City of Sacrifice

City of Sacrifice PDF Author: David Carrasco
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807046432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
At an excavation of the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City, amid carvings of skulls and a dismembered warrior goddess, David Carrasco stood before a container filled with the decorated bones of infants and children. It was the site of a massive human sacrifice, and for Carrasco the center of fiercely provocative questions: If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for the Aztecs in their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and the authority of city states? Is civilization built on violence? In City of Sacrifice,Carrasco chronicles the fascinating story of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonstrating that religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a temple to the gods. That Mexico City, the largest city on earth, was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, is a point Carrasco poignantly considers in his comparison of urban life from antiquity to modernity. Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the rich history of a major Meso american city but also the inseparability of two passionate human impulses: urbanization and religious engagement. It has much to tell us about many familiar events in our own time, from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv to rape and murder in the Balkans.

City of Sacrifice

City of Sacrifice PDF Author: David Carrasco
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807046432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
At an excavation of the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City, amid carvings of skulls and a dismembered warrior goddess, David Carrasco stood before a container filled with the decorated bones of infants and children. It was the site of a massive human sacrifice, and for Carrasco the center of fiercely provocative questions: If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for the Aztecs in their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and the authority of city states? Is civilization built on violence? In City of Sacrifice,Carrasco chronicles the fascinating story of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonstrating that religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a temple to the gods. That Mexico City, the largest city on earth, was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, is a point Carrasco poignantly considers in his comparison of urban life from antiquity to modernity. Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the rich history of a major Meso american city but also the inseparability of two passionate human impulses: urbanization and religious engagement. It has much to tell us about many familiar events in our own time, from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv to rape and murder in the Balkans.

Smoke and Stone

Smoke and Stone PDF Author: Michael Fletcher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781687384317
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
After a cataclysmic war of the gods, the last of humanity huddles in Bastion, a colossal ringed city. Beyond the outermost wall lies endless desert haunted by the souls of all the world's dead. Trapped in a rigid caste system, Nuru, a young street sorcerer, lives in the outer ring. She dreams of escape and freedom. When something contacts her from beyond the wall, she risks everything and leaps at the opportunity. Mother Death, a banished god seeking to reclaim her place in Bastion's patchwork pantheon, has found her way back into the city. Akachi, born to the wealth and splendour of Bastion's inner rings, is a priest of Cloud Serpent, Lord of the Hunt. A temple-trained sorcerer, he is tasked with bringing peace to the troublesome outer ring. Drawn into a dark and violent world of assassins, gangs, and street sorcerers, he battles the spreading influence of Mother Death in a desperate attempt to save Bastion. The gods are once again at war.

Animal Sacrifice and Religious Freedom

Animal Sacrifice and Religious Freedom PDF Author: David M. O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Santeria religion of Cuba—the Way of the Saints—mixes West AfricanYoruba culture with Catholicism. Similar to Haitian voodoo, Santeria has long practiced animal sacrifice in certain rites. But when Cuban immigrants brought those rituals to Florida, local authorities were suddenly confronted with a controversial situation that pitted the regulation of public health and morality against religious freedom. After Ernesto Pichardo established a Santeria church in Hialeah in the 1980s, the city of Hialeah responded by passing ordinances banning ritual animal sacrifice. Although on the surface those ordinances seemed general in intent, they were clearly aimed at Pichardo's church. When Pichardo subsequently sued the city, a federal court ruled in the latter's favor, in effect privileging the regulation of public health and morality over the church's free exercise of its religion. The U.S. Supreme Court heard Pichardo's appeal in 1993 and unanimously decided that the city had overstepped its bounds in targeting this particular religious group; however, the court was sharply divided regarding the basis of its decision. Three concurring opinions registered distinctly different views of the First Amendment, the limits of government regulation, and the religious freedom of minorities. In the end, the nine justices collectively concluded that freedom of religious belief was absolute while the freedom to practice the tenets of any faith were subject to non-discriminatory local regulations. David O'Brien, one of America's foremost scholars of the Court, now illuminates this controversy and its significance for law, government, and religion in America. His lively account takes us behind the scenes at every stage of the litigation to reveal a riveting case with more twists and turns than a classic whodunit. Ranging with equal ease from primitive magic to municipal politics and to the most arcane points of constitutional law, O'Brien weaves a compelling and instructive tale with a fascinating array of politicians, lawyers, jurists, civil libertarians, and animal rights advocates. Offering sharp insights into the key issues and personalities, he highlights cultural clashes large and small, while maintaining a balance for both the needs of government and the religious rights of individuals. The "Santeria case" reaffirmed that our laws must be generally applicable and neutral and may not discriminate against particular religions. Tracing the path to that conclusion, Animal Sacrifice and Religious Freedom provides a provocative and learned account of one of the most unusual and contentious religious freedom cases in American history.

