THE BLOODY AZTECS

While the Mayas were generally regarded over the last century as ‘peaceful’, the Aztecs on the other hand have been seen as developing one of the most violent cultures in the world. As with the Mayas, these assumptions about the Aztecs have been overemphasized by those who have wanted to demonize them for various reasons.

The Aztec (1325–1521 CE) rise to prominence in centralMexico was relatively late among Mesoamerican cultures. The Aztecs authorized their presence in centralMexico by accentuating the similarities of their culture to those of Olmec, Teotihuacan and Tollan. The languages and ethnicity of the people who lived in these places is unknown. In fact most of what is currently known of the pre-Aztec cultures of central Mexico is filtered through the Aztec conceptions of these people. For example, many of the place-names, such as Teotihuacan and Tula, are Nahuatl words. Also the Aztecs performed their own archaeological explorations and held important ceremonies at these sites.

The etymology of the word ‘Aztec’ is a reference to the story of their migration as a tribe, called the Mexica, from an unknown land north of central Mexico. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is part of a family of languages called Uto-Aztecan. It seems that the Aztecs indeed originated in the north because Nahuatl is similar to the Hopi, Huichol, Ute and Paiute languages. This land was called ‘Aztlan’, or the place of the seven caves. From that place the Aztecs the earth, then wandered southward. They were despised and distrusted by those with whom they came into contact. As they wandered they were led by a group of priests who were attempting to divine signs from Huitzilopochtli, ‘Hummingbird on the left’, who was their tribal deity. After a long time of being driven from place to place the Aztecs sought refuge in the marshy cane fields in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Throughout the Valley of Mexico there were enormous salt and sweet water lakes which were a major food resource for the residents. There the priests saw an eagle with a snake in its beak perched on a cactus, which grew out of a rock in the middle of the lake. The eagle was a manifestation of Huitzilopochtli and associated with the sun. This is the ‘hierophany’, or manifestation of the sacred, which founded the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan.

The legacy of the Aztec remains is due to the fact that Tenochtitlan lies beneath Mexico City. Pre-Columbian artefacts are unearthed by virtually every public works project. The significance of Aztec culture for Mexico is exemplified by the hierophany of Tenochtitlan’s founding being depicted on the flag. In 1978 electrical workers uncovered an elaborately carved stone near the great Cathedral and the Zocalo, the central square of Mexico City. They tried to cover-up the find because it would delay their work, but it was eventually reported and led to the most important Aztec excavation. The workers had discovered the now famous Coyoxauhqui stone, which lay at the base of the steps of the Templo Mayor, the central temple structure of Tenochtitlan. The Templo Mayor was built and rebuilt by each new ruler of the Mexica,who was called the ‘tlatoani’ (i.e.principal speaker).From1325 to 1521 the Temple was enlarged and rededicated on the spot where Huitzilopochtli descended onto the cactus in the middle of Lake Texcoco. The discovery and excavation of the temple radically transformed the scholarly and popular understanding of Aztec civilization.

Although there were written descriptions of the temple it had not been seen since Cortés destroyed Tenochtitlan in 1521. As with the other parts of the city, the Spanish conquistadors levelled theTemplo Mayor with cannon fire. For them the temple symbolized the heathen worship of the Aztecs. They used the cut stone of the temple to construct what is now the oldest part of the National Cathedral nearby to the west. The Templo Mayor survives as a series of bases from successive rebuilding stages. When a new temple was to be erected the old one was carefully buried under the new structure. By the sixteenth century, therefore, the Templo Mayor was an enormous pyramid.

The Templo Mayor functioned as a ceremonial platform. The Nahuatl term for city is ‘altepetl’ (‘Water Mountain’) and refers to the dominant temple which emerged out of occupied the centre of every city, town and hamlet.

For Mesoamericans, including the Aztecs, the city was defined by its central temple. When a town was captured by the Aztecs, for example, that event was iconographically represented by the temple having been toppled and set on fire. But the term ‘altepetl’ also indicates that the central temple, like the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan and the cosmic tree for the Mayas, was a vertical axis that connected human beings with the sky and the underworld. Mountains were understood to be containers of water. Either too little or too much water could be devastating for agricultural success. As we have seen at other sites in Mesoamerica, the intimate relationships between various aspects of material life were directly involved in the urban planning and the ceremonies.

