Conclusion
Ritual violence did not end with the European conquest and the establishment of colonial rule. Although native forms were suppressed in the areas controlled by the newcomers, they in turn introduced their own practices, which were often similarly ritualised and based on religious or magical worldviews.
Uprisings against Spanish sovereignty or witchcraft appeared as violations of both the worldly social order and God's grand scheme. Therefore ceremonial executions of rebels such as Tupac Amaru II or alleged witches can, in a certain sense, be considered as sacrifices of expiation. While the sacrifice of humans to the gods or as company for high-ranking individuals was only common among ranked and stratified Amerindian societies, captives were executed and sometimes tortured, mostly to calm the souls of dead relatives or as offerings to the supernatural, in the other Amerindian groups. The consumption of human body parts or substances was also often part of these rituals. Such practices were not alien to the Europeans. Thus, the blood and other corporal substances of executed felons were sometimes consumed to cure certain ailments, the assumption being that they contained a great amount of the life force stemming from individuals who had died, supposedly in good health and strength. The underlying idea of both Amerindian and European thinking seems to have been to incorporate the qualities or energy of the victim. However, while these were considered assets of particular individuals who had demonstrated their courage among Amerindians, Europeans took them as generic features of the young and healthy.As the treatment of rebels against the Spanish Crown or religious dissenters at the hands of New England Puritans shows, European forms of ritualised violence cannot be considered less cruel than the torture and sacrifice of captives by Amerindians.
While the role of the community in these acts was mostly restricted to that of passive audience, sacrifice and torture were often an affair where men, women and sometimes even children participated, particularly in less stratified Amerindian societies. In contrast to European practices, the victims were often not considered outcasts with which any social bond had to be severed, but honoured by feasts before execution or integrated into the group by the creation of fictive kin relationships.Considering what has been said in this chapter, it is neither justified to negate the existence of ritual violence, including human sacrifice, in the pre-Columbian Americas as colonial propaganda, nor can this in any way legitimise the carnage of the European conquest. The French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne was, of course right, when he asserted in his essay ‘Of Cannibals' in 1581:
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people [the Tupinamba], that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits... We are justified in calling these people barbarians by reference to laws of reason, but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.[186]