Instead, the intended victim was usually a captive or slave taken in battle or purchased for the occasion. For example, they sacrificed children in the springtime during times of drought, but only if those youngsters had two cowlicks. For a few rituals, they chose victims from their own number, but these required special signs of supernatural selection and such individuals were difficult to find. The Aztecs rarely ate, or sacrificed, one another. Usually, the Aztecs treated their victims as honored guests and adorned them in the raiment of the gods, which brings us to the question of who could be so dressed, altered into a spirit, and then eaten. Occasionally, priests dressed the victims as enemies from the Aztec past, and ritually defeated them again. Later in that ceremony, noble participants ate small pieces of the man’s body. In one rite, for example, two Aztecs carried a sacrificial victim with arms and legs tied over a long pole, as if he were a deer. Through costume they transformed their victims into beings that personified food and useful plants, the earth in the cycle from sowing to harvest, or game animals. In the decades before the Spaniards arrived, the Aztecs had integrated the consumption of human flesh into a complex set of rituals tied to the 365-day agricultural year. Instead, consumption of another person was intimately tied to ideas of transforming human flesh into a highly potent substance that conveyed life force and that could be eaten only by other people who were already halfway to being gods themselves. Nor did they gluttonously inhale every single morsel of the body. They did not practice a culinary free-for-all in which anyone could unexpectedly end up as the piece de resistance. While there is no doubt that the Aztecs were cannibals they readily admitted it to Spanish chroniclers - they had strict rules about when human flesh could be eaten, who could be consumed, and who were to be the guests at the banquets that occurred in the annual cycle of agricultural rituals. Both species exercise just enough to keep some muscle tone but not so much as to be all gristle. The similarities probably reflect the diet of swine, which, like people, are omnivores and lack the delicate flavor of grain-, roughage-, and flower-fed animals or the gamey bouquet of carnivores. Pork most closely resembles it in taste and texture, said the Aztecs of Central Mexico, who before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519 were enthusiastic practioners of cannibalism, and who in the 1520s received domesticated pigs from the Spanish invaders. Forget grubs, sheep’s eyes, and moss the ultimate in exotic culinary experience must surely be the eating of human flesh.
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