This is the third in a series of PBS programs detailing characteristics of the indigenous cultures that existed earlier -- and, indeed, which still exist today -- on the north and south American continents.
Most of the great cities antecedent to our day were built upon an orientation to the sky, in the sense that they denoted solstices and equinoxes of the sun, cycles of the moon, and in some cases, also those of Venus. The significance of these solar, lunar and planetary phenomena are evident, yet I still feel, after viewing this video, that we have somehow missed the interior meanings that these events held for the native cultures involved.
It seems apparent that civilizations have a life span: their early dawning, their full maturity, and their inevitable decline. Ethnic cultures sometimes outlive the structure of their own particular civilization. As with individual human beings, it's possible that human cultures also, in a sense, reincarnate -- they morph into new or hybrid forms.
Human sacrifice apparently was practiced at times in the city of Cahokia, along the Mississippi river, as well as in the ancient cultures in what is now Mexico, Central America, and possibly in South America, although that is not mentioned in this video.
Perhaps it is just my own provinciality of thought, but to me, evidence of human sacrifice seems an example of a system of beliefs no longer properly understood by its own practitioners. I suspect it was once understood that the sacrifice in question was to be internal, rather than external. If a people fail to grasp this distinction, it seems to me an example of a culture in decline. You may argue this point, but I hate to think ancestral people were always so literal regarding what really were metaphysical truths. This is more likely our own retrospective projection, or, as I said, the loss of interior knowledge of their own faith by the very practitioners of it, as has happened in the Western European religious traditions as well.
And so to the video:
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