WI/AHC: Post-Roman Western religion where human sacrifice is as popular as in Mesoamerican religion

Mesoamerica is well-known for its atypical preference towards ritual human sacrifice. Heart extraction appears to be a cultural universal in the region, and some cultures (notably the Aztecs) regularly sacrificed thousands of people annually.

Why was ritual sacrifice so important in Mesoamerica?

Could a major Western religion after the emergence of Rome as a major power ever do something similar?
 
Pretty impossible that human sacrification would be acceptablel after Rome has became great power. Romans hated such thing deeply and held that barbaric act. Only way would be that there is Carthage around Celtic culture can be around in Gauls. But even then human sacrification hardly would be even near of scale of Mesoamerican culture.
 
Rather, ritual execution.
No, because the point of Mesoamerican state cults was sacrifice. The main ritual of the Chinese imperial cult or the Abrahamic state religions never centered around human sacrifice. Mesoamerican sacrifice wasn’t a legal thing (most criminals weren’t good sacrifices anyways) like the extremely cruel punishments of the Old World, and that’s a big difference.

Think burning people at the stake, or the public executions in medieval and early modern Europe, except practiced a little more frequently. In any case, execution of prisoners of war is hardly unique to Mesoamerica.
There is a significant difference between:

1. The state punishing those perceived as a threat to its control or to social order, and using ritual means to amplify the impact of that punishment.

2. The state pursuing human sacrifice often as an end in itself, with the execution of prisoners the central ritual of the state, and with no implication of punishment whatsoever.

I mean, can you imagine European kings waging war with the stated purpose of burning the target’s nobility at the stake?
 
didn't the vikings have forms of human sacrifice? its easy to think a Norse religion could spread across Europe and replace Christianity.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
didn't the vikings have forms of human sacrifice? its easy to think a Norse religion could spread across Europe and replace Christianity.

They did have it, but it was usually something for pretty extreme situations. Think of the sort of situation where a whole community is perceived as being cursed/hated by the gods (for instance due to famine or plague). This is then perceived as a sign of severe divine disfavour, and must be solved by the most extreme sacrifice possible. That is: a human sacrifice to Odin, who is, after all, the 'lord of gallows' among other things. The conditions for this kind of behaviour, and even the lethal outcome, have considerable resemblance to later witch-burning in cases of plague and famine. In fact, I'm fairly confident that more "witches" were burned in Northern Europe the 16th century than human beings were sacrificed to Odin in the pre-Christian era.

A Norse death-cult emerging and embracing much more human sacrifice can be imagined, but OTl Germanic religion isn't going to lead to anything close to Meso-American levels of human sacrifice.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Let's look at the key question, which the OP also asks: "Why was ritual sacrifice so important in Mesoamerica?" (And why wasn't it in Europe?)

If we go back to ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant, we see greater tendencies towards human sacrifice. The Old Testament sees Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac, showing that this wasn't just something for the per-monotheistic religions among the Semitic peoples. The concept lived on even when monotheism was already introduced. Nevertheless, it did subside. Concersely, it is believed that the Phoenicians (and their relartives, the Carthaginians) did engage in mass sacrifice of children. This is sometimes discarded as nothing but Roman propaganda, but the indications do point towards it having been very real (with the real question being: were these 'superfluous' children being discarded via sacrifice, or were 'valued' children offered to the gods). Ancient European societies also seem to have had human sacrifice, which later evolved into sacrificing animals and effigies of humans instead. Even animal sacrifice became ever more rare throughout the later stages of Antiquity (although there were some throw-backs).

In all European, Near-Asian and North African examples, the common pattern seems to have been that human sacrifice was something that was done under rather extreme conditions. It wasn't standard practice, it wasn't a fundamental part of the religious rite. It was what you did to stave off true disaster.

