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| Angry Christ (1950) by Alfonso Ossorio |
WHERE IS GOD?
On the day I punish Israel for her sins, I will destroy the altars of
Bethel; the horns of the altar will be cut off and fall to the ground.—Amos
3:14
The Phoenicians are an extinct people. They were extinguished by the
Romans.
Ninety percent of the Aztec population was decimated by the smallpox
brought by the Europeans.
Both the Phoenicians and Aztecs practiced child sacrifice.
Divine justice, perhaps?
Photo, cropped, courtesy of Juncristobal
ReplyDeletePhoto link:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Church-of-Angry-Christ-Altar.jpg
Gonzalinho
Divine justice does appear to operate in this world but not exactly in the way we would expect.
ReplyDeleteGonzalinho
A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods.
ReplyDeleteThe paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the ‘tophets’ – ancient infant burial grounds – simply as child cemeteries are misguided.
And the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.
The research pulls together literary, epigraphical, archaeological and historical evidence and confirms the Greek and Roman account of events that held sway until the 1970s, when scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda.
The paper is published in the journal Antiquity.
Dr Josephine Quinn of Oxford University’s Faculty of Classics, an author of the paper, said: ‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries.
‘But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks and Romans against their political enemy, and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander.
‘What we are saying now is that the archaeological, literary, and documentary evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming and that instead of dismissing it out of hand, we should try to understand it.’
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
—“Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children,” University of Oxford, January 23, 2014
One of the reasons why the ancient Israelites were influenced by the practice of child sacrifice by the ancient Phoenicians is that the two groups lived next to each other and as a result were in important ways ethnically, culturally, and linguistically related.
Gonzalinho
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.
ReplyDeleteAndrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.
Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.
While it’s true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true. Why did they carry out such brutal ceremonies? John Verano, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, explains the practice held spiritual significance for the Aztecs.
“It was a deeply serious and important thing for them,” says Verano. Large and small human sacrifices would be made throughout the year to coincide with important calendar dates, he explains, to dedicate temples, to reverse drought and famine, and more.
https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion
—Dave Roos, “Human Sacrifice: Why the Aztecs Practiced This Gory Ritual,” History, October 11, 2018
Gonzalinho