THE EXTINCT CIVILIZATION OF THE AZTECS
In the Extinct Civilizations of the East it was shown that the cosmogony of the Chaldeans closely resembles that of the Hebrews and the Phenicians, and that the account of the deluge in Genesis exactly reproduces the much earlier one found on one of the Babylonian tablets.
Traces of a deluge legend also existed among the early Aztecs. They believed
that two persons survived the Deluge, a man named Koksoz and his wife. Their heads are represented in ancient paintings together with a boat floating on the waters at the foot of a mountain. A dove is also depicted, with a hieroglyphical emblem of languages in his mouth.... Tezpi, the Noah of a neighboring people, also escaped in a boat, which was filled with various kinds of animals and birds. After some time a vulture was sent out from it, but remained feeding on the dead bodies of the giants, which had been left on the earth as the waters subsided. The little humming-bird was then sent forth and returned with the branch of a tree in its mouth.
Another Aztec tradition of the deluge is that the pyramidal mound, the temple of Cholula (a sacred city on the way between the capital and the seaport), was built by the giants to escape drowning. Like the tower of Babel, it was intended to reach the clouds, till the gods looked down and, by destroying the pyramid by fires from heaven, compelled the builders to abandon the attempt.
The hieroglyphics used in the Aztec calendar correspond curiously with the zodiacal signs of the Mongols of eastern Asia. "The symbols in the Mongolian calendar are borrowed from animals, and four of the twelve are the same as the Aztec."
The antiquity of most of the monuments is proved—e. g., by the growth of trees in the midst of the buildings in Yucatan. Many have had time to attain a diameter of from six to nine feet. In a courtyard at Uxmal, the figures of tortoises sculptured in relief upon the granite pavement are so worn away by the feet of countless generations of the natives that the design of the artist is scarcely recognizable.
The Spanish invaders demolished every vestige of the Aztec religious monuments, just as Roman Catholic images and paraphernalia were once treated by the "straitest sects" of Protestants, or even Mohammedans.
The beautiful plateau around the lakes of Mexico, as well as other central portions of America, were without any doubt occupied from the earliest ages by peoples who gradually advanced in civilization from generation to generation and passed through cycles of revolutions—in one century relapsing, in another advancing by leaps and bounds by an infusion of new blood or a change of environment—exactly similar to the checkered annals of the successive dynasties in the Nile Valley and the plains of Babylonia. In the New World, as in the Old World, from prehistoric times wealth was accumulated at such centers, bringing additional comfort and refinement, and implying the practise of the useful arts and some applications of science. As to the legendary migrations or even those extinct races whose names still remain, Max Müller said:[8]
The traditions are no better than the Greek traditions about Pelasgians, Æolians, and Ionians, and it would be a mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again sooner or later, by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis.
Anahuac (i. e., "waterside" or "the lake-country"), in the early centuries of our era, was a name of the country round the lakes and town afterward called Mexico. To this center, as a place for settlement, there came from the north or northwest a succession of tribes more or less allied in race and language—especially (according to one theory) the Toltecs from Tula, and the Aztecs from Aztlan. Tula, north of the Mexican Valley, had been the first capital of the Toltecs, and at the time of the Spanish conquest there were remains of large buildings there. Most of the extensive temples and other edifices found throughout "New Spain" were attributed to this race and the word "toltek" became synonymous with "architect."
Some five centuries after the Toltecs had abandoned Tula, the Aztecs or early Mexicans arrived to settle in the Valley of Anahuac. With the Aztecs came the Tezcucans, whose capital, Tezcuco, on the eastern border of the Mexican lake, has given it its still surviving name.
