Rituais de sacrifícios na mesoamérica: os cronistas das índias e a questão da alteridade

Abstract

When the first Spanish people came to the Mesoamerica region they faced different societies, and this happened in a proportion and variety that they had never experienced before. The Spanish came across a problem that required answers: who was that totally unknown individual who they had encountered in that New World, from another root, from a strange civilization, from a human reality which was completely different from all those that the Occidental world knew or counted? During the whole colonial time, the Europeans registered the experiences they had had in great part of the land they were exploiting and occupying in America. Many of the writings about the native peoples of the new land report the peoples’ history: the religiosity, the gods, and, besides other things, the practices of human sacrifice. In the plurality and heterogeneity of the chronicles writers of the Indies and their narratives that accounted the human sacrifices in Mesoamerica, the evangelists were part of that group. Among the written p