Reading Aztec Sacrifice Through Its Own Economic Language

Historians of Mesoamerican religion, notably Miguel Leon-Portilla, argue that nextlahualli's debt and payment vocabulary is not a modern metaphor imposed on Aztec practice but the Nahuatl sources' own framing, recorded directly in texts such as the Florentine Codex compiled under Bernardino de Sahagun with Nahua scholars in the sixteenth century.

Reading Aztec ritual through this lens changes what a sacrifice meant to the people performing it: rather than a transactional bribe offered to secure a favor, an offering repaid an obligation that already existed regardless of whether any specific favor was requested, closer in structure to a debt payment than to a gift given in hope of return. This framing also extended to the sacrificial victim in Mexica thought, particularly a warrior captured in battle and later sacrificed, who was understood in some contexts to be completing his own life's debt through a death treated as an honored continuation of the same repayment the gods themselves had begun. Modern scholarship treats this economic register as central to understanding Aztec religion on its own terms rather than solely through the horror later European observers projected onto it.