You Wouldn't Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice!

You Wouldn't Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice! PDF Author: Fiona Macdonald
Publisher: The Salariya Book Company
ISBN: 1911242423
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
You are a young man from a noble family in Mexico. Little do you suspect that you are about to fall victim to one of the most powerful South American civilisations and become an Aztec sacrifice! This title in the best-selling children’s history series, You Wouldn't Want To…, features full-colour illustrations which combine humour and accurate technical detail and a narrative approach placing readers at the centre of the history, encouraging them to become emotionally-involved with the characters and aiding their understanding of what life would have been like living in the Aztec civilisation. Informative captions, a complete glossary and an index make this title an ideal introduction to the conventions of information books for young readers. It is an ideal text for Key Stage 2 shared and guided reading and helps achieve the goals of the Scottish Standard Curriculum 5-14.

Ash and Bones

Ash and Bones PDF Author: Michael R Fletcher
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Smoking Mirror spoke in smoke and stone. Having returned Mother Death to Bastion, Nuru flees to the inner rings. The Loa heretics seek to turn her to their own ends and topple the nahual from power. As Bastion crumbles, Nuru contemplates the ultimate blasphemy: A world without gods. Broken by his battle with Mother Death, Akachi awakens with renewed purpose. He must hunt the blasphemers who would destroy his beloved city. Armed with the Staff of the Fifth Sun he stalks Nuru through Bastion's rings. The survival of all humanity rests on his shoulders. Nothing is as it seems. Smoking Mirror, god of discord and strife, plots behind the scenes. He manipulates gods and men alike in a game as old as time. From the lowest Grower to the gods at her heart, Bastion is once again at war.

Fifth Sun

Fifth Sun PDF Author: Camilla Townsend
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190673060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.

The Aztecs

The Aztecs PDF Author: David Carrasco
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195379381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Illuminates the complexities of Aztec life. Readers meet a people highly skilled in sculpture, astronomy, city planning, poetry, and philosophy, who were also profoundly committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife and through warfare.

Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership

Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership PDF Author: Saburo Sugiyama
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521780568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
An archaeological examination of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid as a symbol of power in Teotihuacan.

Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos

Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos PDF Author: Kay Almere Read
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253113917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This introduction to the imaginative world of the Mexica (or Aztec) explores sacrifice in the richly textured life of 16th-century Mexico. Kay Almere Read describes a universe in which every object was timed by a given lifespan and in which sacrifice was the mechanism by which time functioned. This book makes a convincing case for what sacrifice meant religiously and for how it came to be that human sacrifice of staggering proportions could be accepted, matter-of-factly, by the Mexica people.

The Strange World of Human Sacrifice

The Strange World of Human Sacrifice PDF Author: Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042918436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The Strange World of Human Sacrifice is the first modern collection of studies on one of the most gruesome and intriguing aspects of religion. The volume starts with a brief introduction, which is followed by studies of Aztec human sacrifice and the literary motif of human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature. Turning to ancient Greece, three cases of human sacrifice are analysed: a ritual example, a mythical case, and one in which myth and ritual are interrelated. The early Christians were the victims of accusations of human sacrifice, but in turn imputed the crime to heterodox Christians, just as the Jews imputed the crime to their neighbours. The ancient Egyptians rarely seem to have practised human sacrifice, but buried the pharaoh's servants with him in order to serve him in the afterlife, albeit only for a brief period at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization. In ancient India we can follow the traditions of human sacrifice from the earliest texts up to modern times, where especially in eastern India goddesses, such as Kali, were long worshipped with human victims. In Japanese tales human sacrifice often takes the form of self-sacrifice, and there may well be a line from these early sacrifices to modern kamikaze. The last study throws a surprising light on human sacrifice in China. The volume is concluded with a detailed index