Ending human sacrifice in many cultures can be seen in their more modern folklore, in the Bible people view ‘‘Moloc’’ as an evil god that children were sacrificed to. The reality is ‘‘Moloc’’ is the Hebrew word for sacrificing the first born child to Adonai. Once the practice was ended and seen as evil, it changed their stories.

the Maya creation myth in the 1500s had the hero twins tricking the death gods which allowed them to avoid human sacrifice, other cultures around the same time had versions where the hero twins obeyed the death gods without tricking them. So local stories from different groups will clue you in to how they view human sacrifice historically, if you understand the context of the stories.

You also have to keep in mind there’s no one Maya culture, it was always diverse city states Maya is more accurately a region than a people, they’re 20 some odd languages that all derived from the classical Maya spoken today in those lands, and still there are languages today that appear to not be derived from classical Maya, so there’s a lot more going on than one culture or history.

The powder keg situation the Spanish walked into in Tenochtitlan that allowed them to conquer the Mexica was due in part to clashing religious and cultural groups with in the Nahuatl speaking dominant groups, within the city were multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures all coexisting, there simply isn’t one story and never will be.

There are descendants of Mexica and Maya that come from groups that didn’t do blood sacrifice, there’s groups where this was a very rare thing to do, and there’s motivations beyond what people accept, only recently are archeologists looking at temple grounds and finding remains there and realizing the remains of infants all have markers of illness or congenial problems that were likely fatal.

Imagine if a cathedral was discovered by an Asian archeologist who didn’t have information about the religious or cultural views of the people who used it, and finding an attached graveyard with the remains of hundreds of elderly and infant people decided that the cathedral was a place for the elderly and infants to fight to the death to amuse their evil Gods. After all they had human skeletons in armor with weapons on display and scary ugly monsters all around the outside, and cages at the top of the building with human remains on them.

It’s very easy to see other people’s culture as this extreme thing, when in reality we know some Maya city states only had fatal blood sacrifice very very rarely, or not at all, and that human remains near temples or in stone containers may not be from human sacrifice at all.

The report that thousands of people were continously killed this way came much more from the Spanish military and priests reports that were often justifications for brutal treatment or genocide, or simply culture shock. Keep in mind these same Spaniards lived in a time when torturing and killing Jews was commonplace, as well as burning women at the stake, burning Gay men to death, as well as public executions that could range from anything like drawing and quadering or boiling alive in water or oil, and impromptu killing of people on shackles if people in public pelted them hard enough with rocks or garbage, which were not even sure was historically the intent or accidental, and this includes killing children when witchcraft, or non Christian religions were involved.

They weren’t shocked about people being killed in elaborate religiously significant manners in public. They were shocked it was to give blood to a pantheon of gods, and that the person being killed wasn’t accused of anything or seen as evil or sinful enough to earn a death sentance.

Also as another interesting tidbit, Isabella, the Queen of Spain ordered Cortez to make contact and gather information and he was offically ordered to NOT conquer anyone, he made up those orders when he landed to seek his personal glory and wealth, the Spanish aristocracy of the day were against conquest and wanted to establish healthy trade routes, not colonize. At least not at first, and religiously, they wanted priests to preach in the Americas, and covert, but not with the sword, at least not specifically.

A lot of the atrocities committed by priests weren’t looked at as OK morally, and were not ordered to be done, but motivated by being able to report fast progress. They were looking for a shortcut home.