From the Time Magazine
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Science: The Aztecs Revisited
Monday, Sep. 08, 1941
- To honor the spring god Xipe, Aztec
priests flayed human beings and clad themselves in the tattered hides.
This symbolized the new vegetation in which the earth clothes itself.
- To honor the fire god Huehueteotl,
captives were tossed into pits of coals to sizzle while the black-clad
priests danced. Just before they died they were fished up with hooks.
Their chests were sliced open with sharp stone knives and their hearts
wrenched with practiced skill from their blistered bodies.
- When warfare netted too few victims,
Aztec tribes arranged a ceremonial combat, called the War of Flowers. No
one was killed in the battle, but prisoners were used for human
sacrifices.
- As many as 20,000 captives were
sacrificed at one time in the Aztec metropolis. Victims' flesh was
sometimes eaten "in the belief that the eater can absorb the virtues of
the eaten."
These are among the cheerful points of
Aztec history mustered by Archeologist George Clapp Vaillant of the
American Museum of Natural History in his new book Aztecs of Mexico
(Doubleday Doran; $4). Assembling the wealth of new historical evidence
dug up since William Hickling Prescott finished his great Conquest of
Mexico in 1843, it will muffle the sighs which four generations have
sighed over "the tragic destruction of a great culture by lustful Spanish
barbarians."
Disillusion came quickly to the Spaniards
themselves. At the sight of the white Aztec metropolis and its great
temples amid blue lakes, green slopes and high peaks, a roughhewn,
hard-bitten soldier of Cortez' army in 1519 cried, "It is like the
enchantments they tell of in the Legend of Amadis! Are not the things we
see a dream?" But soon he smelled the sickening stockyard stench which was
wafted from the gorgeous temples, saw thousands of skulls threaded on
poles in the public squares.
The Aztecs were very unlike the Incas of
Peru. "The Andean peoples, to generalize broadly, concentrated on the
material technique of supporting life," says Vaillant, "the Middle
American peoples [i.e., Mayas and Aztecs] on spiritual, or more
accurately, supernatural methods." Symbols of Inca culture were their vast
aqueducts and irrigation systems. Symbols of Aztec culture were their
mighty pyramidal temples.
The Inca Empire was a "benevolent,
monolithic state, unique in American annals as the only governmental
system which combined territorial expansion with the amalgamation of
conquered peoples into a social whole." The Aztecs only seemed to form an
Empire. They "lived in independent tribal or civic groups and created a
religious art and architecture without rival in the Americas."
In Aztec religion there was no ethical
concept—its heaven, like the Greek Hades, was devoid of moral
significance. Aztec theology held that in bygone eras mankind had been
successively wiped out by jaguars, by hurricanes, by fiery volcanic rains.
The Aztecs in 1519 believed that their world would in time end amid
horrendous earthquakes controlled by the Sun God. So with a relentless if
grisly logic, they propitiated the deities at all costs, offering up
mankind's most precious possession, its own lifeblood.
The conquering Spaniards did not
blood-bathe the heathen Mexicans as the Inquisition destroyed heretics in
Spain. Instead, Crown & Church at first tried to make good Christians and
Spanish citizens out of them. Twenty of the 190 coats-of-arms granted
during the conquest of Mexico and South America were given to Indians, and
Spaniards often married Indian "princesses" under the delusion that the
Aztec nobility, like that of Europe, was hereditary (actually it was
earned). As great a blow to the Aztecs as the Spanish conquest was the
English victory over the Armada. Mexican communication with the Crown &
Church was thereby weakened, and the greedy, uncontrolled colonists only
after 1588 began enslaving the Aztecs.
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