Daily Life of the Aztecs

by Jacques Soustelle

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  blue-green cloak and jewels of green stones, and carrying a sceptre in the form of a serpent in his hand. 113

  The speeches exchanged between the newly-elected emperor and the chiefs, and his address to the people give an idea of the Mexican conception of the sovereign dignity. He had undoubtedly been chosen by the magnates, but the official theory was that he had really been appointed by the gods, especially by Tezcatlipoca, he who sees all in his magic mirror; and therefore his first duties were towards them. He thanked them for having selected him, though at the same time he complained, sighing at the weight of such a burden as the government of the empire: he would defend the temple of Uitzilopochtli, and ensure the gods the worship that was their due.

  His remaining duties were towards the people: he was traditionally known as 'the father and mother' of the Mexicans. He owed them justice, and he was to struggle for them against famine, so that they might have 'an abundance of the fruits of the earth'. 114 The fundamental ideas of the Aztec monarchy, as they show through the stereotyped official formulæ, are not without dignity; there is a sense of the public good, and the feeling of a real unity between the rulers and the ruled. Furthermore, everything goes to show that the emperors took their duties seriously. Reign after reign, they are to be found in the traditional histories zealous not only in increasing the empire and building temples but also in coming to the help of the unfortunate -- there is Motecuhzoma I, for example, distributing food and clothing to the entire population, or Auitzotl sharing out 200,000 loads of maize among the victims of the flood.

  The great dignitaries, who were often the closest relatives of the emperor, collaborated with him in the government; and the first among them, who had the curious title of Ciuacoatl, 'woman-serpent', was a real vice-emperor. His title was the name of a great goddess, and it is likely that in the beginning the Ciuacoatl was no more than her chief priest. It is only in the reign of Motecuhzoma I that the title of Ciuacoatl (which is found earlier in Mexico and

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  other cities 115 ) suddenly became that of the first dignitary of the state after the sovereign. 'You will help me to rule this Mexican republic,' said Motecuhzoma I to his brother Tlacaeleltzin, 116 whom he had named Ciuacoatl.

  This great dignitary had the widest powers: he was the supreme judge in martial and criminal law, 117 and he 'had the duty of providing for the requirements of governmental business and the royal finances. He heard cases which were submitted to him on appeal,' says Torquemada, who describes him as the 'high presiding judge'. 118 It was he who named the warriors who were to be rewarded; 119 it was he who organised the military expeditions and appointed their commanders. 120 He convened the electoral college at the sovereign's death and during the interregnum he acted as head of state. 121

  When the emperor left Tenochtitlan to command the troops of the confederacy in person, the Ciuacoatl moved into the palace and replaced him in his absence. 122 The honours that were paid him were second only to the emperor's; and he alone might appear before the sovereign without taking off his shoes. 123 He received a very considerable share of the tribute from the conquered cities. He was the tlatoani's understudy in everything, and as a symbol of power his black and white cloak 124 came immediately after the blue-green.

  It seems that the action of Motecuhzoma I in setting his brother Tlacaeleltzin beside him was a stroke of genius; he had a vigorous personality, and the chroniclers always admire him -- Chimalpahin, for example, describes him as uey oquichtli, which is exactly rendered by vir illustris. 125

  All testimonies agree in extolling his military worth, his statesmanship and his loyalty to the emperor. The office acquired such lustre under him that all those who followed him in it were chosen from his direct descendants, his sons and his grandsons, to the very last of them, Tlacotzin, who lived long enough to lay the submission of Mexico at the feet of Cortés on 13th August, 1521, and to be baptised under the name of don Juan Velásquez.

  Beneath the Ciuacoatl there were four great military

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  dignitaries who, with him, were the emperor's chief counsellors: two of them, the tlacochcalcatl and the tlacateccatl, were often directly related to the sovereign, and it was between them that his successor was chosen. Motecuhzoma II, for example, had the office of tlacochcalcatl in the reign of his father, Auitzotl. Some of these dignitaries also had judicial powers: the tlacateccatl 126 cognisance of civil and criminal cases, and appeal lay from him to the Ciuacoatl.

