by Peter Watson
According to legend, the Aztecs were transformed from this minority position by the spiritual leadership of their war god, Huitzilopochtli, known also as ‘the humming bird of the south’. This god was believed to have appeared to one of the tribe’s priest-leaders and instructed him to search for a place where ‘a great eagle perched on a cactus’. There, it was said, the Aztecs should build their capital city. The priests found the sacred place and recognised the symbolism of the image: the fruits of the cactus were red and shaped roughly like the human hearts that Huitzilopochtli devoured; and the eagle was the symbol of the sun, Huitzilopochtli himself. ‘Less than a century and a half later, the greatest city in the Americas lay on this spot.’11
This place, Tenochtitlán, which means ‘rocks growing among prickly pears’, was a swampy island at the southern end of Lake Texcoco, which at the time filled quite a bit of the Valley of Mexico. But, by digging a network of canals and creating very fertile raised fields above the surface of the lake (known as chinampas), and by forging clever military and diplomatic alliances with a succession of neighbours, the Aztecs grew in power and influence until, in 1426–28, they felt sufficiently emboldened, under the leadership of Itzcoatl and his nephews, Moctezuma i and Tlacaelel, to turn on their former masters, the Tepanec. Following this great war of independence, they consolidated their position by forming a Triple Alliance, which comprised the three lake cities of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan. They were by now a bellicose people, their warriors feared throughout the Valley of Mexico. They made a point of burning all the codices of their defeated rivals, so that their histories were lost, and declared themselves the true heirs of the equally admired and equally feared Toltecs. Their god, Huitzilopochtli, was transformed by propaganda into a ferocious warrior, demanding sacrifices. The warrior class assumed ever-greater privileges and there was a marked growth in fanaticism – perhaps the Aztecs’ most fearsome asset.
Theirs was an hierarchical society. The central institution was the calpulli, a unit of social membership, a residential unit whose members owned land communally. In the mid-fourteenth century there were fifteen such units in Tenochtitlán. Each ward had its own school and temple and fellow members of each calpulli often fought alongside one another in warrior squadrons.12 As time went by, leadership of the calpulli tended to become hereditary. But differences in rank were now stressed and privileges in dress, education and ownership became more differentiated as Aztec society evolved, like the Mixtec and the Toltec before them, into – essentially – a war machine. Their main motive force was an apocalyptic vision ‘of the constant struggle between the forces of the universe’, in which their role was to avoid the final cataclysm by furnishing the sun with the vital energy to be found only in blood.
This too was a move beyond shamanism. The priesthood was judged on a daily basis by its ability to sustain the sun in the sky, which in turn depended on victory in battle, which brought captives to be sacrificed. Everyone could see the success (or otherwise) of what the priests – who recommended when war was to be waged – achieved. Here too dark shamanism continued at times of catastrophe or cataclysm, but most of the time the priesthood, part of the nobility, was the more powerful caste.13
Their military conquests were carried out in the name of the war god, the sun god Huitzilopochtli, epitomised by the ruler and fanatically supported by the nobles and warrior knights. When Moctezuma Ilhuicamina (‘the Angry Lord, the Archer of the Skies’) took power (1440– 1468) he declared that war was to be considered ‘the principal occupation of the Aztecs, war designed not only to expand the imperial domains, but to ensure a constant supply of prisoners to satisfy the insatiable Huitzilopochtli’.14 Under this new policy, hundreds of prisoners (and possibly thousands) were sacrificed each year.
