Human sacrifice

You can feel the outrage when David Carrasco ( City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization ) observes, “all significant theories of ritual sacrifice, from Robertson Smith through Hubert and Mauss, Rene Girard, Walter Burkert, Adoph Jensen, and J.Z. Smtih, completely ignored the most thorough record of real, historical human sacrifice while favoring either distant reports of animals sacrifices or literary sacrifices from Western Classics! Why does the physical, pictorial, ethno-historical, and sometimes eyewitness evidence of actual ritual human slaughter provoke so little interest among the major theorists of ritual violence? How can each theory parade right on by the sacrifice of Tezcatlipoca, Spanish soldiers, and horses, and the dismemberment of teenage warriors, adolescent girls, and infant children while constructing general principles of interpretation about human aggression? . . . why is there such a lack of interest in the Mesoamerican cases while Christian and Jewish literary exemplum serve as ‘classic’ cases?”