Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to encourage them, and almost all of our elected officials of both parties defending the priest-executioners, the sacrifices have gone one for five years unabated. . .last year even increased with a “surge.”
Dr. Jaime Awe, in his book “Maya Cities and Ancient Caves”, notes that many of thousands of caves in Central America contain offerings from the ancient Maya civilizations. These include agricultural produce, farm tools, hunting implements . . .and human remains. “The ultimate gift was the offering one’s blood or human lives,” writes Awe. “Many cave sites contain skeletal remains of victims who were offered in sacrifice to the powerful denizens of the underworld. More often than not, the skeletons are those of young children, a preferred victim of Chac the rain god.”
Awe goes on the say that these sacrifices appear to have increased during what is called the Terminal Classic Period, AD 800 to 1000. This is significant, he says, because it was during this period that ancient Maya civilization eventually declined, and that the cities in Belize, Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico declined. It has been suggested that overpopulation and deforestation, exacerbated by drought, spelled disaster for the Maya. Despite the apparent increase in sacrifices, “their socio-economic system eventually failed, and the surviving Maya gradually abandoned the once-thriving cities that extended across the lowland Maya world.”
So it is with us: the more frequent and frenzied our sacrifices become, the more the gods ignore us, and the closer we are to the end of our empire. I have to wonder, though, when our civilization ends, our cities are abandoned and our alphabet forgotten, will people in millennia to come speculate about how and why the people survived, but the civilization ended?