The Shocking Discovery of Male Virgin Sacrifices
New scientific evidence is changing ancient Mayan history, but art has always known the truth
Night falls as Samson hacks through a South American jungle in search of animals to traffic to zoos. He smells fire, hears a frenetic drumbeat, and follows his senses to a clearing; there, a beautiful young woman is bound to a tree, taunted by a devilish tribal dancer who waves a knife in her face, strips her naked — then murders her.
It’s a horror scene. Literally.
Virgin Sacrifice (1960) is a smorgasbord of bloodlust, chivalry, and savage stereotypes in the form of a mildly erotic action-adventure fantasy, which follows a white explorer’s romantic pursuit of a native virgin destined for ritual sacrifice by her local patriarchy. The story was interestingly led by German-Mexican director Fernando Wagner, whose personal relationship with these topics must’ve been quite the complex and perhaps self-loathing cocktail.
But like the virgin, he is dead — so it’s unfair to speculate.
What is certain, however, is that the film’s central anxiety was percolating long before the 1960s. Harvard anthropologist Christine Warinner explains to Salon.com that “lurid tales of young women and girls being sacrificed” by indigenous societies were popularised during the early 20th century. They manifested in films like King Kong (1933), in which the natives of Skull Island capture Ann Darrow as an offering to appease Kong, and later in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), although the Thuggees were equal opportunists with the sexes and Kate Capshaw would raise an eyebrow at the word “virgin.” But perhaps their most lasting contribution is to the mainstream cult of the “Final Girl,” which began in the 1970s in dozens of horror flicks and hasn’t quit since.
Linda Williams describes the trend in Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess: “sadomasochistic teen horror films kill off the sexually active ‘bad’ girls, allowing only the non-sexual ‘good’ girls to survive.” In perhaps the most famous example, Halloween (1978), Jamie Lee Curtis’s virginity made her both a tasty target for Michael Myers — and his worthy adversary.
I was a deeply conflicted adolescent.
So I was recently interested to learn that the 20th century origin of female virgin sacrifice stories wasn’t film or folklore, but a group of scientists.
And that it was also a lie.
Scientists assumed Mayans murdered women
According to History.com, by 600 AD, the city of Chichén Itzá had developed into a major economic and political power of the Mayan world, eventually attracting a population of as many as 50,000 who flocked from as far as present-day Central America to live and work in its bright red, green, and blue buildings. Its paved roads predated those of many European cities, as did its merchant might — cementing the empire’s control over much of the Yucatan peninsula by the 9th century.
Chichén Itzá was the Rome, Paris and New York of its time.
In 1904, archaeologists dredged a large cenote on the city’s northern end, exhuming human skeletons with marks and wounds that seemed to confirm earlier legends of human sacrifices. The discovery was published by archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson in People of the Serpent (1932). In 1967, the remains of over 100 youth were discovered in a nearby underground storage chamber, further perpetuating speculation of sacrificial offerings. And ever since, although bone degradation over hundreds of years made determining gender extremely difficult, researchers have generally asserted the bodies belong to young female victims. Until now.
In spite of abundant evidence that’s been available for hundreds of years, archaeologists and society alike have twisted a historic narrative to suit the anxieties of our times
Research undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology recently performed genome analyses on 64 of the skeletons from the storage chamber — initially searching for evidence of an early Salmonella enterica pandemic. But what they found was much more alarming . . .
All of the victims were young boys.
The results were so unexpected, that the scientists re-ran their tests.
Most of the boys were believed to have been deposited between 800–1,000 AD, at the height of Chichén Itzá’s power, and were between the ages of three and six. The genetic data revealed that they came from local communities and even had similar diets, suggesting they’d possibly been raised in the same household. About a quarter of them were closely related to at least one other individual in the chamber, and the group included two pairs of identical twins — unlikely to be a coincidence given the low incidence rate of twins, the study’s authors tell Rebecca McPhee for ExplorersWeb. McPhee elaborates:
Twins are central to the “Popol Vuh,” a sacred Mayan text. The myth speaks of twins Hun and Vucub Hunahpu, sacrificed to the gods after defeat in a ball game. After the killing, Hun Hunahpu’s head hung from a tree and impregnated a woman who gave birth to another set of twins. These twins went to the underworld to avenge their father and uncle. Researchers think the boys were sacrificed in pairs to mimic the story of the hero twins.
(‘Impregnation by severed head’ casts a whole new light on the concept of immaculate conception, but we’ll deal with that some other time.)
Anthropologist Christina Warinner is quoted in Science Daily:
“This study, conducted as a close international collaboration, turns that story [of female sacrifice] on its head and reveals the deep connections between ritual sacrifice and the cycles of human death and rebirth described in sacred Maya texts.”
But how did scientists get this assumption so wrong for so long? And if they hadn’t, would the trope of the virgin female sacrifice still have expanded into our culture with such force for a hundred years?
