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Chapter 1 of Feldman's politically incorrect examination of Native America takes a look at the sacrificial practices of the Taensa and Natchez people of the Lower Mississippi.

When we look into the settled cultures of the American South, we see a hybrid lifestyle—a civilization—that, in part, reflected the hunter-warrior ways of the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains, but, in far deeper detail, mimicked the internal predation upon the individual which was the hallmark of the high civilizations of Central and South America. Where the Mohegan and Iroquois might eat their enemies, the people who had survived the invasion of Soto in the 1540s, sacrificed their own babies to elevate their social status, and upon the death of the chief woman of the village, sacrificed her husband to appease the angry gods.

How much of this complaisant cruelty was the result of the Spanish invasion, which brought down a higher civilization to this intermediate level and how much represented a need to return to the mass sacrifice that greater societies could afford before the Spanish invasion is unknown.

Feldman marshals the chronicles of five French explorers—who were all sympathetic to these Indians in many ways—but were horrified by their child sacrifice. Yes, they sacrificed enemies too, staking their heads around their temples—like Liver-Eating Johnson is said to have done with Blackfeet heads around the graves of Crazy Woman’s children—but the killing of their own children and adults to appease the gods even as their numbers dwindled and this misfortune demanded more sacrifice, is almost too depressing to read.

When the village mother died, twelve pairs of parents brought each one baby to the great woman’s body, strangled their own baby, and then placed the body as part of her procession to the great village beyond life. As with Old World civilizations across Eurasia and the higher civilizations in the Americas, it is clearly apparent that societies that centralize and scale up for the purpose of agricultural investment and a settled life, dramatically expand slavery and sacrifice for the greater good, and therefore seem to be the proto-social organisms from which our more advanced form of sacrificial society—in which surrender of morality, spiritual autonomy and agency are the objects of divine appeasement—has issued.

If you have a strong stomach, I highly recommend George Franklin Feldman’s blandly gruesome view of Ancient America.