Clearly, it is difficult for us to come to a true understanding of what human sacrifice meant to the sixteenth century Aztec; but it may be observed that every culture possesses its own idea of what is and what is not cruel. At the height of their career the Romans shed more blood in their circuses and for their amusement than ever the Aztecs did before their idols. The Spaniards so sincerely moved by the cruelty of the native priests, nevertheless massacred, burnt, mutilated and tortured with a perfectly clear conscience. We, who shudder at the tales of the bloody rites of ancient Mexico, have seen with our own eyes and in our days civilized nations proceed systematically to the extermination of millions of human beings and to the perfection of weapons capable of annihilating in one second a hundred [times] more victims than the Aztecs ever sacrificed.

Jacques Soustelle in Dances of Anáhuac
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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