A variety of weak and strong rulers followed Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, during which time parts of Guatemala and El Salvador were added to the Aztec homeland, each conquest intensifying the appetite for human sacrifice. In 1487, the forces of Ahuitzotl (1486–1501) put down a rebellion among the Huaxtecs (who occupied the coast of the Gulf of Mexico), the annexation coinciding with the completion of the Great Temple in Tenochtitlán. The joint celebrations which followed involved lavish gift-giving and the sacrifice of no fewer than 20,000 captives, some bound together by ropes through their noses, who were formed into four lines running down the steps of the temple ‘and out along the four causeways of the island city’. Every one of them had his heart cut out and the entire ceremony lasted four days. (The Aztecs frequently had ceremonies lasting twenty days.)15
According to witnesses, the warriors responsible for taking the captives usually sponsored a feast for friends and family ‘in which the flesh of the victim’s limbs was served in carefully prepared stews’. Leaders from all over Mesoamerica were invited to witness this spectacle and plied with gifts, which included, on one account, 33,000 ‘handfuls’ of exotic tropical bird feathers. Some victims seem to have resisted sacrifice but, according to a monk travelling with Cortés, most of them allowed the sacrifice to take place without ‘uttering a word’.16
The Aztecs were a very religious people and inhabited a world where every activity, however mundane, had its symbolic aspects (the mass-production of religious artefacts underlines this). Their New Year started with a ritual dedication to Tlaloc, the rain god, who had been ‘inherited’ from the Toltecs. (Even today the rain clouds gather at Mount Tlaloc.) This was followed by worship for several months of Xipe Totec, the spring deity. September to March (as we would say) were dedicated to warfare, hunting and fire – these were the dry season gods. The dual-system calendar, introduced in chapter twenty, was used and each day had its name god with a specific meaning. Mayahuel, for example, was the god of intoxicating drink and therefore the patron of days with the rabbit sign, ‘for the drunkard weaved and strutted about in the same erratic way as the rabbit’.17 Some days were propitious, others definitely not. As already noted, it fell to Aztec priests to decide when the corn should be sown, and when wars should be declared.
Merchants were known as pochteca. Foodstuffs were brought into the city’s markets (which had a state-controlled entrance) from the raised irrigated fields on the lake, with a whole class of artisans depending on the merchants for their supply of exotic raw materials. Cacao, as we have seen, was a prized luxury, its consumption confined to the nobility. (In moderate amounts, it was said, ‘it gladdens one’; on the other hand, excessive consumption ‘makes one dizzy’.) Cacao beans also served as a form of money, as did cotton cloth and copper tokens.
The major market, though, was not in Tenochtitlán itself but at its satellite, Tlatelolco. With as many as 20,000 farmers, merchants and visitors arriving via dozens of canals, their small canoes brought goods right to the heart of what was the largest entrepôt, by far, in all of the New World. Bernal Díaz tells us he saw merchants of gold and silver, of precious stones and exotic feathers, of embroidered goods. Male and female slaves were traded, along with ‘rope, sandals, otters, jackals, deer, mountain cats and other wild animals’.18 When the Spanish arrived they marvelled at the orderly nature of the market, from where the noise of collective activity could be heard ‘more than a league off ’. A court sat each day to settle disputes.
Enterprising pochteca ventured further afield, jointly charged with acting as the eyes and ears of the Aztec state. Though they could only aspire to the nobility in times of war (not so infrequent), they could enhance their social position by throwing elaborate feasts, or by buying a slave and sacrificing him to Huitzilopochtli. Alternatively, they could hand out chocolate and hallucinogenic mushrooms in a process not dissimilar to potlatch. ‘He who eats many of them sees many things which make him afraid, or make him laugh . . .’ remembered one of Sahagún’s mushroom-takers.19
They used the dual-system calendar, from which it followed that every 52 years the cycles coincided and the Aztecs regarded this as an especially risky period, when time itself had to be renewed. To do so, they e
xtinguished all fires, and people were required to destroy all their possessions and stay awake ‘in fear’ until the priests, secluded on a sacred mountain near Tenochtitlán, rekindled a flame ‘in the chest cavity of a sacrificial victim’. This act launched a new cycle of time.20
Such a view was also reflected in the Aztec creation legend that Four Suns lasting 2028 years (39 × 52) had preceded the present era of the fifth sun. The actual place where the gods had their beginning wasn’t known, but it was believed that they had gathered in darkness, to bring forth the sun, and with the result that ‘all the gods died when the sun came into being’.21 In the first age, or Sun, the giants who lived then were devoured by jaguars after 676 years. The people of the second age were swept away by a great hurricane and changed into monkeys. The people of the third age were destroyed by a mighty rain of fire and transformed into butterflies, dogs and turkeys. In the fourth age the people were swept away by a great flood and turned into frogs. Each sun or era lasted for a multiple of fifty-two years and, says David Carrasco, each age took its name and ‘character’, in the Aztec system, not from its creation but from its destructive elements. ‘Each beginning is sure to result in catastrophe and there appears to be no end in sight to this divine antagonism, these rains of fire, vigilante jaguars, deluges and hurricanes. The forces of nature collapse with violent totality upon the little populations.’ After the Fourth Sun, the world was in darkness for 52 years, ‘When no sun had shone and no dawn had broken.’22
The Aztecs were also convinced that the era in which they themselves lived, the world of the ‘Fifth Sun’, would one day end in violent destruction. This fearful event could only be averted, or postponed, if the gods were offered sacrificial victims, so that it became the Aztecs’ sacred duty to feed the sun daily with chalchiuhuatl, ‘the precious liquid’, human blood. Feeding the sun was in particular the responsibility of the warriors. Aztec poets equated warriors in their cotton armoury as like ‘tree blossoms in spring time’.23 The entire Aztec civilisation – education, art, poetry – was organised around this one sacred duty, to secure enough captives that the gods would receive sufficient nourishment.