Now compare this to Meso-America. Why was human sacrifice so big there? Because it was standard practice there. Not something done in extreme times, but something done always, methodically. "Part of the routine". As far as I can tell, this was the case because the common belief was that such sacrifice was needed to preserve the world. The gods need human sacrifice, and withholding it would have apocalyptic consequences. The exact belief certainly varied from time to time and from place to place, but this midset was a general one in the region.

I suspect that it's the crucial difference. If you can introduce a European religion that successfully preaches that the world will end in some horrible way unless the human sacrifices keep coming... then you'll see something like the Meso-American practices mirrored in Europe. The further back you go in time, the closer you get to some kind of human sacrifice being accepted as 'normal'/acceptable. In a post-Roman context, it's going to be very tricky. I'm almost tempted to circle back to that notion of a Norse death-cult emerging, purely because the Norse societies did still have some notion of human sacrifice.

An idea, although pretty wild: just as the Christians really unleash their attempts to convert Northern Europe, and the pagans are beginning to feel the heat pretty badly, an ATL plague sweeps to Europe, causing Black Death-levels of death in the south of Europe. Some pagan figure in the north explains this as the old gods defending their people against the evil Christians. As the plague also spreads north, he advocates human sacrifice to prove loyalty to the gods. This is followed rather widely. The plague indeed hardly spreads in the northernmost parts of Europe (in reality because the colder climate is less suitable for the disease). From this sequence of events, we end up with a severely depopulated Christian Europe in the South, and a much less hard-hit pagan North. In that latter region, a new religious practice of human sacrifice emerges, perhaps rooted in a duty to wage war against 'unbelievers', and sacrifice the prosoners to the gods-- as a way to prove continued loyality, thus preserving "The Northern way of life". The general belief is that ceasing the sacrifices would cause the angered gods to let the Northern cultures be destroyed completely...
 
And I can't imagine the Aztecs waging war for no other reason than to sacrifice people either.
The stated purpose of the Flower Wars was to collect sacrifices. Now, there were geopolitical goals behind this religious facade, but can you really imagine the Emperor of China attacking his neighbors citing “need to kill people by a thousand cuts” as the justification, or the King of England attacking France not because of some feudal claim but because “I must have French knights to burn at the stake?”

No, because in China and Europe cruel executions were punishments, while in Mesoamerica heart extraction was part and parcel of elite religious life.
 
I think your best bet is probably either the Norsemen (who already had situational sacrifice and a culture of raids) or perhaps a steppe culture bringing a new dimension to ever-fluid Tengriism.
 
I know the Mongols were very into killing people and loved to take everything to extremes but was there any tradition of human sacrifice in their traditional culture to build upon?
 
With regard to the second part of the OP's question, it seems to me that an offshoot of early Christianity is probably the best bet for a western religion that featured human sacrifice as a major sacrament. After all, Christian worship revolved around Christ's sacrifice of himself for humanity, and included symbolic cannibalism in its central ritual. Based on a very logical misunderstanding this new sect, Romans accused Christians of practicing both human sacrifice and cannibalism. Imagine a situation wherein a non-orthodox offshoot of Christianity evolved that took the idea of sacrifice seriously, and featured actual crucifixions of penitents (well you don't have to imagine this, it is still a common practice in some parts of Hispanic America). Throw in some additional plausible what ifs, and it is not absolutely out of the realm of possibility that the form of Christianity that became the Roman Empire's state religion could have been based on a militaristic and extreme sect that took the crucifixion ritual to its logical extreme, seeing it as a way to offer the penitents (or victims, if you prefer) a ticket to paradise by emulating our savior by offering him-or herself as a sacrifice for humanity's sins. This could in fact be incorporated into Roman blood sports.

Regarding the first part, it is interesting to note that the individual torture/sacrifice of war captives was a very common ritual throughout the Americas, especially among sedentary, or semi-sedentary societies. It could just be that the increased size, power, and complexity of MesoAmerican civilizations turned this prevalent pre-existing tradition into such a massive undertaking in the Aztec era (although to be honest, archaeological evidence for the supposed sacrifices of thousands at a time is pretty slim).
 
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