Sunday, February 23, 2020

Human Sacrifice and the Mesoamerican Background to Alma 14:8; 24:9-11 and Alma 34:10-11



Alma 14:8

Of related interest is the mode of execution. Certainly the Ammonihahites did not choose fire to fulfill Abinadi’s prophecy. Why did the deaths of Abinadi, Noah, and these believers all take that form? The Book of Mormon text provides no firm evidence about this concept. However, a combination of possibilities seem reasonable, given Mesoamerican characteristics. Part of its religious culture involved human sacrifice. It is not an obvious influence at this stage of Book of Mormon history, but even this early text contains hints that would be compatible with a nearby culture that included human sacrifice. For instance, in a later sermon, Alma preached: “For it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10; emphasis mine). Alma may be making a simple contrast, but I argue that he feels the need to explain the difference between the Atoning Messiah’s sacrifice and the more common human sacrifices of the Lamanites. Both the Aztec and Maya sacrificed human victims to fire (David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization [Boson: Beacon Press, 1999], 97. For the Maya, see Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of ings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art [New York: George Braziller, 1986], 228). Although there is no direct textual evidence, there are intriguing connection between the local practice of human sacrifice by fire and these particular instances. The dominance of the order of the Nehors in Ammonihah suggests in and of itself that Mesoamerican ideologies had already been accepted, to some degree, by Nephites who would Nehorism appealing. (Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Volume 4: Alma [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007], 234-35)

Alma 24:9-11 (cf. Alma 34:11)

For the Maya, blood was the conduit for ch’ulel, or the “inner soul or spirit” (David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: here Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path [New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993], 201-2). Sacrificial bloodletting became both nourishment/worship for the gods and the substitute sacrifice that renews creation (Roberta H. Markman and Peter Markman, The Flayed God: The Mesoamerican Mythological Tradition, Sacred Texts and Images from Pre-Colombian Mexico and Central America [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992], 179). According to anthropologist Dennis Tedlock, this principle of creation through sacrifice appears to have great antiquity in the Mesoamerican region: “Puz, all the way from its Mixe-Zoque (and possibly Olmec) sources down to modern Quiche, refers literally to the cutting of flesh with a knife, and it is the primary term for sacrifice. If it is read as a synecdoche in the present passage [of the Popol Vuh], it means that the creation was accomplished (in part) through sacrifice” (Dennis Tedlock, “Creation in the Popol Vuh: A Hermeneutical Approach,” in Symbol and Meaning beyond the Closed Community, edited by Gary Gossen [Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany, 1986], 79). The sacrificial blood could and did come from the king and his queen but was augmented by the blood of captives taken in war. Classic Maya inscriptions glorify the personal conquests of the kings and the humiliation and sacrifice of the captives. The Bonampak mural commonly known as “the arraignment” is a graphic depiction of the torturous bloodletting inflicted upon captives (Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art [New York: George Braziller, 1986], 217) (Ibid., 354-55)

Alma 34:10

Amulek begins at the point of commonality: a shared understanding about the relationship between sacrifice and atonement—not the Messiah’s atonement but communal atonement. This principle was certainly part of the Mosaic law, where animal sacrifices were not only part of worship but would effect the communal atonement (Ex. 29:36, Lev. 23:27, Num. 6:10-11). Mesoamerican cultural also offered parallel examples of animal sacrifices as part of their worship and even human sacrifice (Human sacrifice is the most spectacular of the Mesoamerican sacrifices, but other animals might be offered as well. It is particularly noted of Quetzalcoatl that “you shall offer him, you shall sacrifice before him only serpents, only butterflies.” Bernardino de SahagĂșn, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 vols. in 12 [Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1975], 10:160).

Amulek explicitly states that the Messiah’s great atonement “shall not be a human sacrifice.” Human sacrifice was known and accepted in the general culture. In Aztec worship, some of their human sacrifices posed as gods when they were sacrificed. These humans-as-gods enacted primal myths where the sacrifices of the gods established the known world. Anthropologist David Carrasco describes the impersonator of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca:

The captive who best approximated this negative description of perfection was chosen and carefully trained in several Aztec arts, including music, smoking, and flower holding. But he was not just a stationary, imprisoned paragon of beauty and culture for “very great care was taken that he talk graciously, that he greet people agreeably on the road if he met anyone . . . There was an assigning of lordship; he was importuned; he was sighed for; there was bowing before him.” At an appointed time during his year-long public displays and contact with the populace, Tezcatlipoca was taken before the tlatoani (overlord or king) Moctezuma, who ceremonially “repeatedly adorned him; he gave him gifts; he arrayed him; he arrayed him with great pomp. He had all costly things placed on him, for verily he took him to be his beloved god.” (David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence and Civilization [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999], 119-20)

Amulek is teaching that the earthly Messiah was not a deity impersonator, a human who died for a god. Jesus was “God himself . . . come down among the children of men” (Mosiah 15:1). The atonement was not effected through a human sacrifice, but a divine sacrifice. (Ibid., 477)