  And then the Indian and Spanish histories speak of a fairly large number of titles which cannot, in the present state of knowledge, be defined in terms of their function. For example, we know that in his youth the emperor Tizoc had the office of tlailotlac, 127 a word which means a foreign tribe and which may have been used for a title, as Germanicus or Parthicus was used among the Romans. The Mexícatl achcauhtli, the chief of the officials of the city of Mexico, was one of those who had the terrible responsibility of the final surrender. The tecuhtlamacazqui, who is often mentioned among the immediate advisers of the emperor, appears to have been the representative of the priestly order before the central authority. The petlacalcatl, 'he (who is in charge) of the chest', took care of the granaries and stores in which the tribute of the provinces was kept; and the uey calpixqui had the functions both of prefect of the capital and of chief director of the empire's taxgatherers. In this connection, it seems that plurality of offices was not uncommon: thus the tlacochcalcatl Itzquauhtzin, who was serving when the Spaniards arrived, was at the same time governor of Tlatelolco. 128

  Apart from the petlacalcatl and the uey calpixqui, perhaps because of the purely civilian nature of their duties, the great dignitaries were members of the tlatocan, or supreme council of the city. The emperor presided over it, or if he were not there, the Ciuacoatl; and this council was consulted before all important decisions -- embassies, declarations of war, etc. It also formed the principal nucleus of the college that chose the sovereign. This being the case, it would be absurd to see in it the equivalent of one of our

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  deliberative assemblies, or even of a council of sachems in a North-American Indian tribe.

  In the beginning, no doubt, it was made up of delegates elected by the different calpulli; but at this period at least part of it was composed of the emperor's nominees, and the rest were co-opted. Here again we have an instance of the change from tribal democracy to an oligarchic Régime, whose guardian and whose chief was the emperor. But it must not be forgotten that plebeians could reach the highest honours: although this aristocracy was jealous of its prerogatives it was not ossified; it could still renew and strengthen itself by recruiting new men of value. But it is to be observed that although the plebeian might hope to become a tecuhtli, a trader might not: a man born to trade remained all his life a merchant. In modern terms it could be said that the aristocracy had its origin in the people and not in the bourgeoisie. 129

  The Mexican city-state of the sixteenth century, a complex social and political organism, was profoundly different from the wandering tribe which, in 1325, had pitched upon a few islets in the reeds as a refuge: and the difference was not merely quantitative, concerned with the increase of population, territory and resources, but qualitative. The city was not merely the tribe enlarged: it had become something else, a state launched upon a career of aggrandizement, a society in which differentiation was continually growing and in which enmity between the classes was beginning to appear, in which the nature of ownership was changing and in which the ideas of public service and of personal wealth were coming into hidden conflict. But religion, the wonderfully powerful cement binding the various elements of this society, obscured its complexity, and with its living, dominating and unquestioned power imposed a single vision of the world upon the whole community, and by its rites regulated the life of each of its members.

  It was by religion that the city and the tribe were one, and by religion that variety was unified. It was r
eligion that gave this town (so strangely modern in many ways) its mediæval face: for the life of the Mexican, within his

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  social and material compass, makes sense only if one perceives the degree to which an all-powerful religion told him his duty, ruled his days, coloured his view of the universe and of his personal destiny.

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  CHAPTER THREE

  THE WORLD, MAN AND TIME1

  A shifting, threatened world. The myth of the four suns: the supreme Duality: the birth of the sun: the meaning of the human sacrifices: the sacred war: the Mexicans' intensely anxious view of the world-Heaven and earth. The Mexicans as 'people of the sun': Uitzilopochtli: Tlaloc: the earth and the goddesses of the earth: Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love: the moon and the gods of drunkenness: Xipe Totec--Death and rebirth. A constant theme of native thought: vegetation, Quetzalcoatl, the sun: the abodes of the dead--Destinies and signs. The solar year and the divinatory calendar: the Tonalpoualli and the prime axes of the universe: predestination: omens and apparitions: the strong pessimism of the Aztecs--An imperial religion. The Mexican a receptive religion: a welcoming pantheon: syncretism and theological doctrines: belief in a supreme god.

