The Mapuche live in the Andes range of southern Chile and Argentina and were the last South American tribe to be conquered by the Spanish. (The strength of one Mapuche warrior was said to equal that of ten Spanish soldiers.) Mapuche shamen, or machis, still speak with the spirits who dwell in some of the world's highest mountains. In 1960, an earthquake registering 9.2 on the Richter scale struck southern Chile. Hundreds of aftershocks followed. Then the ocean rose up, sweeping away everything in its path. It seemed as if the world would end, and the Mapuches needed to do something about it.
A legend of the Mapuches tells of a young man who was drowned by the sea many years ago after he insulted a waterfall. An angry water spirit took hold of his feet and rooted him in the sand. His friends tried everything, even oxen, to free him, but as the tides rushed in, he met his fate. In death, Juan Manquian was transformed into the Minister of the Sea, the Mapuche father-god. After young Juan Painecur's limbs were fed to the rising waters, his torso was stuck in the sand, to be washed out to sea, just like Manquian's.
No one would testify against Machi Juana in the trial for Juan Painecur's murder. Now 85 years old, she is both feared and respected as a shaman who speaks with the spirits of volcanoes. When questioned about the death, she admitted to police that "for great illnesses, great medicine is required." She had predicted the 1960 quake as a punishment for the Mapuche people who had neglected their old religion, who no longer attended the annual festivals. The old shaman thought that an earthquake of such destructive force was a sign that the earth was sick. Machi Juana carried out the sacrifice, which was ordered by more powerful elders. She accepts the blame for the death of the boy, and although her neighbors hate her for leading the sacrifice, they will grudgingly admit that it was necessary to save their lives.
In the Mapuche hierarchy of earth energies, the ocean is the most powerful. To the Mapuche, all life comes from the sea. While the ocean is the strongest element, the mountains can control and direct the energy of water. Machi Juana has a formidable reputation among other machis because of her ability of "take hold of the ocean in one hand and the mountain in the other." Machi Juana was probably the only person who, in her peers' eyes, could lead such a sacrifice, because she could call upon her own mountain and ocean spirits, which resided in the lands that were threatened.
Mountains have different personalities, in the Mapuche's view. Some contain the spirits of warriors, other of giant serpents. A well-known type of serpent-mountain is the Tren-Tren, a mythical hill that rises in times of trouble. A mountain such as this saved the first Mapuche man and woman. When floodwaters threatened to destroy them, they sacrificed their only son and were saved from the flood by the rise of the Tren-Tren.
According to Mapuche custom, earthquakes are punishment for sin. To appease the often violent forces they live with, machis sometimes "pay the earth" with blood. The blood of sheep are offered each spring to pay the water spirits for rain the Mapuche do not irrigate, and their crops depend on nature alone. Machi Juana can predict earthquakes by listening to the earth with a special trumpet. When she predicted a severe quake in 1986, she saw a charging white horse whose reins no one could control. To propitiate this dangerous earth and water, the Mapuche feel they must offer up animals every four years. If these are not enough, it is believed that human sin is so great that a stronger sacrifice must be presented. In 1960, the Tren-Tren did not rise to save the Mapuche village of Lago Budi from tidal waves, so sacrifice was necessary: the murder of Juan Painecur, the last human sacrifice on record in Chile.
Elsewhere in the Andes, similar thinking persists. While driving on treacherous Andean mountain roads, travelers often encounter boulders, strategically placed near steep cliffs. People in the area still believe that the "highway must be fed" with blood to reduce accidents.
When Patrick Tierney researched human sacrifice in modern Peru, he found isolated incidents of Aymara yatiris (Peruvian shamen) who perform sacrifices for profit, at the behest of drug traffickers who seek protection and wealth. Their Peruvian ancestors, the Incas, controlled human sacrifice as a function of the state, but their victims often volunteered. The humans allegedly offered today are not volunteers, and it is said that their souls are not only enslaved for greed but also feared by the yatiris who take their lives. To enslave a soul requires constant vigilance. This cycle of offering human blood can become endless.
Many people believe that human sacrifice is a thing of the past, that unlike our ancestors we no longer live in fear of the spirit world. But some of the modern world hasn't heard the news.
Suttee
Up until the early 1800s, the Hindu funeral rite of suttee required a widow to join her husband on his funeral pyre. If a widow was unwilling to rush to the flames, her neighbors forced her into the fire, fearing a plague if she didn't follow Hindu tradition. Some anthropologists would call mandatory self-sacrifice a form of population control, but was it?
British colonial rule outlawed widow-burning in 1829. It's ironic that in modern India, home of the goddess Kali, a goddess who forbids violence against women, some men now stage accidental deaths to rid themselves of wives with small dowries. Greed at all costs, or a repressed need to sacrifice?
The Holocaust
Politics and ritual often mix. The Third Reich was a millennial movement so arrogant that it compared itself to the thousand-year empire of Rome. Germany had long been infamous among Christian countries in its persecution of the Jews. When Adolph Hitler adopted the Hindu swastika, or sun-wheel, he poisoned a life-affirming symbol that has been found in cultures around the world, from the Navajo to the Norse.
The myth of the Wandering Jew spread the legend that when the Jews finally converted to Christ, His second coming was close at hand. Once the Jews were Christianized, the Christians hoped that the Jews would simply disappear. The German version saw the Jews as immortal, a nuisance that would never go away. For centuries, banking was one of the only professions open to Jews. When wealthy Christians were hard-pressed to pay their debts, they often used the sin of usury as an excuse to kill their Jewish creditors. The Nazis thought all bankers were Jewish; blaming an entire race of people for Germany's financial woes made them that much easier to kill.
