There have been two or three posts recently on ancient Mexico. Whenever I have the chance to visit its archeological sites, inevitably some museum plaque or historical brochure turns my thoughts to the most grisly aspect of the cultures that flourished there. By which I mean human sacrifice, and in particular, voluntary or involuntary cardiectomy. Stop here if you don’t like to read about blood.

Only Mel Gibson (that I know of) has tried depicting this process on screen, in his not-that-dreadful, non-stop-action movie Apocalypto. Having consulted scholars and/or doctors, he correctly shows one man in a nightmare sequence, who has a gash at the bottom of his ribcage, but does not have his actual chest torn open. The sacrificing priest had to cut through the skin over the stomach, then through the diaphragm to enter the chest cavity, for extracting a human heart through a barricade of ribs would have required considerable strength and much time. The extracted hearts were deemed to be more energising for the gods they nourished if the donor was in a state of abject terror when they were cut out, but even the most compliant volunteer (yes, some people did offer themselves) would have had trouble remaining still while a priest was slicing through cartilage and snapping his ribs back.

The practice, just to clarify, was deemed utterly necessary to sustain the gods, and in particular, to sustain the passage of the Sun across the sky each day. Without it, people believed, human life would have been impossible. The central Mexican rain god Tlaloc needed an annual heart or three so he could do his rainy duty, and the other deities all required their own supplies. The springtime god, Xipe Totec (SEE-pay TOE-teck), needed the skin of a flayed human victim, but in most cases, cardiectomy was the preferred method of sacrifice.

The Aztecs developed an entire war-culture around capturing prisoners for sacrifice, and seem to have allowed a couple of neighbouring kingdoms to remain independent so they didn’t have to go far to gain captives.

Where things become strange is the acquiescence of most people in this whole process. The Aztecs were hated for their rapaciousness in collecting victims, but not over the principle of the whole business. Sacrifice was just like taxes today – everyone argues for a reduction, but almost nobody opposes the idea of some degree of taxation.

And at some point in this meditation, which happens each time I visit an old city’s ruins or restored pyramids, I find myself half-entering the mindset people had then. The very atmosphere of Teotihuacan or Tula seems to accept the idea of regular human sacrifice, the way we accept clogged traffic in today’s cities, or a certain level of price inflation. These things are – and were – facts of our existence.

The usefulness of this exercise lies in how it questions our current assumptions. We do argue for reduced urban pollution and fewer cars, but not very urgently, and especially not if we’re drivers ourselves. We dutifully lament inflation, but we only become concerned when it goes above one or two per cent a year.

What else, then, is our equivalent to the MesoAmerican acceptance of agonising death as a requirement for maintaining a functioning cosmos? Religious believers might answer ‘prayer or ‘faith’ but both of these notions are at least questioned by large numbers of people. Neoconservatives would argue ‘free enterprise’ but that one is currently in many skeptics’ sights, too. Two centuries ago, most persons of European origin might have accepted that slavery was the African’s divinely ordained lot, and have quoted the three or four Bible verses that can be made to support this viewpoint. But while slavery is not dead in the world, it is mostly furtive today, if not outright criminal in the places it’s practised. The ferociously articulate defences of human bondage and slave-owners’ property rights mounted in the southern U.S. in the first half of the 1800s still have a certain splendour to their wrathful cadences, but no substance of either law or moral force to back them any more.

We still accept nationhood as an alienable necessity, even if it often masks racism. National identity is, very often, the line in the sand on the topic of race. Universal brotherhood, while wholly embraced by a few mystics and idealists, is still largely a concept, and likely to remain so until our world has found far better ways to arbitrate its quarrels. Right now, it’s possible, as has happened this week, to mount a global condemnation of an Afghan initiative to placate religious traditionalists by making women wholly subject to their husbands. That particular law will, at the least, be watered down. But a global commonality of humankind, and the elimination of armed conflict between states, are things any of us alive today don’t expect to see. We cannot reach a mental space where we can trust that things can be worked out without violence, any more than the Toltec or Zapotec captive climbing a Mexican pyramid questioned the essential need of the gods to have his pounding heart, or for his blood to flow down the steps his quivering legs were ascending.

There is no artful formulation of pacifist sentiments about to be thrown in here, since I have my own doubts about how ready we are to talk our way through our mutual hatreds. However, the idea that it always has to be thus is equally untenable. To quote a theme from other recent posts, we are too prone not to accept evolution, and instead to strive to reach settlements of issues that are seen as ‘morally right’ and not simply functional steps along the way. Our instincts, though, at least point us towards the notion of a space for finding common ground. President Obama’s recent overture to Iran, while ostensibly rebuffed, is interesting most of all because of how rapidly it reached a large number of Iranians, and through back-channels as opposed to formal methods such as state-managed TV. The methods for constructive communication exist in far better ways than they did a generation ago, even if it requires a skillful communicator to use them effectively.

There is a very contentious account of the 9th Century CE god-king Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl that was compiled shortly after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. It asserts he was opposed to human sacrifice, but was out-maneuvred by his evil brother Tezcatlipoca.

Some scholars feel this story was an example of native Mexican apologetics, designed to placate Catholic clerics, and that the archeological record doesn’t bear it out. But from surviving fragments of poetry, from the precision of the calendars the peoples of Mexico created, and from other evidence they left behind, the people of those times were clearly not unaware of processes of critical thinking. At some point, like my unknown revolutionary in the March 9 post, some people must have questioned the order of things, and whether even the hundreds of hearts sometimes extracted by the Aztec and other priesthoods were really a significant factor in the grand motion of the Sun over the heavens. If not King Topiltzin himself, then someone in his circle perhaps wondered if we forever had to be food for our creators. And not, one hopes, just those who would rather have been back at home tending a plot of maize, not listening to the screams of the cardiectomy victim preceding them.

By the same token, we need to remember that elimination of inter-national and inter-cultural violence is not an impossibility. It’s just a condition that is slow to arrive, and that might need a sudden and radical shift, but not necessarily one as violent as the conquest of Mexico by Cortes, to bring about.