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The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice
An extraordinary exploration of human sacrifice details its religious and cultural significance, and its practice, past and present. 16 pages of full-color photos.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 6, 2015
One of the other books I'm reading right now (and no, it's not on my shelf; I've given up trying to keep my GR shelf up-to-date, I'm too impulsive in my reading and I read too many books at a time) is "Clear and Simple as the Truth," by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner. It's a book about a writing style they call "classic."
Classic prose, they write, "is pure, fearless, cool, and relentless. It asks no quarter and gives no quarter to anyone, including the writer ... human beings are not pure, fearless, cool, or relentless, even if we may find it convenient for certain purposes to pretend that we are. The human condition does not, in general, allow the degree of ... certainty that the classic writer pretends to have ... But the classic style simply does not acknowledge the human condition ..."
The Highest Alter is *not* an example of classic style.
On the contrary, it's a bit of a mess.
I do not mean that pejoratively however.
Tierney got involved in this human sacrifice business as a journalist; he was sent to do a story about an Incan child sacrificed on a 17,780-foot-high mountain in Chile.
He ends up learning about and then chasing down a number of stories of 20th Century human sacrifice in Argentina, Chili, and Peru. And there's a real bull-in-the-china-shop feel to his story. He barges into these indigenous communities ("It rubs me the wrong way to have a gringo come here and ask me about that," one man responds when Tierney questions him) and tries to get the local tribal leaders and shamans and victims' family members to confess to acts that Tierney himself finds horrifying. More than horrifying. Also culturally and psychologically inexplicable. "I couldn't shed my desire to civilize the natives," Tierney remarks at one point. "In my ideal world they would all have become teetotaling vegetarians who practice yoga."
He narrowly escapes with his life on more than one occasion, whether it's because he's caught in a blizzard on a mountain peak or because he's insulted or riled the locals.
The result is hugely peculiar. Tierney eventually realizes that human sacrifice is a fairly common practice in certain regions of the Andes. He also slowly, gropingly begins to place it within a larger religious context. Human sacrifice is a tool these cultures use to deal with fear and uncertainty and the lack of control that marks human existence everywhere. Victims are turned into demi-gods, intermediaries between this world and the next; they're worshipped and supplicated. It's a sacred practice. Horrifying, but sacred. But how do you write about that when you also view the practice as murder -- bloody murder, literally (while ancient Incan sacrifice victims were probably drugged and killed relatively gently via exposure, which accounts for the relatively peaceful posture and facial expressions of Andean mummies, today's victims often die neither quickly nor happily).
The only way Tierney could learn anything about these practices was to become close to their practitioners. This puts him into a morally ambivalent position. He not only consorts with murderers. He also recognizes that he's exploiting illiterate native South Americans for selfish reasons (so he can write an Important Book and be lauded for it). And he finds himself feeling pity for people who commit these crimes, because they are in a sense drafted into the role by their communities. If a bloodthirsty god has sent a devastating earthquake and tsunami that is killing people around you and wiping away their homes, and you're a local shaman, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
This is hugely tricky territory. And so, to get back to the notion of how content and style interplay: it's no wonder much of the book seems somewhat disorganized. Tierney is reporting what he learned, but also trying to make sense of it, and he's part of the story -- he's complicit in it. At times he literally repeats points he's made earlier, like you do when you're keeping a journal and there's some insight you can't quite internalize, so keep returning to in your life.
Tierney closes the book with several chapters that shift the action away from contemporary South America entirely, and instead examine Western Judeo-Christian practices and beliefs. In some respects, these are the most coherent chapters of the book -- because here, Tierney is dealing with theories and analysis and scholarship instead of children getting their limbs hacked off.
What he proposes is certainly fascinating.
Human sacrifice was practiced by every single pre-historic culture in every region of the world.
Somehow, certain cultural traditions managed to render it taboo.
I've personally formulated a fresh new notion of human evolution since reading this book. We became humans, instead of animals, when we began practicing human sacrifice.
We started to become something else again when we stopped.
But we haven't stopped entirely. The Highest Alter was published in 1989. I doubt the practices Tierney investigated have disappeared since then ...
Highly recommended for anyone interested in history, paganism, ancient religion -- or what it means to be human.
Classic prose, they write, "is pure, fearless, cool, and relentless. It asks no quarter and gives no quarter to anyone, including the writer ... human beings are not pure, fearless, cool, or relentless, even if we may find it convenient for certain purposes to pretend that we are. The human condition does not, in general, allow the degree of ... certainty that the classic writer pretends to have ... But the classic style simply does not acknowledge the human condition ..."
