Yesterday I had the great privilege of visiting for the first time the Mayan ruins at Palenque, in Chiapas, Mexico. Astonishing. Part of the conversation among my family as we walked through these stone shells of palaces, temples, and dwellings only recently unveiled from the rainforest was about whether the people who lived there were happy. My uncle, who has a penetrating intuition for buildings and their builders, decided yes. Such things could not be made without happiness. I want to agree but still have a hard time picturing it. After all, so much of what we hear about the Maya involves rather depressing things like war, power, blood, and, of course, human sacrifice. Except the latter, all these things are obviously present in our societies today as well, and they don’t keep us from our moments of joy, such as they are. But there is that sticking point: human sacrifice.

Or is it? Perhaps there are instances of such acts among us as well, though perhaps disguised, not arousing our taboos in the same way. And perhaps, by recognizing them where they hide, we might find it easier to envision Mayan happiness amidst their particular sacrifices.

In his 1566 Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, the conquistador priest Diego de Landa writes to a bishop with his concern that their own Christian faith doesn’t live up to the zeal of the Mayans’ bloody sacrifices. The same sense of uncomfortable admiration has long been directed by Christians at Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: Kierkegaard, for instance.

Wherefore do you, priest of God, tell me if you have taken note of the office of these unhappy priests of the demon, and of all those who, as we read in the divine writings, there have been in times past, how much more burdensome were their fasts than yours, and how long and many; how much longer were their vigils and their miserable prayers than you give, how much more serious and careful they were of the affairs of their office than you are of yours; with how much more zeal than you they understood how to teach their pestiferous doctrines. If thereby you find yourself in any fault, correct it, and see that you are a priest of the Lord above, who solely by your office obliges you to seek to live in cleanness and prudently, the cleanness of an angel rather than of a man. (See context.)

This is the same de Landa who oversaw the burning of every Mayan relic and text he could find, nearly destroying the memory of a civilization with a single stroke. Still, in this passage he does raise the question of some eerie proximity between the human-sacrificing other and ourselves. How different are we, really? Could it be that their faith is just as strong as ours? Even stronger and more admirable, even if we are sure its foundations are incorrect?

To find out, I’ve started a list of possible instances of human sacrifices in modern societies, particularly the United States. I’ve tried to keep to familiar things, official things, often secular things, rather than the taboo peripheries, as important as they are. I’m quite certain about none, which is the reason for all the (parenthetical) qualifications.

• Automobiles (particularly because of high speed limits and other laws that permit some expected, an apparently acceptable, amount of human death)
• Celebrity (I was thinking of Kurt Cobain—but how many others have we killed?)
• Abortion (so it is argued)
• Death penalty (especially when so arbitrary, racist, and symbolic)
• Guantanamo Bay prison
• An incoherent immigration policy that rests the economy on legally nonexistent people
• Football, boxing, ballet (arts that damage the body young)
• Unnecessary warfare
• The availability of firearms
• Romantic, artistic suicide
• The homeless who die on the street
• Suicide terrorism

It seems I’m not the first to do this, or something like it.

• Here’s a pretty large list of present-day human sacrifices from tinWiki
• An interesting essay called “Human Sacrifice and the Rational Economy” from the book Electronic Civil Disobedience

I’m not sure contemplating these things has made me glimpse any more happiness in the Maya, per se. Perhaps the problem is actually that we have lost the language of sacrifice, so many of these things sound like only mere tragedies

Probably the most important recent statement on sacrifice in recent philosophy is Gorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). He suggests that modern politics has removed the possibility of sacrifice in its killing by animalizing, or even statistic-izing, its closest resemblance.

What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways. Our age is the one in which a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe’s highways than a war campaign, but to speak of a “sacredness of the highway railing” is obviously only an antiphrastic definition (La Cecla, Mente locale, p. 115). (114)

To understand what the Maya mean by sacrifice, perhaps we do need more faith after all, a faith in the gods so strong that without question they are truly greater than ourselves. Or, to take the question in a different direction: how did the Maya, as we so blatantly do, domesticate their sacrifices?