Aztec Divine Blood Fetishism

The New Trinity:

Blood-Fetishism — Blood-Catharsis — Blood-Donation

This book which was republished seven times between 1962 and 2013, and got its eighth edition in 2018, must satisfy a need in its market to be that successful. It is a book that targets various audiences. Not the extremely competent specialized researchers on the subject, but the wide public — though educated probably at college level, and then the more specialized people who are more than just interested, like people in the tourist industry, or ^people who want to travel to Mexico, though less involved than in deep research on the topic.

I will look at this book from this educated and deeply interested point of view of an audience with at least two years of college education in history and archaeology/anthropology, but not too much in linguistics. The 2013 edition I am working on, of course, does not consider what has been brought to light in the last ten years. These recent discoveries bring up new questions. Most of the time, these questions are kept on the side of the main discourse as a footnote or a comment that is not developed. I will give some examples. The original author, and then the second author-editor want to be factual, descriptive, and explanatory enough for the readers to follow what is a timeline from ca. 2000 BCE to precisely AD 1521, the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards.

The timeline is explicit about the sequential positions of the different people. Olmecs first, then the Zapotecs, the Toltecs, the Mixtecs, the Huastecs, the Tarascans, and the Aztecs; Some, if not all, overlap over the previous one or the next one. The Mayas are mentioned but marginally. That’s probably an element that, in a way, warps the presentation. Michael Coe is thinking phylogenetically, and he is trying to find the various stages of this evolution in Mexico, but he only covers a very precise period, from 2000 BCE to the Conquest in 1521. But there is no phylogeny that does not consider what was before the starting point, and what the context is, hence the wider geographical area that contains Mexico but goes somewhat beyond in two essential directions, south and north. First South, to South America, and that is less than we may think, or from South America north, and here the real…