Most people are familiar with the Aztecs and their supposed penchant for human sacrifice. But how many of us know the mythology behind this heinous practice?

Well, the Aztecs believed that their sun was the fifth and last in a line of suns. They believed that human sacrifice was necessary to keep the chaos of darkness at bay. Humans would be sacrificed, and their blood would be fed to the sun in order to keep it alive. The Aztecs sacrificed humans to save the world, which sounds like a worthy cause.

In Hawaiian mythology, a human sacrifice functioned as an apology to the gods after one of their divine laws had been broken. The victim in these cases was usually the sinner, so in reality it wasn’t too far off from the death penalty. These laws included things like cannibalism, incest and child murder.

Germanic tribes would sacrifice to their gods when they needed help through dire circumstances. They would turn to sacrifice whenever a tribe faced an agricultural disaster, or a war they knew would leave most of them dead.

Two things were true for all these instances of human sacrifice, it was only done when absolutely necessary and no one actually looked forward to it.

The difference between murder and sacrifice

This is important to point out, because we also know of many instances in which people were killed by governmental institutions. Gladiatorial games in Rome saw captives of war sent to their deaths and Ancient Spartans murdered Helots (state-owned slaves) on a regular basis.

This isn’t sacrifice.

Sacrifice isn’t simply about killing people against their will. For a killing to be sacrificial, the gods need to be involved. Death needs to have a divine purpose. Murder is something that humans do to benefit humans. Sacrifice is something humans do to please the gods.

The slanderous side of sacrifice

The Aztecs, Hawaiians, and Germanic tribes represent only a few of the accounts of societies that practiced human sacrifice, but what makes them special is that we actually have sources for their mythological compulsions. In other cases, such as with the Austronesian tribes, accounts of human sacrifice are shrouded in the fog of colonialism and biased history, with the true mythology hidden and distorted for political purposes.

While there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that human sacrifice was part of Austronesian mythologies, our minimal and incomplete accounts of the practice come from biased European “anthropologists”. They do not give accounts of what the mythology suggests as the reason for human sacrifice, simply that it happened and was bad. Europeans used human sacrifice to outline the Austronesians’ perceived barbarism and justify future colonialist efforts.

There are one or two unbiased sources that can be found with a great amount of effort. One Southeast Asian myth provides some context for the necessity of human sacrifice. In this tradition, there is a great flood that wipes out the majority of humanity. A brother and sister escape the flood and then replenish the Earth’s human population.

But incest is taboo and that causes an issue. To rectify this original sin, humans turned to sacrifice. Their blood is meant to help cleanse the living of the affront to the gods.

Killing people is still bad…

This is where the distinction between sacrifice and murder and the cultural reasons behind sacrifice become so important. By the Austronesians’ own accounts, they performed sacrifice for much the same reason that Jesus sacrificed himself. This sacrifice had the intention of cleansing the human race of their sins in the eyes of their gods.

The depiction passed along by racist Europeans, on the other hand, is murder. Some accounts state that people were killed simply to use as rollers to get a boat into the water. While labelled as human sacrifice in most accounts, that’s murder, and it has a 99% chance of not being true.

The idea we have of cannibalistic heathens killing people left and right comes from Europeans and not the people themselves.

As we’ve seen throughout these examples, human sacrifice seems to have been used as the nuclear option. Aztecs aimed to avoid the apocalypse. Germanic tribes wanted to protect their people from famine. And the Austronesians attempted to atone for humanity’s sinful existence.

I’m not going to sit here and advocate for the normalization of human sacrifice, but I do think colonialist propaganda has tainted our perception of it. The people who practiced this ritual according to their sacred mythologies were not reveling in the act.

Molly Desson

Molly Desson is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College. When she’s not busy with coursework, she’s either talking to or about her dog. Some of her non-dog interests include the ancient world, crafts, and being outside.