The Aztecs, again, after long migrations from place to place, finally, in A. D. 1325, halted on the southwestern shores of the great lake. According to tradition, a heavenly vision thus announced the site of their future capital:
They beheld perched on the stem of a prickly-pear, which shot out from the crevice of a rock washed by the waves, a royal eagle of extraordinary size and beauty, with a serpent in its talons, and its broad wings opened to the rising sun. They hailed the auspicious omen, announced by an oracle as indicating the sight of their future city, and laid its foundations by sinking piles into the shallows; for the low marshes were half buried under water.... The place was called Tenochtitlan (i. e. "the cactus on a rock") in token of its miraculous origin. [Such were the humble beginnings of the Venice of the Western World.][9]
To this day the arms of the Mexican republic show the device of the eagle and the cactus—to commemorate the legend of the foundation of the capital—afterward called Mexico from the name of their war-god. Fiercer and more warlike than their brethren of Tezcuco, the men of the latter town were glad of their assistance, when invaded and defeated by a hostile tribe. Thus Mexico and Tezcuco became close allies, and by the time of Montezuma I, in the middle of the fifteenth century, their sovereignty had extended beyond their native plateau to the coast country along the Gulf of Mexico. The capital rapidly increased in population, the original houses being replaced by substantial stone buildings. There are documents showing that Tenochtitlan was of much larger dimensions than the modern capital of Mexico, on the same site. Just before the arrival of the Spaniards, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the kingdom extended from the gulf across to the Pacific; and southward under the ruthless Ahuitzotl over the whole of Guatemala and Nicaragua.
The Aztecs resembled the ancient Peruvians in very few respects, one being the use of knots on strings of different colors to record events and numbers. Compare our account of "the quipu" in Chapter X. The Aztecs seem to have replaced that rude method of making memoranda during the seventh century by picture-writing. Before the Spanish invasion, thousands of native clerks or chroniclers were employed in painting on vegetable paper and canvas. Examples of such manuscripts may still be seen in all the great museums. Their contents chiefly refer to ritual, astrology, the calendar, annals of the kings, etc.
Most of the literary productions of the ancient Mexicans were stupidly destroyed by the Spanish under Cortés. The first Archbishop of Mexico founded a professorship in 1553 for expounding the hieroglyphs of the Aztecs, but in the following century the study was abandoned. Even the native-born scholars confessed that they were unable to decipher the ancient writing. One of the most ancient books (assigned to Tula, the "Toltec" capital, A. D. 660, and written by Huetmatzin, an astrologer), describes the heavens and the earth, the stars in their constellations, the arrangement of time in the official calendar, with some geography, mythology, and cosmogony. In the fifteenth century the King of Tezcuco published sixty hymns in honor of the Supreme Being, with an elegy on the destruction of a town, and another on the instability of human greatness.
In the same century the three Anahuac states (Acolhua, Mexico, and Tlacopan) formed a confederacy with a constant tendency to give Mexico the supremacy. The two capitals looking at each other across the lake were steadily growing in importance, with all the adjuncts of public works—causeways, canals, aqueducts, temples, palaces, gardens, and other evidences of wealth.
The horror and disgust caused by the Aztec sacrificial bloodshed are greatly increased by considering the number of the victims. The kings actually made war in order to provide as many victims as possible for the public sacrifices—especially on such an occasion as a coronation or the consecration of a new temple. Captives were sometimes reserved a considerable time for the purpose of immolation. It was the regular method of the Aztec warrior in battle not to kill one's opponent if he could be made a captive; to take him alive was a meritorious act in religion. In fact, the Spaniards in this way frequently escaped death at the hands of their Mexican opponents. When King Montezuma was asked by a European general why he had permitted the republic of Tlascala to remain independent on the borders of his kingdom, his reply was, "That she might furnish me with victims for my gods."
In reckoning the number of victims Prescott seems to have trusted too implicitly to the almost incredible accounts of the Spanish. Zumurraga, the first Bishop of Mexico, asserts that 20,000 were sacrificed annually, but Casas points out that with such a "waste of the human species," as is implied in some histories, the country could not have been so populous as Cortés found it. The estimate of Casas is "that the Mexicans never sacrificed more than fifty or a hundred persons in a year."
Notwithstanding the wholesale bloodshed before the shrines of their gory gods, we can still assign to the Aztecs a high degree of civilization. The history of even modern Europe will illustrate this statement, although apparently paradoxical.
Consider "the condition of some of the most polished countries in the sixteenth century after the establishment of the modern Inquisition—an institution which yearly destroyed its thousands by a death more painful than the Aztec sacrifices, ... which did more to stay the march of improvement than any other scheme ever devised by human cunning.... Human sacrifice was sometimes voluntarily embraced by the Aztecs as the most glorious death, and one that opened a sure passage into paradise. The Inquisition, on the other hand, branded its victims with infamy in this world, and consigned them to everlasting perdition in the next."
