Amerindian Human Sacrifice and Ritual Violence
The concept of sacrifice refers to the relinquishment of something of value and its offering to an addressee, such as an ancestor or supernatural being. This may be intended as a sign of devotion, a plea for a benefit or as an expression of gratitude.
Human sacrifice can affect one's own body or those of members of one's group or outsiders. These forms of ritual violence have a long history and wide distribution in the Americas. Self-sacrifice - involving isolation, fasting, exposure to the vagaries of the weather, blood-letting, the cutting or even the amputation of body parts such as parts of a finger - was an important component of the vision quest during rites of passage, or pertained to ordeals to secure certain benefits for oneself or one's group. Outsiders, such as captives of war or slaves, were the most common sacrificial victims in all types of indigenous society. The sacrifice of certain in-group members (such as children or the wives and retainers of a deceased chief) in addition to outsiders was also practised in the ranked or stratified societies of Middle and South America (e.g. the Aztec and Inca) and the south-eastern part of North America, such as the Mississippian cultures (e.g. the Natchez).[161] Among the relatively egalitarian hunters, gatherers and horticulturalists of North and South America ritual killings were generally restricted to aliens and took place mostly in the context of feuding and warfare. Retaliation for real or assumed damages suffered by others was a typical motive. In addition to actual killings caused by members of enemy groups revenge raids could also result from the belief that death was not natural in most cases but an effect of harmful activities - physical or spiritual (sorcery or witchcraft) - by neighbouring groups. The living relatives were therefore obliged to calm the soul or spirit of the defunct by avenging his demise. These beliefs led to a particular conflict pattern known as ‘mourning war', which was widespread in North America (especially among the Plains and the North-east) and also found in lowland South America.[162] Grief led to acts of mourning sometimes including forms of auto-aggression, such as cutting oneself in the legs and arms. Aggressive impulses were then redirected against outsiders and acted out ritually. This involved the organisation of war parties to kill enemies or to obtain captives. Since warfare was the most important means for males to acquire prestige, mourners had little difficulty in motivating young men to accompany them on revenge raids. Female mourners often played a key role in instigating war parties. Among the Iroquois, for example,women whose kinfolk had been killed would appear at public dances and feasts, weeping inconsolably; if this display did not succeed in arousing the warriors, the women might offer payments or accuse the lagging warriors of cowardice... until there had been retaliatory killings and tortures, it was as if the blood of the murdered one had not been wiped away and his corpse not covered.[163]
The taking of body parts of enemies slain during raids, such as heads or scalps, was common. However, they were differently treated and served diverse ritual functions. While the scalp was adopted and addressed by kinship terms in some groups (the Plains, Eastern Woodlands, South-east and South-west), it was affronted and reviled in others. Scalps and other body parts were used as offerings to the supernatural, especially among the South-eastern groups of North America (e.g. the Caddoans, Natchez and Calusa), as a means to calm the souls of the dead, or merely as tokens of a warrior's courage.
A warrior's success depended heavily on his ability to capture prisoners in many Amerindian groups. It was considered more prestigious than killing the enemy on the spot and could also be related to rites of passage, as among the Tupi on the Brazilian coast:
The greatest honor they have...
is to capture an enemy in war and this they consider greater than killing them because many of those who capture them give them to others to kill, so that they may have a name, taking a new one each time they kill one, and they have as many names as the number of enemies they have killed, though the [ones] most honored and esteemed and regarded as courageous are the ones who capture them.[164]The ritual torture of captives was not universally practised in the Americas, but was found among certain specific groups including the Carib (in the Caribbean), the Indians in the Colombian Cauca Valley, the Araucanians (in southern Chile and Argentina), the Tupinamba, Natchez and Pawnee (on the Missouri) and, particularly elaborated, among the Indians of the North-east (the Montagnais, Huron, Iroquois and Susquehanna). The methods of torturing were varied and included, among other things, tearing out fingernails; cutting or biting off fingers; burning various body parts with torches, embers and hot metal; and the mutilation of the ears, nose, lips, eyes or tongue. Captives were often tied to a pole or stake, or fixed to a frame, and often, but not always, tortured to death.
