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Question for February 2022

Would you have lived longer living amongst the Maya or the Aztecs?? Asked by Farleigh School. Chosen and answered by Dr. Mark Van Stone

I don’t have an easy answer to this question. The life expectancy for noble Aztec children was lower than among commoners, and among other cultures’. Aztec noble families were sometimes (perhaps often) asked to give up their children for sacrifice. That is, they believed that the Gods demanded the best of everything, and that the blood of commoners tasted to the Gods like “old stale bread (tortillas)”, while the blood of nobles was like “delicious, fresh-from-the-oven bread.” I believe Sahagún tells us this. Noble families were expected, every couple of decades, to offer their “unblemished, untarnished” children to the gods. A hard sacrifice for loving parents! (Myself, I’d be willing to injure my children, maybe scar their faces or something, so they would be “unappetizing”!) So nobles tried to have large families, so they might have a “spare” child on hand to give to the gods.

On the other hand, the Aztecs astonished the Spanish with their cleanliness, both of their homes and streets, and their bodies. They bathed once tor twice a day, at a time when Europeans bathed once a month, or even less often. (Michalangelo [or at least his father] considered any bathing unhealthy, a common belief!) I suspect that they may have lost fewer children to diseases caused by unsanitary conditions than the Europeans.
And then, like today’s hand-sanitized, sterilized, civilized people, the Aztecs may have lost some of their natural resistance to disease. Perhaps you have heard of some families allowing, even encouraging, kids to play in the dirt, to build up their resistance. My girlfriend no longer washes her carrots; believes that eating the dirt makes us (in the long run) healthier, more resistant.
Now, as to whether I would have survived the Maya religion... I doubt it. I am a free-thinker, and don’t agree with my friends on most religious points. I suspect that many (but not all, certainly) ancient Mesoamericans (particularly the Aztec, it seems) were pretty intolerant of folks like me who disagree with the State Religion... .

Aztecs

Maya

Question for February 2022

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