The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West

by F.A.S. M.A. Robert E. Anderson

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.