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>Lake Chapala
>They built a temple to their god, Iztlacateotl, and practiced human sacrifice
>What is Tititcaca
THE HILLS ARE FULL OF DEVILS
By R. TOM ZUIDEMA; R. Tom Zuidema is the author of the forthcoming Inca Civilization in Cuzco.
Published: January 7, 1990
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THE HIGHEST ALTAR
The Story of Human Sacrifice.
By Patrick Tierney.
Illustrated. 480 pp. New York: Viking. $22.50.
Students of Andean culture, old or modern, are familiar with stories about the nakaq - an old Inca word for sacrificer. These stories tell us about outsiders interested in killing local people to obtain their body fat. The first such story was told by one of the Spanish conquerors of the Aztec empire in Mexico, Bernal Diaz del Castillo. He and his companions killed an Aztec opponent in battle and used his body fat to grease their weapons.
In The Highest Altar, Patrick Tierney reports recent stories from Peru about the nakaq (under the names nanqha, or 'devils' and liquichiris), told by people who are wary of foreigners and who live under the stress of inflation, drug traffic, the operations of the Shining Path guerrillas and natural calamities.
Mr. Tierney went to Peru in 1983 as a reporter for Omni and Discovery to write about a well-preserved mummy of an Inca boy, left to die as a sacrifice on a high mountain peak some 500 years ago. This evoked his interest in recent reports abouthuman sacrifice, which is still practiced in Chile, Bolivia and Peru.His search provided him the material for the central and main part of his book. Only slowly, after regular visits during a period of five years (1983-88), would people reveal to him the events in which they themselves were involved or about which they had heard.
The first report of a sacrifice Mr. Tierney investigates concerns a 5-year-old boy in southern Chile, among the Mapuche Indians, who was said to have been killed in 1960. After an earthquake followed by a huge tidal wave, people under the leadership of a female shaman tried to appease the wrath of the ocean with this sacrifice. It is the single case Mr. Tierney cites of a communal killing ritual in Chile. Then a newspaper article in 1986 about the possiblesacrifice of a man near Lake Titicacain Peru led Mr. Tierney to investigate this event as well as many others in recent years. Here Mr. Tierney was presented with personal motivations - for instance, the overriding desire to become rich. We have to ask if we are dealing with facts or with stories inspired by envy.
Mr. Tierney gives many lively descriptions. He unearths more and more cases of recent sacrifices, and he reports various opinions people had about them. Finally, he participates in a ritual on a mountaintop with an old shaman, accused of sacrificing the man near Lake Titicaca. The shaman tells Mr. Tierney he had led many victims - but only young women - to their execution. He describes these in lavish detail, but he denies having sacrificed the man near Lake Titicaca. His own opinion, he says, is that death was a case of common murder, committed by someone else.
Mr. Tierney writes an informative account of the ethnohistorical background on human sacrifices - people executed for reasons of state -in the Inca empire and of the spectacular discoveries of children left to die on high mountaintops in the era before the Spanish conquest of Latin America. He then studies theories of human sacrifice, especially from the points of view of Jewish and Christian traditions.
Some of the practices mentioned clearly have pre-Spanish precedents, for instance that of making the face of the victim unrecognizable.But the fear for the nakaq seems to have had its European influences. Even if in the end we are left with the doubt that all or most of Mr. Tierney's examples in the Andes illustrate human sacrifice rather than certain ritual aspects of common murder, he gives us abundant and valuable ethnographic material. His book illustrates admirably the psychological pressures under which many Peruvians are living today.
>https://archive.ph/ZvT17#selection-481.1-481.136