Heart-extraction
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Heart-extraction is a horror trope used to kill vampires and werewolves.
Aztec culture
By far the most common form of human sacrifice in Aztec culture was heart-extraction, and this seems to have related to the Aztec belief that the heart(tona) was both the seat of the individual and a fragment of the Sun's heat (istli). To this day, the Nahua consider the Sun to be a heart-soul (tona-tiuh) 'round, hot, pulsating'(Alan Sandtrom, Corn is Our Life, 1991, 239-240). It seems that in the Aztec view, humanity's 'divine sun fragments' were considered 'entrapped' by the body and its desires:
- Where is your heart?
- You give your heart to each thing in turn.
- Carrying, you do not carry it...
- You destroy your heart on earth (Nahua poem in Irene Nicholson, Firefly in the Night, 156 & 203).
Heart-extraction was viewed as a means of liberate istli and reunite it with the Sun, as aptly depicted in Codex Magliabechiano, Folio 70 (illustrated in this section), wherein a victim's transformed heart flies Sunward on a trail of blood.
See also