The difficulty with the Aztecs is how to reconcile such refinement as their extinct civilization showed with their savage enjoyment of bloodshed. "No captive was ever ransomed or spared; all were sacrificed without mercy, and their flesh devoured." The first of the four chief counselors of the empire was called the "Prince of the Deadly Lance," the second "Divider of Men," the third "Shedder of Blood," the fourth "the Lord of the Dark House."
The temples were very numerous, generally merely pyramidal masses of clay faced with brick or stone. The roof was a broad area on which stood one or two towers, from forty to fifty feet in height, forming the sanctuaries of the presiding deities, and therefore containing their images. Before these sanctuaries stood the dreadful stone of sacrifice. There were also two altars with sacred fires kept ever burning.
All the religious services were public, and the pyramidal temples, with stairs round their massive sides, allowed the long procession of priests to be visible as they ceremoniously ascended to perform the dread office of slaughtering the human victims.
Human sacrifices had not originally been a feature of the Aztec worship. But about 200 years before the arrival of the Spanish invaders was the beginning of this religious atrocity, and at last no public festival was considered complete without some human bloodshed.
Prescott takes as an example the great festival in honor of Tezcatlipoca, a handsome god of the second rank, called "the soul of the world," and endowed with perpetual youth.
A year before the intended sacrifice, a captive, distinguished for his personal beauty and without a blemish on his body, was selected.... Tutors took charge of him and instructed him how to perform his new part with becoming grace and dignity. He was arrayed in a splendid dress, regaled with incense and with a profusion of sweet-scented flowers.... When he went abroad he was attended by a train of the royal pages, and as he halted in the streets to play some favorite melody, the crowd prostrated themselves before him, and did him homage as the representative of their good deity.... Four beautiful girls, bearing the names of the principal goddesses, were selected, and with them he continued to live idly, feasted at the banquets of the principal nobles, who paid him all the honors of a divinity. When at length the fatal day of sacrifice arrived, ... stripped of his gaudy apparel, one of the royal barges transported him across a lake to a temple which rose on its margin.... Hither the inhabitants of the capital flocked to witness the consummation of the ceremony. As the sad procession wound up the sides of the pyramid, the unhappy victim threw away his gay chaplets of flowers and broke in pieces his musical instruments. ... On the summit he was received by six priests, whose long and matted locks flowed in disorder over their sable robes, covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import. They led him to the sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with its upper surface somewhat convex. On this the victim was stretched. Five priests secured his head and limbs, while the sixth, clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of his bloody office, dexterously opened the breast of the wretched victim with a sharp razor of itzli, and inserting his hand in the wound, tore out the palpitating heart, and after holding it up to the sun (as representing the supreme God), cast it at the feet of the deity to whom the temple was devoted, while the multitudes below prostrated themselves in humble adoration.
Such was an instance of the human sacrifices for which ancient Mexico became infamous to the whole civilized world.
One instance of a sacrifice differing from the ordinary sort is thus given by a Spanish historian:
A captive of distinction was sometimes furnished with arms for single combat against a number of Mexicans in succession. If he defeated them all, as did occasionally happen, he was allowed to escape. If vanquished he was dragged to the block and sacrificed in the usual manner. The combat was fought on a huge circular stone before the population of the capital.
Women captives were occasionally sacrificed before those bloodthirsty gods, and in a season of drought even children were sometimes slaughtered to propitiate Tlaloc, the god of rain.
Borne along in open litters, dressed in their festal robes and decked with the fresh blossoms of spring, they moved the hardest hearts to pity, though their cries were drowned in the wild chant of the priests who read in their tears a favorable augury for the rain prayer.
One Spanish historian informs us that these innocent victims of this repulsive religion were generally bought by the priests from parents who were poor.
