Who did the Aztecs use for sacrificial victims?

It is well known that the Aztec people sacrificed human beings at many ceremonies, but that is not all that they did. The Aztecs had two ways that they sacrificed to the gods, in one they would offer the hearts of humans and the blood of animals to the gods, in the other way they would place high amounts of pain upon their bodies which bled for the gods. It makes sense that they could not offer large numbers of humans' everyday for sacrifice, or else they would run out of people too quickly. So instead, the Aztecs would offer some of their blood to the gods without dying themselves.

There were many ways that they offered themselves to the gods. For instance, Penance- letting their own blood, self-mutilation, piercing their own tongues with spiney strings- was another way of gaining favor from the gods (Booth 1966). They thought that the more pain that they went through the more the gods would be pleased with them. This thought was not new to the Mexican basin area. It was in fact a big trend with the people, Auto sacrifice, the extraction of blood from different parts of one's own body (tongue, penis, ears, legs) with various cutting instruments (awls of bone or obsidian, maguey thorns, was wide spread throughout Mesoamerica beginning in Preclassic times (Solis 2004).

It was natural for all people to perform auto sacrifice, but it was not a daily occurrence for most people, all people engaged in autosacrifce at some point in their lives, usually to petition the gods for agricultural or human fertility (Smith 1996). In contrast to the common people though, the most devout practitioners (priests, for the most part) would pierce their flesh and then pull hollow straws or reeds through the hole. Priests engaged in autosacrifice nightly (Smith 1996). The priests were naturally the closest to understanding the desires of the gods and therefore performed these rituals upon themselves daily so that the gods would get the blood they demanded. This ritual was based on their prehistory, The god Quetzalcoatl performed the first act of autosacrifice when he bled himself to give life to the bones of the ancients (Smith 1996). It all goes back to the fact that the Aztec rituals were meant to repeat the past.

It is the same way with the Christian faith and the whole eating the wafer and drinking the wine, plus the praying a penance thing that they do is similar to what the Aztecs strove to do. The way they went about practicing their beliefs is slightly more extreme than some other religions, but has the same principal ideas. The most common act of auto sacrifice was to pierce one's earlobes or upper ear with pointed maguey thorns. Sometimes other parts of the body were pierced, including the tongue, thigh, upper arm, chest, and genitals (Smith 1996). The maguey plant had many uses that the Aztec people took advantage of; some things were more pleasant than others. By piercing their bodies with the spines they could feel connected to the gods without having to stab a knife into their chest. Although some were obviously such devout followers that they would do more than the required auto sacrifice, and end up killing themselves. Furthermore, while auto sacrifice represented a "partial" death, a person could also die symbolically through sacrificing a victim who was believed to be an "image" (ixiptla) both of him-or herself and of a particular god (Solis 2004). In addition, although autosacrifice was an important and prevalent ritual, it was only a substitute for the more powerful human sacrifice (Smith 1996).