From start to finish, the death-camp process was a cleansing sacrificial ritual of the worst kind. First, the victims were bathed and tortured. Victims' skin was then fashioned into drums and lampshades. Next, their most valuable remains, gold fillings and clothing, were recycled into wealth for the leaders who ordered the sacrifice. Finally, the victims were burned as offerings to a warped cause, and like the followers of Machi Juana, when confronted with the crime of murder, few participants would admit their guilt.
The Final Solution was a plan that made it easy to rid the earth of Jews and other perceived undesirables. It was nothing less than Hitler's psychotic mission to cleanse the world of evil, paving the way for the next millennium. He achieved semi-divine status by acting upon his murderous promise to save the world from the Jewish Anti-Christ.
Blood libel
In 1989, a cauldron containing human remains was found on a ranch outside Matamoros, Mexico. The remains of 13 mutilated men were exhumed, one of whom had been boiled alive. Police also found nearly 100 pounds of marijuana. This physical evidence and the confessions of captured ranch-hands led police to believe that they had stumbled upon a drug-smuggling, satanic cult.
The leader of the group, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, was never questioned about his reputation as a ritual killer. After police surrounded his apartment in Mexico City, an assistant, ordered by him, killed him and his lover. Police and so-called occult experts on both sides of the border had proof that he was a drug smuggler and a psychotic murderer, but they slandered the African religion of Ifa by calling him a Santero. He killed for power and greed, not for the saints. What is known is that humans were sacrificed in Matamoros, Constanzo ruling his followers with the fear that they might be next. Who can say if the black magic he worked defeated the U.S. Border Patrol and competing gangs, or if the threat of death alone intimidated his enemies into submission?
In reporting both the Matamoros murders and the investigation of General Manuel Noriega of Panama, the media wrongly assumed a connection between drug-running, Satanism and Afro-Caribbean religions. Santeria and Palo Mayombe were widely slandered as being devil-cults. Even Time magazine published these false innuendoes, obtained from frightened sources in the Border Patrol. In fact, Palo Mayombe is a cult of the dead, an offshoot of Santeria, and practitioners of Palo may use graveyard remains to call the dead, but no evidence has been found of human sacrifice. (The last known human sacrifice in the Caribbean took place in the 1880s, but no one accused a palero of this crime.) Although most practitioners of Santeria offer animal sacrifice, they are not Satanists.
In 1990, the Supreme Court amazingly ruled in favor of The Church of Lukumi, a Santeria church in Hialeah, Florida. In a unanimous decision, the court struck down a city ordinance restricting animal sacrifice; this was seen as a giant step forward for religious freedom. Surprisingly, the church received support from a number of Jewish and Christian churches.
El Dia de Los Muertos
The Day of the Dead is observed throughout Latin America and coincides with the modern celebration of Hallows' Eve. Like the Celts, most Latin Americans believe that this day marks a time of the year when the dead can speak to the living. I grew up in the Southwest, where Halloween nights were spent enjoying a carnival in the town square. Later in the evening, families brought candles, flowers and food to the graves of their loved ones, presenting a banquet for the dead. Many who made these offerings were poor, and taking food from their table might have been a hardship, but they remembered their ancestors. They fed the spirits of their dead with love. My best friends' family sat plates of food on graves that no one else tended. The only thing to fear on Halloween night was those who were forgotten. A night of socializing in the graveyard was followed by a solemn day spent in church, where the dead were honored with a special Mass.
The Sun Dance
Each year, the summer sees another type of blood sacrifice; the Lakota Sioux and other natives of this continent spill their blood onto the earth in one of their most powerful rituals, the Sun Dance. In this controversial ritual, the participants pierce holes into the skin on their chests, thread large hooks made of antler or wood through the holes and hang themselves from a sacred tree until either they rip the skin through and fall or until they pass out. Through offering their own blood, they are able to achieve an ecstatic state, making a connection with the Great Spirit and giving back to the earth something that is truly of their body. This ritual was outlawed but still survives today as an Indian-only event, within the larger Sun Dance festival attended by thousands.
Native American spirituality may yet have something to tell us. The Book of the Hopi predicts a great cataclysm in the near future. Hopi elders are saddened by the prospect of devastation that might be preventable if people would only change their attitudes. Technology isn't to blame; rather, there is too much anger, hate and resentment in the world. Crime and disasters feed on negative energies, and the effect is multifold. The Hopi and many others advise that we begin giving back to the earth, instead of doing nothing but taking.
The modern world: Votive sacrifice vs. blood
Sacrifice of other living beings is no longer widely considered necessary. We can, and should, honor our ancestors, those who went before us. However, we do not have to take another life when we can raise energy in other, "cleaner" ways. Sacrifice doesn't have to mean death; self-sacrifice doesn't have to mean suicide.
According to the threefold law, whatever you put out comes back times three. What then would a sacrifice of blood reap? Instead, we can sacrifice our favorite things in honor of our ancestors, or our gods, and get a good result. We can give the energy that we raise with our bodies, or we can sacrifice flowers or food on our altars. Even IBM embraces a corporate philosophy of giving away your best ideas in order to achieve your highest goals. There are many ways to achieve the desired result without sacrificing blood. Blood is supposed to contain the strongest life vibration, but the energy raised by the living can be just as strong. The exchange becomes equal. Instead of offering the blood of others, we can offer something of ourselves. We need no longer feed orphans' limbs to the sea.
But let us not consider ourselves too far from those who do. You and I may no longer live in fear of the spirit world, but not everyone feels so safe. A word to the wise: If you find yourself driving in the Andes, watch out for falling rocks.
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