The Highest Alter is *not* an example of classic style.
On the contrary, it's a bit of a mess.
I do not mean that pejoratively however.
Tierney got involved in this human sacrifice business as a journalist; he was sent to do a story about an Incan child sacrificed on a 17,780-foot-high mountain in Chile.
He ends up learning about and then chasing down a number of stories of 20th Century human sacrifice in Argentina, Chili, and Peru. And there's a real bull-in-the-china-shop feel to his story. He barges into these indigenous communities ("It rubs me the wrong way to have a gringo come here and ask me about that," one man responds when Tierney questions him) and tries to get the local tribal leaders and shamans and victims' family members to confess to acts that Tierney himself finds horrifying. More than horrifying. Also culturally and psychologically inexplicable. "I couldn't shed my desire to civilize the natives," Tierney remarks at one point. "In my ideal world they would all have become teetotaling vegetarians who practice yoga."
He narrowly escapes with his life on more than one occasion, whether it's because he's caught in a blizzard on a mountain peak or because he's insulted or riled the locals.
The result is hugely peculiar. Tierney eventually realizes that human sacrifice is a fairly common practice in certain regions of the Andes. He also slowly, gropingly begins to place it within a larger religious context. Human sacrifice is a tool these cultures use to deal with fear and uncertainty and the lack of control that marks human existence everywhere. Victims are turned into demi-gods, intermediaries between this world and the next; they're worshipped and supplicated. It's a sacred practice. Horrifying, but sacred. But how do you write about that when you also view the practice as murder -- bloody murder, literally (while ancient Incan sacrifice victims were probably drugged and killed relatively gently via exposure, which accounts for the relatively peaceful posture and facial expressions of Andean mummies, today's victims often die neither quickly nor happily).
The only way Tierney could learn anything about these practices was to become close to their practitioners. This puts him into a morally ambivalent position. He not only consorts with murderers. He also recognizes that he's exploiting illiterate native South Americans for selfish reasons (so he can write an Important Book and be lauded for it). And he finds himself feeling pity for people who commit these crimes, because they are in a sense drafted into the role by their communities. If a bloodthirsty god has sent a devastating earthquake and tsunami that is killing people around you and wiping away their homes, and you're a local shaman, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
This is hugely tricky territory. And so, to get back to the notion of how content and style interplay: it's no wonder much of the book seems somewhat disorganized. Tierney is reporting what he learned, but also trying to make sense of it, and he's part of the story -- he's complicit in it. At times he literally repeats points he's made earlier, like you do when you're keeping a journal and there's some insight you can't quite internalize, so keep returning to in your life.
Tierney closes the book with several chapters that shift the action away from contemporary South America entirely, and instead examine Western Judeo-Christian practices and beliefs. In some respects, these are the most coherent chapters of the book -- because here, Tierney is dealing with theories and analysis and scholarship instead of children getting their limbs hacked off.
What he proposes is certainly fascinating.
Human sacrifice was practiced by every single pre-historic culture in every region of the world.
Somehow, certain cultural traditions managed to render it taboo.
I've personally formulated a fresh new notion of human evolution since reading this book. We became humans, instead of animals, when we began practicing human sacrifice.
We started to become something else again when we stopped.
But we haven't stopped entirely. The Highest Alter was published in 1989. I doubt the practices Tierney investigated have disappeared since then ...
Highly recommended for anyone interested in history, paganism, ancient religion -- or what it means to be human.
October 19, 2014
This exploration of human sacrifice meanders a bit, but maintains interest throughout. Perhaps it should have been organized into three parts. Parts 1 and 2 are very anecdotal as author Patrick Tierney gives a first-person account of his adventures in the Andes as he investigated his subject. Part 1 is as much about mountain climbing as human sacrifice. He scaled various peaks to investigate mountain burial sites of Incan child sacrifices. In Part 2, he spends time in the company of modern-day shamans to uncover the truth behind present-day sacrifices, culminating in a lengthy interview with Maximo Coa, a man who is famed for committing many human sacrifices. Part 3 shifts gears completely. Referring to the patterns and motifs of human sacrifice and the mythology surrounding it, he makes a provocative and fascinating case that sacrifices were an integral part of early, developing Christianity and that sublimation of and guilt over this fact has resulted in hundreds of years of anti-Semitism.