We may now resume the traditional settlement of the ancient Mexicans on the region called Anahuac, including all the fertile plateau and extending south to the lake of Nicaragua. The chief tribes of the race were said to have come from California, and after being subject to the Colhua people asserted their independence about A. D. 1325. Soon afterward, their first capital, Tenochtitlan, was built on the site of Mexico, their permanent center. For several generations they lived, like their remote ancestors, the Red Men of the Woods, as hunters, fishers, and trappers, but at last their prince or chief cazique was powerful enough to be called king. The rule of this Aztec prince, beginning A. D. 1440, marked the beginning of their greatness as a race. It became a rule of their kingdom that every new king must gain a victory before being crowned; and thus by the conquest of a new nation furnish a supply of captives to gratify their tutelary deity by the necessary human sacrifices. In 1502 the younger Montezuma ascended the throne. He is better known to us than the previous kings, because it was in his reign that the Spanish conquerors appeared on the scene. From the time of Cortés the history of the Aztecs becomes part of that of the Mexicans. They were easily conquered by the European troops, partly because of their betrayal by various of the neighboring nations whom they had formerly conquered. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, according to Prescott, the Aztec king ruled the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
From the scientific side of their extinct civilization it is their knowledge of astronomy that chiefly causes astonishment (see also p. [85]). As in the case of the Chaldeans and Babylonians, a motive for the study of the stars and planets was the priestly one of accurately fixing the religious festivals. The tropical year being thus ascertained, their tables showed the exact time of the equinox or sun's transit across the equatorial, and of the solstice. From a very early period they had practised agriculture, growing Indian corn and "Mexican aloe." Having no animals of draft, such as the horse, or ox, their farming was naturally of a rude and imperfect sort.
"The degree of civilization," says Prescott, "which the Aztecs reached, as inferred by their political institutions, may be considered, perhaps, not much short of that enjoyed by our Saxon ancestors under Alfred."
In a passage comparing the Aztecs to the American Indians, we read:
The latter has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization he seems to sink and pine away beneath it. It has been so with the Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination their numbers have silently melted away. Their energies are broken. They no longer tread their mountain plains with the conscious independence of their ancestors. In their faltering step and meek and melancholy aspect we read the sad characters of the conquered race.... Their civilization was of the hardy character which belongs to the wilderness. The fierce virtues of the Aztec were all his own.
Humboldt found some analogy between the Aztec theory of the universe, as taught by the priests, and the Asiatic "cosmogonies." The Aztecs, in explaining the great mystery of man's existence after death, believed that future time would revolve in great periods or cycles, each embracing thousands of years. At the end of each of the four cycles of future time in the present world, "the human family will be swept from the earth by the agency of one of the elements, and the sun blotted out from the heavens to be again rekindled."
The priesthood comprised a large number who were skilled in astrology and divination. The great temple of Mexico, alone, had 5,000 priests in attendance, of whom the chief dignitaries superintended the dreadful rites of human sacrifice. Others had management of the singing choirs with their musical accompaniment of drums and other instruments; others arranged the public festivals according to the calendar, and had charge of the hieroglyphical word-painting and oral traditions. One important section of the priesthood were teachers, responsible for the education of the children and instruction in religion and morality. The head management of the hierarchy or whole ecclesiastical system, was under two high priests—the more dignified that they were chosen by the king and principal nobles without reference to birth or social station. These high priests were consulted on any national emergency, and in precedency of rank were superior to every man except the king. Montezuma is said to have been a priest.
The priestly power was more absolute than any ever experienced in Europe. Two remarkable peculiarities were that when a sinner was pardoned by a priest, the certificate afterward saved the culprit from being legally punished for any offense; secondly, there could be no pardon for an offense once atoned for if the offense were repeated. "Long after the conquest, the simple natives when they came under the arm of the law, sought to escape by producing the certificate of their former confession." (Prescott, i, 33.)
The prayer of the priest-confessor, as reported by a Spanish historian, is very remarkable:
"O, merciful Lord, thou who knowest the secrets of all hearts, let thy forgiveness and favor descend, like the pure waters of heaven, to wash away the stains from the soul. Thou knowest that this poor man has sinned, not from his own free will, but from the influence of the sign under which he was born...."
After enjoining on the penitent a variety of minute ceremonies by way of penance, the confessor urges the necessity of instantly procuring a slave for sacrifice to the Deity.
In the schools under the clergy the boys were taught by priests and the girls by priestesses. There was a higher school for instruction in tradition and history, the mysteries of hieroglyphs, the principles of government, and certain branches of astronomical and natural science.
