Human sacrifices never took place in the Aztec Empire, according to a well-respected guest speaker at the Hinde Auditorium last week.

Angelbertha L. Cobb said there are severe misconceptions about the religious practices of the Aztec civilization. The name “Aztec” was given to them by the Spaniards who conquered them in the early 1500s.

Cobb discredited the allegations that the Aztecs participated in ritual cannibalism. It had been believed that the Aztecs ate the flesh of prisoners to obtain the strength of their enemies after their bodies were blessed by the gods. She also said it would have been difficult and virtually impossible to drive a sacrificial knife through the human chest cavity with a single thrust and pull out the heart with bare hands.

Cobb was born in Puebla, Mexico. She is a graduate of the Academia de Comercio Cervantes in Guadalajara, Mexico. She was also a paralegal graduate from the Lorenzo Patino School of Law. She has formed several Mexican folklore and traditional dance organizations not only in Mexico, but in Sacramento, as well. She taught indigenous ceremonies as a drug and violence prevention activity in Sacramento. Cobb is also responsible for establishing dance and theater groups at D.Q University, which would open for ceremonies at the pyramid sites in Teotihuacan, Mexico City. Cobb has also been an adviser and volunteer of many cultural and educational organizations in the southwestern United States. Cobb has also received a large list of honorable awards and plaques of recognition for work in many communities.

Cobb, who also goes by her traditional name, Coxamayatl (which means rainbow woman of the earth), presented her credentials not in the form of documents, but with a stone, symbolizing creation and indestructiveness.

“My degree is in the stone, the same way the Aztec calendar is,” Cobb said.

She described the hardships she endured in Mexico as opposed to her experiences in the United States.

“In Mexico, there is more discrimination for us, the ones they call Indians,” Cobb said.

Professor Rose Borunda, who hosted the presentation, said it is important to question the validity of what history texts try to teach us.

Borunda said the Aztecs were not only “demonized” by the Spaniards, but also by other groups who settled outside of the Aztec Empire.

“In the aftermath of conquest, who constructs the knowledge of what our children know?” Borunda said.

Benjamin Torres, an understudy of Cobb and instructor of Aztec dance, emphasized that the Aztec gods were not gods, but symbols. He said the Aztecs were monotheistic and not polytheistic like scholars imply. Torres said the Aztec calendar, which was originally designed by the Toltecs, was not a calendar but a chronological history of the Mexica-Aztec people that represented several points of significance, including astrology and medicine.

Glyphs drawn by the Aztecs depicting human sacrifices should not be taken literally, Torres said, but in a spiritual sense.

Many historic scholars and anthropologists would strongly disagree with Cobb. There were allegedly hundreds of sacrificial victims to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. It is also written in many historical texts that children were sacrificed to the Tlaloc, the rain god. Several scholars believe that Quetzalcoatl, the “feathered serpent” and god of wisdom and learning, was indeed a real person: a Toltec king. According to the sacred books of the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was driven from power by Huitzilopochtli and would return on a certain date. This date coincided with the arrival of Cortes.

“The Spaniards came for gold and treasure,” Cobb said. “But the real treasure is in our hearts and in our minds.”

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