I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0] examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The epis

I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0] examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The episodes were a companion to Daniele Bolelli's "History on Fire" episodes [1] about the first contact between the Spanish and the Mexica (Aztecs), but whereas Bolelli focuses more on the narrative drama of the events of these two incompatible cultures clashing, Cooper's episodes are more psychological explorations about the human condition that try to examine just where in our human minds arises these primal urges toward cannibalism and sacrifice of other humans and how early cultures dealt with the trauma of it in the form of rituals. There's a progression to it too, where cultures tend to move between different phases (cannibalism to human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to purely symbolic sacrifice) where those 'psychic urges' can be played out in more and more abstract ways. It's reminiscent of Dan Carlin's episode about gladiators and public executions [2] and how our modern culture still wants to see the violence but to have it be virtual. The MartyrMade podcast's analysis does a great job of juggling the two opposing ways of looking at these cultures. On one hand there is a human universality in that every culture and every people almost certainly has cannibalism and human sacrifice somewhere in its deep past. On the other hand, it's too easy for us in modern Western societies to try to interpret these other cultural behaviors in rational ways as if deep down they're just like us. Culture shapes its participants fundamentally; truly alien ways of being are the norm. You can't read the account [3] of a young women ritualistically standing in for a Maize Goddess, being beheaded, flayed, and having her too-small skin being stretched and worn by a priest dancing before a crowd without being reminded of the quote "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." When people talk about the "cultural iceberg" [4], this exemplifies just how deep those icebergs go; it's not just language and food and dress and dance. --- [0] http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/ http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/ [1] http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec [2] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-61-blitz-painfotainment/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-61-blitz-... [3] http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html [4] https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultural-iceberg.png https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultur...