March 30, 2009

• Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and Hallucinogenic Snuff

  

  The peak of the civilization at
  Teotihuacán, in North Central Mexico
  was about 1700 years ago.

  For me, this search started with Teotihuacán and Chaco Canyon.  Interested in archaeology from childhood, I was familiar with both archaeological sites through a lot of reading.  My interest in the archaeology of the Prehistoric Pueblo cultures preceded my conscious recall of the past lives in which I lived in those cultures.  Learning that I had once lived there only intensified my interest.  I went on studying the archaeology of the area to satisfy my curiosity, and in response to my mentor’s injunction to verify past life recollections.  Then, in the 1990s, I spent two winters in the 4-Corners area, visiting many ruins including Chaco Canyon.

  

  Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico,
  was occupied for about
  three hundred years,
  peaking around 900 years ago.

  One notable feature of the archaeological record in Chaco Canyon is the scarcity of human remains.  The pueblos would have housed thousands of people, but very few burials have been found.  Some notable exceptions are a few skeletons that appear to have been carelessly dumped into an interior room of one pueblo along with a lot of garbage, and three respectful burials of apparently high status individuals. 

  The elite three, two men and a woman, had all been mature adults at death, and all three had their teeth filed into a catlike appearance.  Remains found at Teotihuacán and at Paquimé in Northwestern Mexico, had similarly filed teeth, but the practice has not been seen in other Prehistoric Pueblo sites of the 4-Corners.  I intuited that filed teeth marked these high status people as followers of the Jaguar Cult.

  

  above: Clava, a stone head with jaguar fangs.
  Many are tenoned into outer walls at Chavín de Huántar,
  and similar depictions are found at Teotihuacán.

  Archaeologists have traced Teotihuacán’s past to origins in several small villages that existed on the site centuries before it became a major regional cultural and trading center.  When we lived there, we called the city, “Xocoma.”  In its late phases, separate carvings and murals depict eagles and jaguars that some archaeologists believe, and some friends of mine and I remember, were cult figures.  We recall conflict between Eagle People and Jaguar People.

  

  above:  Lanzon, a carved pillar standing in an
  underground passage at  Chavín de Huántar.
  Its carvings combine features of men,
  with jaguars, serpents, and birds.

  The Eagle People came to what is now North Central Mexico from the east coast of Mesoamerica, the land of the Maya.  Some say that originally their ancestors had come to the Americas as refugees from Atlantis.  Archaeological evidence suggests that the Jaguar people were later arrivals.  None of the archaeological books or articles I read, nor any of the esoteric sources I consulted, explained where the Jaguar Cult came from.  The city had been in ruins when the Aztec entered the area.  They named it Teotihuacán:  the place where men became gods.

  

  above: the site of Chavín de Huántar, Peru,
  where occupancy peaked about 3,000 years ago.

  Then, a decade or more ago, I started reading about digs at Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Inca site in Peru.  They had found jaguar iconography similar to that at Teotihuacán.  Carvings also appeared to depict shamanic use of hallucinogenic snuff, similar to depictions in sites of the late Teotihuacán culture.  In Chavín de Huántar are depictions of Trichocereus pachanoi, the San Pedro cactus.  At Teotihuacán, the hallucinogen of choice appears to have been morning glory, Ipomoea.   If my intuition is correct, the Jaguars of Xocoma, if they did not originate at Chavín de Huántar, probably at least shared a common origin somewhere else.

  

  above: clava from Chavín de Huántar,
  depicting nasal discharge associated
  with use of hallucinogenic snuff

  Some of the human remains at Chavín de Huántar show evidence of ritual cannibalism.  No such evidence has been found for the early or Classical periods of Teotihuacán, but it has been found in the terminal phase there.  I see in this another hint that it could have come with the Jaguar Cult.  Although indigenous descendants of these people often want to deny that their ancestors were cannibals, and many mainstream archaeologists prefer to think of prehistoric Americans as noble savages, there is abundant evidence for both cannibalism and human sacrifice.

  

  above:  figure of a Xipe-Totec priest,
  wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim.
  Earliest known images of Xipe-Totec
  are at Teotihuacán, from whence it
  spread, and endured into Aztec times.

  There is extensive evidence that prehistoric Pueblo people butchered and cooked human bodies.  This includes slice and scrape marks on bones where flesh was stripped from them, and “pot polishing” on the ends of bones that were stirred as they boiled.   These signs occur at outlying Chacoan sites, and at Paquimé, the latest of all Anasazi sites, in contexts that suggest it was domestic use rather than ritual mortuary defleshing.  From butchering and cooking to eating is a logical jump.

  It is of course possible that at least some of the meat was being prepared for consumption by domestic animals.  It is also possible that those cultures did not have the taboos on cannibalism that exist in most modern cultures. “Although some anthropologists believe that the argument for human cannibalism is not yet proven, evidence that it did happen includes human bones with human teeth marks on them, and fossilised human faeces which include human proteins.” (BBC)   Additionally, there is linguistic evidence in the form of words, in several Native American languages, that translate as “man corn”:  food derived from human meat.

  

  above: Duho, believed to be
  a ceremonial tray for preparing
  hallucinogenic snuff.

  Cultural remnants of the hallucinogenic snuff depicted at Teotihuacán and Chavín de Huántar live on today in shamanic divination rituals of tribes in South and Central America.  Animal sacrifice is still practiced in various parts of the Americas, and occasional reports of human sacrifice surface.  That human sacrifice was practiced by ancient Mayans, Olmecs, and the people of Chavín de Huántar, is widely accepted among anthropologists and archaeologists.

  Despite copious physical evidence and the strong opinions of several prominent archaeologists, in the face of their own taboos and those of present-day Native tribes, the profession as a whole hesitates to be so politically incorrect as to accuse the ancestors of living Native Americans of cannibalism.  I contend that words like “accuse” are inappropriate in this context.  Who are we to try and retroactively impose our taboos on the ancestors?  Judging such things as “wrong” and, because of that judgment, suppressing the evidence that they occurred, does a disservice to the past, the present, and the future.
  

  • 11:04 am
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