July 16, 2025
I love nonfiction like this. High-adventure tracking down tales of modern day human sacrifice (and some mountain climbing) in Peru. A detailed look into the lives, and supernatural beliefs of the natives. Human sacrifice, a local kind of vampire, and drug smuggling co-exist. Then there's scholarly insight finding human sacrifice in the Judeo-Christian tradition and even an even a theory on the the origins of the werewolf myth. A treasure trove for writers. And it makes a lot of fiction look pale.
July 4, 2018
I picked up this book because I thought it was about human sacrifices/mummification performed by the Incas. Instead, it is about a tradition of human sacrifice in the Andes that predates the Incas and has continued in rural areas into the 1980s. That’s not a typo - NINEteen eighties.
While being a sacrifice during Inca times was a great honor, and victims were treated like living gods before death and drugged before they were killed, modern practice is far more gruesome. In some cases, sacrifices are community actions, performed during times of crisis (earthquakes, tsunamis). Sometimes they are considered requirements for a successful construction project or mining endeavor. These activities, while not using honored and willing victims, at least are somewhat in line with the Inca past.
Far more unsettling is the tradition of sacrifice that seems to be the tragic consequence of incomplete Catholic conversion, a literal interpretation of missionaries’ statements that all paganism is Satanic, and the impoverishment of rural areas by colonists and greedy businesses. God’s “sacrifice” of his son is tacit affirmation of the power of blood. “Evil” pagans picked up Satanic books and augmented their belief systems, believing what they were told by missionaries. Finally, these things became incorporated into a new prestige practice of kidnapping and murdering the poor and marginalized in order to gain wealth and power, partly through simple intimidation.
This behavior is not the norm in the Andes, but the author does a good job of explaining the practice’s provenance and the beliefs/motivations of those who practice it.
While being a sacrifice during Inca times was a great honor, and victims were treated like living gods before death and drugged before they were killed, modern practice is far more gruesome. In some cases, sacrifices are community actions, performed during times of crisis (earthquakes, tsunamis). Sometimes they are considered requirements for a successful construction project or mining endeavor. These activities, while not using honored and willing victims, at least are somewhat in line with the Inca past.
Far more unsettling is the tradition of sacrifice that seems to be the tragic consequence of incomplete Catholic conversion, a literal interpretation of missionaries’ statements that all paganism is Satanic, and the impoverishment of rural areas by colonists and greedy businesses. God’s “sacrifice” of his son is tacit affirmation of the power of blood. “Evil” pagans picked up Satanic books and augmented their belief systems, believing what they were told by missionaries. Finally, these things became incorporated into a new prestige practice of kidnapping and murdering the poor and marginalized in order to gain wealth and power, partly through simple intimidation.
This behavior is not the norm in the Andes, but the author does a good job of explaining the practice’s provenance and the beliefs/motivations of those who practice it.
September 10, 2020
Interesting and some great insights on Human Sacrifice but just in case you were wondering: It doesn't work and the theory is based on Bollocks.
June 13, 2013
This exploration of human sacrifice meanders a bit, but maintains interest throughout. Perhaps it should have been organized into three parts. Parts 1 and 2 are very anecdotal as author Patrick Tierney gives a first-person account of his adventures in the Andes as he investigated his subject. Part 1 is as much about mountain climbing as human sacrifice. He scaled various peaks to investigate mountain burial sites of Incan child sacrifices. In Part 2, he spends time in the company of modern-day shamans to uncover the truth behind present-day sacrifices, culminating in a lengthy interview with Maximo Coa, a man who is famed for committing many human sacrifices. Part 3 shifts gears completely. Referring to the patterns and motifs of human sacrifice and the mythology surrounding it, he makes a provocative and fascinating case that sacrifices were an integral part of early, developing Christianity and that sublimation of and guilt over this fact has resulted in hundreds of years of anti-Semitism.
July 8, 2017
I'd started reading this towards the end of the semester for a reseearch paper and I wound up hooked on it. Most of the book is focused on South America, and it covers both ancient and modern cases of human sacrifice, which is still practiced in many remote Native American communities. The Highest Altar reads something like a detective novel, but it's nonfiction.
April 17, 2012
The first 2/3 of the book were interesting, but got a bit tedious. Suddenly at the ending chapters Tierney took a decidedly anti-Christian attitude, particularly anti-Catholic, all of which I found rather insulting. He only gave the opinions of Jacob Maccoby, and did not seek out any opposing explanation by Christian theologians.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews