The Great Divide

mountain huacas where people were sacrificed and, according to some accounts, hundreds of children were killed at a time. We are now in a position to explain this striking anomaly and to discuss its central relevance to our story.
    E VER -A NGRIER G ODS
    In South America there was a further factor, the idea that death – at least for some people – was not the end, that there was a form of continued existence midway between life and death, founded on the naturally occurring mummified remains that comprised part of the ritual life of the earliest inhabitants, and which found its fullest expression in the Inca system of split inheritance and panaqa , whereby dead kings were treated as, to all intents and purposes, still living.
    In such an environment, where death was apparently not always so ‘final’ as it is for us today, sacrifice would not have been seen as so terrible. This is not to say that it wouldn’t have been without pain or suffering, but it is to say that it would not have been quite so terrible as it now sounds. We are reminded that, as discussed in chapter twenty-one, attitudes to death were different in the New World, where parents would give or sell their children as sacrificial victims, where gamblers at the ball game would wager their own lives on the result, where the victors in ball games were sometimes sacrificed (who in the modern world would ‘win’ under such circumstances?), or where the Inca parents who donated their children as sacrificial victims were not allowed to show any negative feelings. The inscriptions showing people with tears in their eyes do seem to suggest that, despite the possibility that the psychoactive plants of the New World could help stupefy potential victims, pain was nevertheless very real in the sacrificial ceremonies. But it is probably wrong to see the pain of the victims in sacrificial rituals as separate from the pain of the captors and rulers who led the rituals, whose own auto-sacrifice was crucial. Pain had religious meaning.
    One explanation we can give for this, though it perhaps betrays a modern, Western, post-Christian bias, is to say that asceticism, stoicism and fortitude were admired and valued in the New World civilisations. A better explanation, more functional, at least in this author’s view, is that it reflected a subtle but marked change in ideology. Blood was important in the New World rituals and blood letting , as discussed in chapter twenty-one, was an evolution of the shamanistic system. Traditional shamans, entering trance via hallucinogens, had dominated small-scale societies, consisting of tens, or at most hundreds of people in villages. In the later great urban centres, with populations in the thousands, or tens of thousands, more theatre was needed, and the leaders needed to adopt a system that didn’t break with tradition, not totally, but extended and improved it, which awed the larger populations and at the same time under-girded the shaman-kings’ unique link to the gods. The deliberate shedding of their own blood in copious quantities, amid much self-inflicted pain, which produced trance – the traditional device of the shaman – was such a system. Pain, and the fear associated with it, became a form of authority – the worse the pain, the more blood that was shed, the more authority someone had. Sacrifice, self-sacrifice, even death itself, was in this scheme of things the ultimate form of power, in the Inca world as much as in the Aztec. Shamanism, and the vivid other worlds encountered in trance, convinced people of these other worlds much more than did the rituals of the Old World. Amid such a set of beliefs, one can see how attitudes to sacrifice would have been different: the more you are convinced that other worlds exist, the easier it is to forgo this one.
    We don’t know how this system came about and probably never shall. However, given that at least some New World wars were fought for captives, rather than for territory, and given that some rulers or nobles were tortured for considerable periods of time before being sacrificed – months or even years – it is at least possible, even likely one might think, that a small number of noble warriors was captured, tortured, during which time they lost so much blood that they entered trance, and were then rescued . Such individuals would have been able to recall their experiences once back in their own villages or towns and would have incorporated them as a