  A SHIFTING, THREATENED WORLD

  The Mexicans, like some other Central-American peoples, 2 believed that several successive worlds had existed before ours and that each of them had fallen in ruins amid cataclysms in which mankind had been wiped out. These were the 'four suns'; 3 and the age in which we live is the fifth. Each of these 'suns' is shown on monuments such as the Aztec calendar or the stone of the suns 4 by a date, a date which is that of its end and which evokes the nature of the catastrophe which ended it: in this way the fourth epoch, for example, the 'sun of the water', which was drowned in a kind of Flood, has the date naui atl, 'four -- water.

  Our world will have the same fate: its destiny is fixed by the date which has, as one might say, branded it at birth -the date naui ollin, at which our sun first began to move. The glyph ollin, shaped like a Saint Andrew's cross, which

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  shares the centre of the Aztec calendar with the sun-god's visage, has the double sense of 'movement' and of 'earthquake'. It symbolises both the first motion of the heavenly body when our age began and the cataclysms that will destroy our earth. At that moment the appearance of reality will be ripped open like a veil and the Tzitzimime, the monsters of the twilight who await the fatal hour beneath the western sky, will swarm out and hurl themselves upon the last survivors.

  The ancient Mexicans believed in two primordial beings who were at the origin of all others, even of the gods: they were Ometecuhtli, 'the Lord of the Duality', and Omeciuatl, 'the Lady of the Duality'; and they lived at the summit of the world, in the thirteenth heaven, 'there where the air was very cold, delicate and iced.' 5 Their unending fruitfulness produced all the gods, and from it all mankind is born. At the time with which this book is concerned these two great divinities had come in some degree to resemble those kings who reign but do not govern: they had been pushed into the background by the vigorous crowd of younger and more active gods. But it was still they who were held to have the privilege of fixing the birth-date of each living being, and thus its fate.

  The gods, the descendants of the supreme Duality, in their turn were the creators of the earth: the most important act in this creation was clearly the birth of the sun; and this sun was born from sacrifice and blood. It is said 6 that the gods gathered in the twilight at Teotihuacán, and one of them, a little leprous god, covered with boils, threw himself into a huge brazier as a sacrifice. He rose from the blazing coals changed into a sun: but this new sun was motionless; it needed blood to move. So the gods immolated themselves, and the sun, drawing life from their death, began its course across the sky.

  This was the beginning of the cosmic drama in which humanity took on the Rôle of the gods. To keep the sun moving in its course, so that the darkness should not overwhelm the world for ever, it was necessary to feed it every day with its food, 'the precious water' (chalchiuatl) -- that

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  is, with human blood. Sacrifice was a sacred duty towards the sun and a necessity for the welfare of men: without it the very life of the world would stop. Every time that a priest on the top of a pyramid held up the bleeding heart of a man and then placed it in the quauhxicalli 7 the disaster that perpetually threatened to fall upon the world was postponed once more. Human sacrifice was an alchemy by which life was made out of death; and the gods themselves had given the example on the first day of creation.

  As for man, his very first duty was to provide nourishment intonan intota tlaltecuhtli tonatiuh, 'for our mother and our father, the earth and the sun'; and to shirk this was to betray the gods and at the same time all mankind, for what was true of the sun was also true of the earth, the rain, growth and all the forces of nature. Nothing was born, nothing would endure, except by the blood of sacrifice.

