Of the sacrifices the most important was that signifying the annual demise of Tezcatlipoca. The most handsome of the captives who chanced to be in the hands of the Aztecs was chosen for the purpose. It was necessary that he should be without spot or blemish, as it was intended that he should represent Tezcatlipoca himself. He was taken in hand by a body of tutors, who instructed him how to play his allotted part with the dignity and grace to be expected from a divine being. Arrayed in magnificent robes typical of his godhead, and surrounded by an atmosphere of flowers and incense, he led the life of a voluptuary for the space of nearly a year. On the occasion of his appearance in the public streets he was received by the populace with all the homage due to a god, but was strictly guarded, nevertheless, by eight pages, who in reality were merely gaolers. Within a month's time of his immolation four beautiful girls were given him as wives, and he was feasted and fêted by the nobility as the incarnation of Tezcatlipoca.
On the day preceding the sacrifice the victim was placed on one of the royal canoes, and accompanied by his four wives, was rowed to the other side of the lake. That evening his wives bade him farewell, and he was stripped of his gorgeous apparel. He was then conducted to a teocalli some three miles from the city of Mexico. In scaling this he threw away the wreaths of flowers with which he had been adorned, and broke in pieces the musical instruments with which he had amused his hours of captivity. Crowds thronged from the city to behold the act of sacrifice. On reaching the summit of the teocalli the victim was met by six priests, five of whom led him to the sacrificial stone, a great block of jasper with a convex surface. On this he was placed by the five priests, who secured his head, arms, and legs, whilst the officiating priest, robed in a blood-red mantle, dexterously opened his breast with a sharp flint knife. He then inserted his hand into the gaping wound, and tearing out the still palpitating heart, held it aloft towards the sun. Then he cast the bleeding offering into a vessel containing burning copal, which lay at the feet of the image of Tezcatlipoca. A species of sermon was then delivered by one of the priests to the people in which he drew a moral from the fate of the victim illustrative of the inevitable conclusion of all human pleasure by the hand of death.
Huitzilopochtli had also a representative sacrificed every year who had to take part in a sort of war-dance immediately before his immolation, and a woman was annually sacrificed to Centeotl, the maize-goddess. Before her death she took part in several symbolic representations which were expressions of the various processes in the growth of the harvest. The day before her sacrifice she sowed maize in the streets, and on the arrival of midnight she was decapitated and flayed. A priest arrayed himself in the still warm skin and engaged in mimic combat with soldiers who were scattered through the streets. Part of the skin was then carried to the temple of Centeotl the Son, where a priest made a mask of it in the likeness of the presiding deity, and afterwards sacrificed four captives in honour of the occasion. The skin was then carried to the frontiers of the empire, and buried. It was supposed that its presence there acted as a talisman against invasion.
We have before described the sacrifices of children to Tlaloc. Even more gruesome were the awful doings at the festival of Xiuhtecutli, when the unhappy victims were half-roasted and finally despatched by having their hearts torn out. Cannibal feasts often followed these sacrifices—feasts which were the more horrible in that they were accompanied by all the accessories of a high standard of civilisation; but it must be remembered that their purport was essentially symbolic, and in no way partook of the nature of the orgies of flesh-famished savages.
When the great temple of Huitzilopochtli was dedicated in 1486, the chain of victims sacrificed on that occasion extended for the length of two miles. In this terrible massacre the hearts of no less than seventy thousand human beings were offered up! In the light of such appalling wickedness it is difficult to blame the Spanish conquerors of Anahuac in their zeal to blot out the worship of the deities whom they designated 'horrible demons.' These victims were nearly always captive warriors of rival nations, and it was on rare occasions only that native Mexicans were led to the stone of sacrifice unless, indeed, they were malefactors.
The great jubilee festival, which was celebrated every fifty-two years throughout the empire, marked the coincidence of four times thirteen solar and four times thirteen lunar years. This the Mexicans called a 'sheaf of years,' and when the first day of the fifty-third year dawned, the ceremony of Toxilmolpilia, or 'the binding-up of years,' was held. Priests and people gazed feverishly at the Pleiades to see if they would pass the zenith. Should they do so the world would hold on its course for another similar period; if not, extinction would instantly follow. Fire was kindled upon a victim's breast by the friction of wood, and whenever it was alight the prisoner's heart was plucked out, and along with his body was consumed upon a pile of wood kindled by the new fire. As the flames ascended, and it was seen that the Pleiades had crossed the zenith, cries of joy burst from the assembled people below. Faggots were lighted at the sacred pyre, and domestic fires rekindled from them. Humanity had been respited for a generation.
It is difficult to believe that a people so imbrued in a religion of bloodshed could have been punctilious in matters of morality, and it is still more difficult to believe the evidence of Sahagun and Clavigero concerning their personal piety. It seems certain, however, that as a race the Aztecs were austerely moral, pious, truth-loving, and loyal as citizens, and even the sanguinary priests do not appear to have reaped any benefit from their terrible offices. All the evidence would seem to show that it was the belief in the existence of cruel and insatiable gods which rendered the priests and people alike callous and insensible to the taking of human life, and this is the more easily understood when it is remembered that the Aztecs had at a comparatively late period emerged from a state of migratory savagery into the heirship of an ancient and complex civilisation.[5]
CHAPTER IV