Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [221]
MYTHIC VOICES
They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now we have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols…. Certainly Our Lord God would be well pleased if by the hand of Your Royal Highnesses these people were initiated and instructed in our Holy Catholic Faith, and the devotion, trust, and hope which they have in these idols were transferred to the divine power of God.
—HERNANDO CORTÉS*(1521)
The Spaniards made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babies from their mother’s breasts by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks…. They spitted the bodies of other babies, together with their mothers and all who were before them on their swords….[They hanged Indians] by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive…. I saw all the above things…. All these did my own eyes witness.
—FRAY BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS, History of the Indies, 1552
What sets Mesoamerican myth apart?
There is little question that what sets Mesoamerican myth apart from many others is its preoccupation with human sacrifice. Other civilizations throughout history clearly used human sacrifice, but nowhere else does it seem to occur quite on the scale it did in Mesoamerica. And nowhere in Mesoamerica was it more pronounced than among the Aztecs, a group originally known as the Tenochca.
In their foundation myth, the Tenochca were commanded by their god Huitzilopochtli to journey from their home base in the north to the Valley of Mexico. At first, they lived in the town of Culhuacan. But after they sacrificed a daughter of Culhuacan’s king, the Tenochca were forced to move and start their own city, Tenochtitlán, on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Becoming more powerful and skilled as warriors, they often served as mercenaries in the ongoing conflicts among other people in the area. By the mid-1400s, the Tenochca built a causeway that linked their island city to the mainland, and began to conquer the Valley of Mexico, emerging as a powerful city-state that controlled the region. Under Moctezuma I (also known as Montezuma), who ruled from 1440 to 1469, the Tenochcas conquered large areas to the east and south, and the name Aztec now commonly refers to this larger group who made up this empire. Moctezuma’s successors expanded the empire until it reached what is now Guatemala, to the south, and the state of San Luis Potosí, about 225 miles north of Mexico City.
As they did, the Aztecs assimilated many of the gods, beliefs, and practices of the surrounding area into their own religion and myths, including the ancient gods of the mysterious ancient city of Teotihuacán, which they named “the place where men became gods,” and the remnants of Toltecs, another warrior tribe that had conquered much of the Mayan territory in Yucatán. When Moctezuma II became emperor in 1502, the Aztec empire was at the height of its power, and hundreds of nearby conquered towns paid heavy taxes to the empire. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, Tenochtitlán may have had a population of 200,000 to 300,000, larger than any Spanish city of that time. But the Aztec rulers also had made plenty of enemies among the people they taxed and fought with so relentlessly. The Spanish were able to use that local antagonism to make allies among some of the natives eager to see Moctezuma brought down.
A highly militarized society with the kind of sharp class distinctions found in European feudalism, the Aztecs were divided into nobles, commoners, serfs, and slaves. While an emperor presided