The Templo Mayor is actually two temples in one structure. The southern side of the temple is dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the tribal god of the Aztecs, and the northern side is dedicated to Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility whose earliest appearance is at Teotihuacan. The bifurcated structure is extremely rare among Mesoamerican cities; only one other bifurcated temple is known. While the Aztecs conquered an enormous area stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, they did not seem as interested in imposing their religious structures on subject peoples. Rather they were interested in the flow of tribute to Tenochtitlan. This is dramatized by the absence of similar bifurcated temples throughout their conquered region.

The dominant status of Huitzilopochtli at the Templo Mayor was not surprising to researchers. What was surprising was the absence of images of the god. In fact no iconographical representations of Huitzilopochtli were found at the site. Yet as Matos Moctezuma, the archaeologist responsible for the excavations, has said, it was Huitzilopochtli who oversaw the imperial designs of the Aztecs. As god of the sun Huitzilopochtli was venerated at the Templo Mayor with sacrifices and other offerings. Like the sun he was omnipresent, but at the same time he was a uniquely Aztec deity. Scholars have been quick to point out that the absence of images of Huitzilopochtli at the Templo Mayor should not be seen as symptomatic of his significance for the Aztecs. Instead he may have been of great significance as a deus otiosus, a god obscured, or remote.

Unlike Huitzilopochtli, the presence of Tlaloc at the Templo Mayor is ubiquitous. For Broda this indicates that the Aztecs perceived the Templo Mayor as a symbol of absolute fertility. As with the ceremonial centres of Teotihuacan, the Aztecs saw their principal temple as an ‘altepetl’, a ‘water mountain’, which established the proper connection between human and divine beings for purposes of agricultural success. Huitzilopochtli was the solar god but also the Mexica deity of war and tribute. Tlaloc was the water and fertility god and a pan-Mesoamerican deity of agriculture. In the bifurcated Templo Mayor, therefore, the Aztec venerated deities who symbolized the material well-being of the city of Tenochtitlan.

The Aztecs adopted Tlaloc as their own deity and thereby authorized their presence in the Valley of Mexico. Thousands of figurines and statues were found at theTemplo Mayor, as well as numerous other artefacts associated with water and fertility. The richest source of Tlaloc material is the offering boxes, which have been found throughout the site and are associated with all phases of the temple’s construction. For Lopéz Luján, an archaeologist who has worked intensively with the offering boxes, the profusion of Tlaloc material can be ‘read’ like a book. The various layers of these boxes were intended to represent the different layers of the cosmos. In addition these layers indicate how Aztec ceremonial life unfolded.

Offering box no. 48, for example, is a particularly rich example. At the bottom of the box are various shells and corals from both Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They are laid out in an east–west direction, tracing the path of the sun. Above that were found various objects including jaguar skeletons, beads, figurines of various gods, and jars which symbolize the temple as a container of water. Above these objects were the entire skeletons of forty-two children below the ages of 7, with a corresponding number of Tlaloc figurines capping off the box. This offering was dated to 1454 when there was a very serious multi-year drought in Central Mexico. In desperation the Aztecs propitiated the deities of rain, principal of them being Tlaloc, to bring rain.

The Aztecs are famous, perhaps infamous, for their use of human sacrifice. These sacrificial rites have held a powerful place in the European imagination, and at certain points in the last 500 years they have assumed mythic proportions. Incidents of human sacrifice in the New World were often emphasized and exaggerated by Europeans in order to justify their colonial operations in the Americas. It is important to note, however, that the Spanish killed millions more people than did the Aztecs. This is particularly ironic given that the intention of the Spanish, as with other Europeans in the New World, was to spread a religion of love. The ‘Black Legend’ of the Spanish brutality perperated by Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1550 was promoted by the Protestant cultures of northern Europe. Protestants wished to demonize the Spanish Catholics by emphasizing the atrocities throughout the Americas. As horrific as Aztec human sacrifice was they killed far fewer people in the course of a given agricultural year than did the Spanish.

The phenomenon of human sacrifice is no different from similar offering rites. In an exchange economy of relationships with the deities human sacrifice is the gift among all gifts. Even so, the descriptions of these rites that have survived through the conquest of Tenochtitlan seem to indicate that even among Mesoamerican cultures, who were no strangers to human sacrifice, the Aztecs were known to be particularly bloody in their sacrificial rites. Since the scholarly view of the Mayas has been altered since the 1950s their counterparts in central Mexico look more similar and less bloody than they had done.

Written by Philip P. Arnold in "A Handbook of Ancient Religions", edited by John R. Hinnells, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2007, excerpts pp. 549-553. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.