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84 Kajendralala Mitra — On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. [No. 1 



any repugnance or surprise, and the vow of Jephtha, which was literally 

 carried out by the sacrifice of his daughter, affords a positive proof on the 

 subject. The offering of children to Moloch, which the Jews evidently 

 borrowed from their neighbours, is also remarkable as bearing strongly on 

 the question at issue. 



Of all the different races of America, the Aztecs were the most civi- 

 lized. Their social institutions, their palaces, their elective form of govern- 

 ment, were such as to claim for them a very high position as a nation, and 

 yet their addiction to human sacrifice was such as would disgrace the lowest 

 savages. At their coronations, "the new monarch", says Prescott, " was 

 installed in his regal dignity with much parade of religious ceremony ; but 

 not until, by a victorious campaign, he had obtained a sufficient number of 

 captives to grace his triumphal entry into the capital, and to furnish 

 victims for the dark and bloody rites which stained the Aztec supersti- 

 tion."* The number immolated at such times was prodigious ; nor was 

 the coronation the only time when this horrid rite was celebrated. Adop- 

 ted in the beginning of the fourteenth century, it was not very frequent 

 at first ; " it became", according to the historian, " more frequent with the 

 wider extent of their empire till at length, almost every festival was closed 

 with this cruel abomination."f The total was variously estimated at from 

 twenty thousand to fifty thousand in ordinary years, and rising, on great 

 occasions, such as a coronation or the dedication of an important temple, as that 

 of Huitzilpotchli in 1486, to a hundred thousand. The heads of the victims 

 were preserved in Golgothas, in one of which the companions of Cortes 

 counted one hundred and thirty-six thousand skulls. The details varied 

 according to circumstances, and the nature of the divinity to whose honour 

 the rite was celebrated, but they were generally of the most disgusting 

 and cruel kind possible ; attended by preliminary tortures, which Prescott 

 justly compares with the fantastic creations of the Florentine poet as 

 pictured in the twenty-first canto of his ' Inferno'. Neither sex nor age 

 offered an immunity to the unfortunate captive from his- cruel doom, and in 

 seasons of draught, infants were particularly sought as the meetest offering 

 to the rain-god Tluloc. The object in this case was exactly the same for 

 which the Khonds of western Orissa sacrificed their Meriah to the Earth 

 Goddess, Tari Pennu, and the manner in which they treated the Meriah 

 corresponds in many respects with that of the Aztecs. The following 

 extract gives the details of an ordinary sacrifice of the Aztecs : 



" One of their most important festivals was that in honour of the god 

 Tezcatlepoca, whose rank was inferior only to that of the Supreme Being. 

 He was called ' the soul of the world', and supposed to have been its Crea- 



* Conquest of Mexico, I, p. 22. 

 f Ibid., p. 67. 