  The great god-king of the Toltecs, Quetzalcoatl, 'never would (offer up human victims) because he so loved his subjects, the Toltecs, and he presented only snakes in sacrifice, and birds and butterflies.' 8 But Quetzalcoatl was expelled from Tula by the black magic of Tezcatlipoca; and so Mexico was delivered over to the blood-thirsty gods. In the most usual form of the rite the victim was stretched out on his back on a slightly convex stone with his arms and legs held by four priests, while a fifth ripped him open with a flint knife and tore out his heart. The sacrifice also often took place in the manner which the Spaniards described as gladiatorio: the captive was tied to a huge disk of stone, the temalacatl, by a rope that left him free to move; he was armed with wooden weapons, and he had to fight several normally-armed Aztec warriors in turn. If, by any extraordinary chance, he did not succumb to their attacks, he was spared; but nearly always the 'gladiator' fell, gravely wounded, and a few moments later he died on the stone, with his body opened by the black-robed, long-haired priests. The warriors who were set apart for this kind of death wore ornaments and clothes of a special nature, and they were crowned with white down, as a symbol of the first light of the dawn, of the still uncertain hour when the

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  soul of the resuscitated warrior takes its flight in the greyness towards our father the sun. 9

  But these were not the only forms of sacrifice. Women were dedicated to the goddesses of the earth, and while they danced, pretending to be unaware of their fate, their heads were struck off; children were drowned as an offering to the rain-god Tlaloc; the fire-god's victims, anæsthetised by yauhtli (hashish), were thrown into the blaze; and those who personified the god Xipe Totec were fastened to a kind of frame, shot with arrows and then flayed -- the priests dressed themselves in the skin. 10 In most cases, the victim was dressed, painted and ornamented so as to represent the god who was being worshipped; and thus it was the god himself who died before his own image and in his own temple, just as all the gods had accepted death in the first days for the salvation of the world. And when ritual cannibalism was practiced on certain occasions, it was the god's own flesh that the faithful ate in their bloody communion.

  There is no aspect of the Mexican civilisation that shocks our feelings as much as this. From the first contact between the Indians and the Europeans the horror and disgust that the newcomers felt for the human sacrifices helped them to convince themselves that the native religion came from hell and that its gods were no more than devils: 11 from then onwards they were certain that Uitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca and all the other gods of Mexico were in fact demons, and that everything that concerned them either directly or remotely should be rooted out for ever. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice was a great factor in making the two religions which confronted one another totally irreconcilable, and when the war broke out between the Spaniards and the Mexicans, in giving it a bitter and remorseless character from the moment the helpless conquistadores saw from afar the death of their comrades, whose grinning skulls they later found exposed on the tzompantli.


  Clearly, it is difficult for us to come to a true understanding of what human sacrifice meant to the sixteenth

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  century Aztec: but it may be observed that every culture possesses its own idea of what is and what is not cruel. At the height of their career the Romans shed more blood in their circuses and for their amusement than ever the Aztecs did before their idols. The Spaniards, so sincerely moved by the cruelty of the native priests, nevertheless massacred, burnt, mutilated and tortured 12 with a perfectly clear conscience. We, who shudder at the tale of the bloody rites of ancient Mexico, have seen with our own eyes and in our own days civilised nations proceed systematically to the extermination of millions of human beings and to the perfection of weapons capable of annihilating in one second a hundred times more victims than the Aztecs ever sacrificed.

  Human sacrifice among the Mexicans was inspired neither by cruelty nor by hatred. It was their response, and the only response that they could conceive, to the instability of a continually threatened world. Blood was necessary to save this world and the men in it: the victim was no longer an enemy who was to be killed but a messenger, arrayed in a dignity that was almost divine, who was sent to the gods. All the relevant descriptions, such as those that Sahagúin took down from his Aztec informants, for example, convey the impression not of a dislike between the sacrificer and the victim nor of anything resembling a lust for blood, but of a strange fellow-feeling or rather -- and this is vouched for by the texts -- of a kind of mystical kinship.