A depiction of Aztec human sacrifice from the sixteenth-century Tovar Codex, by Juan de Tovar © John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Discussed in this essay:

All Desire Is a Desire for Being, by René Girard. Edited with an introduction by Cynthia L. Haven. Penguin Classics. 317 pages. £12.99.

On November 8, 1519, the first Europeans to walk into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán saw something none of them had seen before. “All these buildings,” the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo later recalled, resembled “fairy castles . . . so high, majestic, and splendid.” The…