Cause and Effect and Child Sacrifice?

The news of climate-deniers and people who think the COVID vaccine is a government plot can be hard to hear: how are these folks coming up with such ideas? (wait — maybe don’t answer that). The truth is, history is laden with people who have gravely misunderstood cause and effect, with sometimes horrifying consequences.

Take the Ancient Central American rituals of child sacrifice, for instance. Here you see a Mesoamerican manuscript from the 16th century showing Tlaloc the rain God, a deity worshipped by the Aztecs and other peoples who lived long before them. Drought and floods were frequent conditions that Central American peoples contended with, and they sought to appease Tlaloc in order to procure temperate and predictable weather for their harvests.

For instance, a major Aztec ritual in the springtime involved taking children up mountains sacred to the rain deity and ripping out their hearts. These children knew what their doom entailed as they were carried up — they were dressed in finery, placed on flower- and feather- bedecked litters, and dancers accompanied them. The Spanish conquerors wrote about these rituals, noting that the children about to be killed would sometimes cry, and their tears were thought to be a good sign that rain would come.

Earlier Central Americans also practiced child sacrifice to bring about rainfall. In the second image you see a skeleton of a child between 5 and 8 years old, deposited in a pit alongside 23 others. Their bodies faced east around a shrine to Tlaloc, and there are scar marks on some of their vertebrae that suggest their throats were slit. This particular site dates from 950-1150 when Toltec peoples dominated the area — but the rain God and his attendant child sacrifices continued into the Aztec period.

Perhaps a sense that they could have some sort of control over the weather explains this tragic Central American belief. The desire to have agency is a profoundly human one: it is sad that it has lead to such inhumane actions.