The focal point of this worship was the Great Temple in Tenochtitlán, famously excavated in the 1980s. From modest beginnings, the temple was rebuilt six times and grew increasingly grand. Some 6,000 objects were discovered in the temple, in 86 ‘caches’, mostly tribute or spoils of war from far-flung parts of the empire. The design and layout of the Great Temple revealed that the Aztecs believed the earth lay at the centre of the cosmos, surrounded by water, as Tenochtitlán itself was. Above were the heavens, below was the Underworld, while the Middle World, the terrestrial level, had a central point – the Great Temple itself – which was the symbolic pivotal point, the ‘portal’ where a vertical channel linked the three levels. It was here, via the vertical channel and portal, that the supreme ruler interceded with the gods. At the summit of the pyramid of the Great Temple, there were two shrines, dedicated to the two supreme gods, Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. Huitzilopochtli was the god of war, who demanded heart sacrifice, Tlaloc the underworld god of rain, who demanded child sacrifice, and most of the cache offerings came from under his shrine, including a complete jaguar skeleton.24 This confirms the view of Enrique Florescano, the prominent Mexican historian (and Master of the College of Mexico), that in the most ancient times the important gods of Mesoamerica were those of the netherworld, the powers that ‘managed the forces of destruction, decadence and death, as well as the miracles of regeneration’.25
Potentially rebellious nobles were kept in line by being forced to attend court daily and by being made to supply warriors and foodstuffs for the frequent campaigns. And they were often married off to the women of the royal ‘harem’, so that the elite was increasingly interlinked by blood.
Brian Fagan argues that the Aztec state wasn’t as monolithic as the Roman one, to which it is sometimes compared, but more a patchwork of alliances unified by a tribute system. ‘There was no standing army but there were tax collectors: for example, twenty-six towns had to supply one of the royal palaces with firewood. Other tribute payments included gold dust, tropical bird feathers, jaguar skins, tree gum.’ There were two classes of warrior elites, the Jaguar Knights, who wore pelts of the animal, and the Eagle Knights, resplendent in feathers of the rare and predatory Harpy Eagle. Rivalry between the two ensured that both kept up their standards.26
SACRED CRUELTY
But does all this make the Aztecs sound rather more bloodless than was actually the case? David Carrasco, the professor of the history of religions at Princeton who was introduced earlier, thinks that it does. He goes so far as to say that much of the scholarly work on ritual sacrifice has ignored the Aztec case, that Aztec practices have troubled modern readers for centuries and that although we have been aware of this ‘shocking practice (for us)’ for almost half a millennium, ‘the scholarly community has been remarkably hesitant to explore the evidence and nature of large-scale ritual killing in Aztec Mexico’.27
He has no such reservations himself, conceding that religious violence has a curious fascination ‘for both the scholarly and the lay public’ and in his book, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (1999), he explores four elements that have been neglected by others: the increase in sacrifice between 1440 and 1521, the anxiety and paranoia at the root of Aztec beliefs, the phenomenon of flaying, and the sacrifice of women and children – in other words, he tackles head-on the most extreme aspects of ritual violence in ancient Mexico.
