The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West

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Excerpt: ... may therefore infer that to the early races of Canaan (including Israel), as well as to the primeval Aztecs, it was a privilege and religious custom to eat part of any sacrifice that had been offered. There can be little doubt, to any one who has studied the earliest human antiquities, that all races indulged in cannibalism, not only during Pg 104 that enormously remote age called Paleolithic, but in comparatively recent though still prehistoric times. "This is clearly proved by the number of human bones, chiefly of women and young persons, which have been found charred by fire and split open for extraction of the marrow." Such charred bones have frequently been preserved in caves, as at Chaleux in Belgium, where in some instances they occurred "in such Pg 105 numbers as to indicate that they had been the scene of cannibal feasts." Teocalli, Aztec Temple for Human Sacrifices. The survival of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous condition of their Indian race, just as in the Greek drama, when that ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess or other distinguished heroine, was not unfrequent. We remember Polyxena, the virgin daughter of Hecuba, whom her own people resolved to sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, and her touching bravery, as she requests the Greeks not to bind her, being ashamed, she says, "having lived a princess to die a slave." A better known example is Iphigenia, so beloved by her father, King Agamemnon, and yet given up by him a victim for purposes of state and religion. From the Greek drama, human sacrifices frequently passed to the Roman, nor does such a refined critic as Horace object to it, but only suggests that the bloodshed ought to be perpetrated behind the scenes. In Seneca's play, Medea (quoted in our Introduction), that rule was grossly violated, since the...