While the rituals accompanying the execution of captives differed in many respects - torture might be present or absent, for example - they also showed a number of similarities. The victims were frequently expected to participate in the ritual by singing or dancing. The prelude to the execution was also a moment to test the victim's fearlessness. According to descriptions from geographically widely separated groups, such as the Island Carib, Tupinamba, Chickasaw (along the Tennessee River) and the Iroquois, at least some of the captives boasted of their own deeds in war, mentioning particularly how many of their capturer's group they had killed themselves. They threatened their tormentors with the revenge of their fellows and scoffed them ‘as being unskilled in the art of inflicting torments'.[165] Besides proving one's valor, this might have been intended to infuriate the tormentors and provoke a mortal blow to shorten the suffering in cases involving torture.
In addition to secular objectives, such as inspiring fear among one's enemies, the torture and execution of prisoners was aimed at appeasing the souls of dead relatives or intended as offerings to the supernatural. Among the Mohawk and Huron in the North-east, for example, captives were tormented and slain as sacrifices to the god of war, to ensure success in future war parties. The North Carolinian Saponi feared supernatural punishments, such as storms or crop failure, if they did not torture prisoners.[166] That torturing was part of a sacrificial complex is indicated, among other things, by the festive arrangement of the executions, the aforementioned singing and dancing of the victims, the ritualised behaviour on the part of the torturers, the insistence on particular methods of killing the prisoner (preferably by knife among the Iroquois, or by a particular club among the Tupinamba) and, in a number of cases, the extraction of the heart and the consumption of flesh or blood.[167]
In the ranked and stratified societies of south-eastern North America, Mesoamerica, the Central Andes and central Colombia war captives were sacrificed to the gods by ritual specialists as part of a centralised cult controlled by the rulers until European domination became firmly established. Among the more egalitarian Amerindian groups, in contrast, the sacrifice of prisoners was a communal affair in which men and women, old and young, participated. Women often played a key role in the treatment and ritual torture of captives. The ritual fostered social cohesion by strengthening ties among the living as well as with the souls of the deceased. Beyond this, it reaffirmed the power of the group and was an opportunity to appropriate the spiritual force of victims, among other things, by ingesting the flesh, organs or blood of valiant prisoners. The treatment of the sacrificed captive's body among the Huron is described thusly: ‘they tear the heart from the breast, roast it upon the coals, and, if the prisoner has bravely borne the bitterness of the torture, give it, seasoned with blood, to the boys, to be greedily eaten, in order, as they say, that the warlike youth may imbibe the heroic strength of the valiant man'.[168] The ritual was also a means to maintain friendly relations beyond the local group.
The Tupinamba invited people from neigbouring groups to their sacrificial feasts, which were always accompanied by the consumption of manioc beer. Iroquois raiding parties ritually tortured their captives during feasts in several villages on their way home.Although the drama of sacrificing or torturing prisoners to death attracted much attention among European observers and compilators, there is evidence that these practices were exceptions rather than the rule. In fact, the capture of enemies, especially women and children, to compensate for previous losses or to increase the population was a widespread motive for warfare in egalitarian societies: it was often related to the revenge or ‘mourning war' complex. While men were often either killed during raids or sacrificed later, women and children were spared and assimilated by marriage or adoption. A Jesuit missionary reported from the Huron: ‘the Barbarians do not usually harm the women or the children, except in their sudden attacks. Indeed, many a young man will not hesitate to even marry a prisoner, if she is very industrious; and thereafter she will pass as a woman of the country.'[169] The marriage of captives into the captor's group is reported from the Tupinamba, the Cree, Algonkian, Iroquois, Delaware and western Siouans, among others. In the complex societies of the North American south-east, Middle and South America, in contrast, captives were either enslaved or sacrificed and not adopted into the group in most cases.