At Face Value

            There is an inherent difficulty in using two different civilizations as comparisons to one another: they’re different. There is some grounds for making direct comparisons between two closely related societies (Ancient Rome and Greece for example), particularly if they share aspects of their culture. But applying preconceptions built on an understanding of one ideology as a filter to another ideology can severely hinder one’s understanding.

            The Aztec empire was built on several different pillars, but the central one was its state religion. The religious ideology of the Aztecs was so pervasive in everyday life that it went beyond the scope of worship during isolated times and rituals. Every action held significance. Further it was built on a very simple, but powerful, idea: the gods must be sustained with the blood of ritual human sacrifices. If the gods were not sustained the world would come to an abrupt halt, the sun would cease to rise, and an apocalypse would ensue.

            Did other religions of empires in Western history have ritual sacrifice? Yes. Roman and Greek gods were beseeched with offerings made of slaughtered calves burned on altars by priests of the respective deities. Judeo-Christian history has sections of the Old Testament that speak of the proper sacrifices made to atone for various sins, and sections of the New Testament that compare Jesus to a sacrificial lamb. But trying to draw parallels between these ideologies and those of the Aztecs is not fair to any of the beliefs involved. The point here is that applying the lens of Western beliefs to the Aztecs cannot adequately cover the unique aspects of such a pervasive belief system in a society so far removed from the West as to be completely unrelated.

            Conrad and Demarest do make comparisons, at points, between the motivations of the Inca and Aztec empires, but the emphasis they place on the unique aspects of each balances with it. Further their comparisons are between two related societies that grew almost parallel to one another. At other times they also compare the two empires with the societies that preceded them in the same area, but they do so to draw attention to the aspects that were borrowed or built upon from those predecessors. Such comparisons allow historians to trace the sources of those aspects of a society which are directly related to another society in the historical context in which they occured.

Here, it should be noted, is the difference between the comparisons Conrad and Demarest make and those some others have made: Conrad and Demarest make comparisons between societies that share a geographical region and had some distant contact with one another. This allows them as historians to better understand the societies in context. Comparison out of context illuminates nothing beyond the face value of the aspects being compared.