This keeps me up at night. But what I find most disturbing of all, is that evidence of Mayan virgin male sacrifice has always been hiding in plain sight . . .
Scientists just weren’t looking.
Mayan art has long exhibited the truth
In 1969, the Art Institute of Chicago purchased a vessel that was used by Mayans around 753 AD for drinking chocolate. The scene painted on its surface details a sacrificial ceremony for a royal accession, described on the museum’s website:
This vessel, used to consume a chocolate drink, depicts a key event in a royal Maya accession ceremony, which shows the relationship between human sacrifice and the assumption of power. The expectant king is flanked by servants, musicians, and masked nobles, while a terrified captive — bound to a scaffold — awaits his death. It is probable that the victim was a warrior from a rival community defeated by the prospective king during a coronation war. Such sacrifices were required as proof of a new ruler’s military abilities, provided an offering to his patron gods, and served as a sign of the triumphant reign to follow.
The Dallas Museum of Art displays another vessel from a similar period, also depicting a sacrifice in progress. A nude male lies on a stone; he grimaces as blood pours from his midsection. His tormentors hover above, performing a lost ritual.
The identities of these ritual characters are highly speculated among art historians, as are those of the victims themselves.
But another cacao vase, portraying the grisly aftermath of another royal sacrifice, contains glyphs pointing to a Late Classic king from 731 AD. David Stuart of The University of Texas at Austin describes the scene on Maya Decipherment:
“In the scene we see a king seated upon what looks to be a portable throne and looking on a scene of decapitation sacrifice. The victim, perhaps a war captive, lies prone upon a stone altar and before a small stela. His head lies atop the stone monument [ … ] Overall this vessel offers a remarkable and maybe even surprising look into the nature of Maya calendar ceremonies. Written records of k’atun endings, for example, feature the ritual acts of kings who “bind the stone” or “cast the incense.” They never directly mention human sacrifices nor the bloody anointing of stelae, and why they don’t raises an interesting issue worth pondering further.”
These aren’t the only three vessels recording Mayan sacrifices. Many more can be viewed in an archive amassed over thirty years by photographer Justin Kerr, as well as found in museums around the world.
And although their ages, ranks in society and ritual purposes continue to be debated, the victims portrayed are males — not females.
Most archaeologists in modern history have been men, perhaps indicating an obvious explanation for the prior assumption. But that alone doesn’t account for the myth’s vast traction in western culture.
Our adaptations tap into something deep-rooted in our modern collective subconscious — anxieties familiar with patriarchal power dynamics, racial superiority, and sexualized violence
Lead author of the study, Rodrigo Barquera, tells CNN, “I think we have to remember that death, and everything that these rituals imply, were completely different to us because we have a very different view of the world than the one that they had.”
He’s hit the nail on the head.
Somehow, in spite of abundant evidence that’s been available for hundreds of years, archaeologists and society alike have twisted a historic narrative to suit the anxieties of our times. In the centuries since the Mayans ruled, purity ideals have rendered women both targets of violence and heroines worth saving across religion, historical accounts, film, science and beyond. Our adaptations tap into something deep-rooted in our modern collective subconscious — anxieties familiar with patriarchal power dynamics, racial superiority, and sexualized violence.
These are anxieties we can get our heads around. This is the power of storytelling and the stronghold of fear.
So while it’s difficult to imagine a completely inverted victim narrative, David Stuart is right — it’s worth pondering.
So let’s try
The year is 700-something-AD and a new Chichén Itzán king is preparing to take the throne. The last king had an excellent run; the weather was good, the crops were plentiful, trade was expansive, and wars were minimal. To keep the peace, the new king needs to convince his people things will be just as good under his upcoming rule. And perhaps just as importantly, he needs to convince himself.
So he plans to make good with the gods, who control absolutely everything — and whose favor he can be seen currying in a highly public way — by doing EXACTLY what the last king did . . . or at least as close as he can get. It begins with his coronation ritual sacrifice.
The new king visits the house of the “Good Luck Boys”: a family with prosperity in their blood. He’s delighted to discover that their pair of twins has just turned five — the last king sourced his sacrificial twins here, the cousins of these very boys! This is all great news. The deaths of these virgins will be an honor for the family, a good omen for everyone, and great publicity. Besides, the boys will go down in history — their story will be preserved on cacao vessels for all eternity so that future generations can celebrate how selflessly they offered themselves to the preserve the future of the Mayan empire.
Sorry, kids. Back to reality.
Fast forward to the ample breasts of Linda Cordova, exposed by a hooligan in a Halloween mask, as she writhes sexily in Virgin Sacrifice. Meanwhile, white knight Samson observes from his hiding place in the trees: “I guess the only hope for these natives is with that little boy, the chief’s son. I trust when he becomes chief he’ll abolish these savage practices.”
How things have changed.
I guess our only hope for our ignorance is a willingness to address our own fears. I trust that when we’re willing to look at all the evidence, we’ll abolish our savage assumptions.
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