Such crops, etc., as were available for their lands were known to the Aztecs, and developed to their full extent. They thoroughly appreciated and enjoyed the wealth of flowers which nature scattered over the soil. Flowers were to them an important part of their religious ceremonies; their soft, brilliant, or gaudy colors had each its peculiar significance. Out of them the women wove wreaths for the head, and long festoons for decoration, heaping blossoms in greatest profusion wherever was festivity and rejoicing. In fact in the Aztec disposition is found an inheritance of gentleness and mildness, brought with them from Aztlan, shown in their consideration for women, their industry, their taste in ornament, and their devotion to flowers. The ferocity of their religious sacrifices has nothing in common with these other traits of character. It is as if this dismal feature of their creed were picked up somewhere on the way during their long wanderings, a dark, bloody thread interwoven in the soft, tender fabric of their composition. The women were not oppressed, but ruled their homes peaceably, assisting in the lighter work of the field, and taking care of the children, preparing food, and all household requirements.
VASE. MUSEUM AT MEXICO.
Among the Aztecs was an order of priestesses, who withdrew from the world for one or more years at the age of twelve or thirteen, and went to live shut up within the inner courts of the teocalli. Their hair was cut in a set fashion, common to all, but they were allowed to let it grow again after one cutting; they were draped in white, without any decoration or ornament, and always slept in their clothes, "in order to be ready for work in the morning." The life was one of abstinence and toil; they carried their eyes always cast down, and bore themselves with great modesty of deportment, always watched by the sharp eye of a lady-superior within the walls of their retreat, and outside by vigilant old men who stood guard by day and night. Their food was plain and sparing, only at feast-time were they allowed meat, and then because their accustomed routine was interrupted by unusual exertion. They assisted at the religious dances of these festivals, their feet and hands adorned with feathers, and their cheeks painted red. On days of penance they pricked their ears, and put the blood on their cheeks "as a religious rouge," says the account; washing it off in a particular basin destined for that purpose. The slightest variation from the path prescribed to them was punished by death. Some of the Nahuatl deities are goddesses, which shows that the sexes were not unequally reverenced. An important goddess, Coatlicue, or She of the Skirt of Serpents, has a statue in the court of the museum at Mexico, which is regarded as one of the best specimens of Aztec workmanship. Like the calendar, it was found buried in the Plaza Mayor, not far from the cathedral, doubtless tumbled there by the Spaniards when they destroyed the great teocalli. It is not beautiful according to ideas of symmetry formed from the Venus of Milo; it is strange and interesting on account of the quantity of symbols by which it is overwhelmed. Coatlicue, or Cihuatcotl, or Cihuacoatl, is the serpent woman, mother of the first human pair in the world; she is the goddess of the earth, in the night-time, after sunset. She is, therefore, the mistress of the dead. And then she is the mother of Quetzalcoatl, the god and hero of the early Nahuatl. This sounds better than it looks. The upper part is the head of a serpent, whose body is entwined with that of a woman. The skirt is a web of snakes, adorned with tassels and feathers. The figure has many hands, as a symbol of the production-giving power of the earth. The skull at the girdle shows that on her breast repose her children after death in eternal slumber.
Such were the Aztecs in 1500, after little more than a century of life in their new land. Much of their civilization, many of their customs, they must have caught from the older, longer established, refined court of the Texcucans, their neighbors at the other end of the lake, whose dynasty was much older, and whose traditions came down unimpaired from the cultivated Toltecs, whose remote ancestors, if they came from the same stem as the Aztecs and wandered to Anahuac from the same shadowy Aztlan or Huehue-Tlapallan, had yet the advantage of a couple of centuries of development, and a longer abstinence from the bloody rites of a savage religion.
The Mexicans were in some sort parvenus on the plateau. They won their way by their valor in battle, and insisted on recognition by the other tribes, by superior force or ferocity conquering to themselves a large portion of the happy land. The neighboring people made way for them, a few to be their allies; but their ferocious warfare had made them detested by those who feared them in all the surrounding country, so that these other kingdoms, republics, or sedentary races saw not unwillingly the downfall of the haughty Aztec house, even if they did not actively help its invaders.
In the end, this policy was fatal to all. Once they had gained a foothold on the plateau, the Conquistadores stopped not until the whole country was within their grasp.