Carrasco puts the increase in sacrifice down to the anxiety the Aztecs felt about their universal order (cosmic life was an unending war) which ‘was intensified to the point of cosmic paranoia’.28 The temple was rebuilt and enlarged as rebellions were put down, and sacrifices carried out on an ever-larger scale to deter and threaten other potentially rebellious peoples. It was now that tribute took on the form, not of feathers, or gold, or maize, say, but of sacrificial victims. Brought to Tenochtitlán, these victims were ritually transformed into gods, and then slain. These sacrifices were not just more numerous, he says, but more widespread, carried out across the city, not just at the Templo Mayor. Indeed, the city walls were plastered everywhere with the blood of victims, as another sign of incremental domination. Some festivals lasted for months, in some cases victims being allowed privileges before they were slain, such as a number of wives. But Carrasco’s main point is that the killing increased because of underlying anxieties which the Aztecs had about their position. This fits in with the views of Conrad and Demarest, discussed immediately below, but an alternative account will be given in the Conclusion. We have already glimpsed the argument in our outline of the Mixtec trajectory (chapters twenty and twenty-one).
In his discussion of flaying, Carrasco describes how, after sacrifice, and before victims were divided into parts which would be ceremonially eaten, their bodies were flayed ‘and their skins worn by individuals who moved through the neighborhoods of the city and fought intense mock battles’.29 This was of course an essentially shamanistic practice, or derived from shaman-type transformations, the skins in this case having a ‘career’, being passed from one warrior to another, as they gradually deteriorated, when they were buried. Men who didn’t have a skin attempted to snatch pieces off those who did. Human skins were believed to have magical properties and when the skins were finally taken off, that symbolised renewal. Here too, though, we see the anxiety and dread which underlies the process. Xipe Totec was a god who flayed himself to provide food for humans. The ‘Totec’ part of his name translates as ‘Awesome and Terrible Lord Who Fills One Up With Dread’.
Women victims – who were sacrificed in about a third of Aztec ceremonies – were sometimes flayed, and this is another area which Carrasco feels scholars have avoided. In considering this issue, he writes: ‘Is the Aztec grossness really grossness, or just a more complex, sobering, and terrible story about some dimensions of
the history of religions that is too hard to tell and very much too hard to sell? Or is there a level of sacred cruelty in Tenochtitlán that shocks our most effective categories of understanding?’ He confesses that it had taken him a long time to be able to face reading the details of women and children sacrifice. Children were sacrificed in the first quarter of the Aztec year. There was apparently much weeping when this happened, and singing, but the killings went on to ensure that the rains came in abundance. Young girls were associated with young maize seeds, the feminine part of the cosmos, and their flayed skins were used to prepare men for war.30
Whether these practices are gross, they are certainly grisly. We described David Carrasco’s argument, that human sacrifice increased greatly among the Aztecs in the period 1440–1521, on account – he said – of the ‘anxiety’ built into their society due to their tribute-gathering and the pressures this put on their rulers. But this explanation, while true enough as far as it goes, is at one remove from the fundamental reason. Why, after all, did this tribute-gathering need to increase? Why did the Aztec anxiety grow?
The explanation falls into three parts. The first part shows why anxiety levels were high in Mesoamerican society and is provided by the work of Arthur Joyce and Marcus Winter with the Mixtec. We saw in chapter twenty that, among the Mixtec, there was a marked link between religion and war. Why should this be? Joyce and Winter say that Mixtec society became much more stratified over time, that the elite deliberately and increasingly took on the role of ritual specialists and that part of their ideology was to promote war. This may not be unique in the history of the world but it was certainly unusual – what can account for it? Joyce and Winter’s answer is that the main elements in Oaxacan religion were the threats that came from natural and supernatural forces. What this means of course is that supernatural forces were the names given to threatening natural forces that no one, in reality, understood. The truth is that the (religious) elite had no control over the (super)natural forces, such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño events, tsunamis, jaguars and the rest. Therefore, say Joyce and Winter, they sponsored an ideology that was, in effect, ‘deceptive’ (their word) on the non-elites, by promoting conflict, war, what was in effect a form of threat that they had some measure of control over. Not complete control, perhaps, but enough to reinforce their power and privileged position. Wars, calendrically determined and fought for religious reasons, could be won, while there could be no final victory over natural threats like volcanoes and hurricanes. Moreover, the sight of captives in a city was good evidence of the threat, and their sacrifice equally good evidence of the elite’s ability to protect its population. The elite preserved their position by their exclusive access to sacred knowledge – calendrics, astronomy, writing and so on.31