In the education of their children the Mexican community were very strict, but from a letter preserved by one of the Spanish historians, we can not doubt the womanly affection of a mother who thus wrote to her daughter:
My beloved daughter, very dear little dove, you have already heard and attended to the words which your father has told you. They are precious words, which have proceeded from the bowels and heart in which they were treasured up; and your beloved father well knows that you, his daughter, begotten of him, are his blood and his flesh; and God our Lord knows that it is so. Although you are a woman, and are the image of your father, what more can I say to you than has already been said?... My dear daughter, whom I tenderly love, see that you live in the world in peace, tranquillity, and contentment—see that you disgrace not yourself, that you stain not your honor, nor pollute the luster and fame of your ancestors.... May God prosper you, my first-born, and may you come to God, who is in every place.[10]
Some trace of a "natural piety," which will probably surprise our readers, is also found in the ceremony of Aztec baptism, as described by the same writer. After the head and lips of the infant were touched with water and a name given to it, the goddess Cioacoatl was implored "that the sin which was given to us before the beginning of the world might not visit the child, but that, cleansed by these waters, it might live and be born anew." In Sahagun's account we read:
When all the relations of the child were assembled, the midwife, who was the person that performed the rite of baptism, was summoned. When the sun had risen, the midwife, taking the child in her arms, called for a little earthen vessel of water.... To perform the rite, she placed herself with her face toward the west, and began to go through certain ceremonies.... After this she sprinkled water on the head of the infant, saying, "O my child! receive the water of the Lord of the world, which is our life, and is given for the increasing and renewing of our body. It is to wash and to purify." ... [After a prayer] she took the child in both hands, and lifting him toward heaven said, "O Lord, thou seest here thy creature whom thou hast sent into this world, this place of sorrow, suffering, and penitence. Grant him, O Lord, thy gifts and thine inspiration."
The science of the Aztecs has excited the wonder of all competent judges, such as Humboldt (already quoted) and the astronomer La Place. Lord Kingsborough remarks in his great work:
It can hardly be doubted that the Mexicans were acquainted with many scientifical instruments of strange invention;... whether the telescope may not have been of the number is uncertain; but the thirteenth plate of M. Dupaix's Monuments, which represents a man holding something of a similar nature to his eye, affords reason to suppose that they knew how to improve the powers of vision.
References to the calendar of the Aztecs should not omit the secular festival occurring at the end of their great cycle of fifty-two years. From the length of the period, two generations, one might compare it with the "jubilee" of ancient Israel—a word made familiar toward the close of Queen Victoria's reign. The great event always took place at midwinter, the most dreary period of the year, and when the five intercalary days arrived they "abandoned themselves to despair," breaking up the images of the gods, allowing the holy fires of the temples to go out, lighting none in their homes, destroying their furniture and domestic utensils, and tearing their clothes to rags. This disorder and gloom signified that figuratively the end of the world was at hand.
On the evening of the last day, a procession of priests, assuming the dress and ornaments of their gods, moved from the capital toward a lofty mountain, about two leagues distant. They carried with them a noble victim, the flower of their captives, and an apparatus for kindling the new fire, the success of which was an augury of the renewal of the cycle. On the summit of the mountain, the procession paused till midnight, when, as the constellation of the Pleiades[11] approached the zenith, the new fire was kindled by the friction of some sticks placed on the breast of the victim. The flame was soon communicated to a funeral-pyre on which the body of the slaughtered captive was thrown. As the light streamed up toward heaven, shouts of joy and triumph burst forth from the countless multitudes who covered the hills, the terraces of the temples, and the housetops.... Couriers, with torches lighted at the blazing beacon, rapidly bore them over every part of the country.... A new cycle had commenced its march.
The following thirteen days were given up to festivity. ... The people, dressed in their gayest apparel, and crowned with garlands and chaplets of flowers, thronged in joyous procession to offer up their oblations and thanksgivings in the temples. Dances and games were instituted emblematical of the regeneration of the world.
Prescott compares this carnival of the Aztecs to the great secular festival of the Romans or ancient Etruscans, which (as Suetonius remarked) "few alive had witnessed before, or could expect to witness again." The ludi sæculares or secular games of Rome were held only at very long intervals and lasted for three days and nights.
The poet Southey thus refers to the ceremony of opening the new Aztec cycle, or Circle of the Years.
On his bare breast the cedar boughs are laid,
On his bare breast, dry sedge and odorous gums,
Laid ready to receive the sacred spark,
And blaze, to herald the ascending sun,
Upon his living altar. Round the wretch
The inhuman ministers of rites accurst
Stand, and expect the signal when to strike
The seed of fire. Their Chief, apart from all,
... eastward turns his eyes;
For now the hour draws nigh, and speedily
He look's to see the first faint dawn of day
Break through the orient sky.
Madoc, ii, 26.