I’m always amazed at how quickly some call the Native Americans savages because of human sacrifice-being Hispanic, most of my ancestry is from Spain-but like anyone whose ancestors came to the New World more than a couple of centuries in the past, I have some Native American DNA-as far as I’m concerned, my Spanish ancestors were just as bloody and cruel as the Natives-they just had more sophisticated methods of murder-Spanish Inquisition, anyone-with extra torture? How about some live heretic burning? That stuff was being done all over Europe-and Britain as recently as 300 years ago.
As for child sacrifice-as someone already mentioned, what do you call abortion? Also-Child sacrifice was practiced by everyone from the early Europeans to Africans to
Asians at some time in history-even the Romans made note of that. It seems hypocritical to call some ethnic group savages when we all were just a few centuries ago-those were brutal times, and people were ignorant because there was no scientific knowledge available about weather, climate etc...
The climate change lunatics are still ignorant today-what is their excuse?
There are two things that are being pointed out, most of the time — the other is, that the ridiculous noble savage myth, which is sometimes morphed into the kumbaya tolerance fantasyland, is belied by the ethnic cleansing, continual warfare, and institutional human sacrifice. The first two happened throughout Precolumbian America, the last one is best known from Central and South America, but cannibalism and human sacrifice was practiced here and there all over.
The Aztecs believed that blood sacrifices were necessary to keep the Sun alive, the Mayans more generally thought blood sacrifices were needed to feed their deities. In the Andes (at least as far south as the Atacama) human sacrifice may have been the way the priests (a parasitic class in most societies) alleviated anxiety about regional crises.
Human sacrifice remains part and parcel of Islam, with the last known undisguised example dating to the 1930s I think. When a group of Islam-holes show up to a beheading and shout Allah Akbar as the victim becomes a two-piece, it’s simple to argue that it is human sacrifice in thin disguise.
The witch burnings in Germany came to an end a bit more than 200 years ago. The Salem witch trials didn’t result in any burnings at the stake, but the superstitious ignorant savages like Cotton Mather clamored for the blood of innocent neighbors. Eventually, years later, the main accuser recanted her testimony. That would have been a good time to kill one more, but instead, and perhaps unlike her victims, she probably has living descendants.
None of that was human sacrifice so much as it was witless demonology. Anyone who defends the Salem witch trials today should be burned at the stake, just to explain things to them, in a lesson they won’t live to profit from.
The Iliad has the well-known (probably fictional, but familiar enough to the original audience) human sacrifice of Iphigenia.