Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [222]
To the Aztecs, warfare was a religious duty aimed at taking prisoners to offer to the gods, and providing blood for the gods was a sacred duty. As a result, Aztec methods of combat were designed to capture prisoners rather than kill them. The chief Aztec weapon, a wooden club edged with sharp pieces of obsidian, was effective for disabling an opponent without finishing him off. For protection, warriors carried wooden shields and wore padded cotton armor. Clearly, these weapons and armor did not serve them very well against the steel swords, metal armor, firearms, and cannons of the Spanish. The Aztec and other native warriors, accustomed to taking prisoners in battle, were also unprepared at first to fight battles in which killing was the point.
The fruit of the flowery wars—the blood flowing from a wound was described as the “flower of war”—was offered up at great ceremonies, during which human hearts were proffered to Huitzilopochtli and the other major divinities. Believing that the world had already been destroyed four times, the Aztecs thought that this feeding of the gods would forestall the end of the universe. The grim “open heart surgery” was performed by priests who slashed open the chest of a living victim and tore out the heart. Like the Mayas, the Aztecs believed that the gods needed human hearts and blood to remain strong. Before their deaths, sacrificial victims, who symbolically represented the gods, were dressed in rich clothing, given servants, and treated with honor. Once dead, their souls flew immediately to Tonatiuhichan—the House of the Sun. This was the highest paradise, where dead warriors spent their eternal lives—and lived forever in happiness. By some accounts—not universally accepted—priests or worshippers sometimes ate portions of a victim’s body, believing that the dead person’s strength and bravery passed to anyone who ate the flesh. While most victims were prisoners of war, the Aztecs also sacrificed children to the god Tlaloc.
Some modern critics and historians dismiss the accounts of Aztec sacrifice as propaganda written by the Spanish invaders to justify their own brutality. But the vast majority of scholarly research and recent archaeology supports the view that the Aztecs had elevated human sacrifice to a ghastly cultural rite.
Did the Aztecs really think the Spanish were gods?
Back in grade school, if they were still teaching anything about the arrival of the Spanish in what would become Mexico, you may have heard this version of events. When the Spaniards arrived, riding horses then unknown in the Americas and wearing metal armor that made great noise, the “primitive” Aztecs unwittingly welcomed them, believing that Cortés was the returning god Quetzalcoatl. With a relatively small band of men, Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, took Moctezuma captive, and, in short order, captured the city and the Aztec empire, eventually destroying it.
The real history, as usual, is a little more complex. First, we should begin with the source of this story—or legend, as it might be called. Most accounts of the arrival of Cortés and the Spaniards, and specifically his encounter with Moctezuma, come from Cortés and other conquistadors, and, later, priests. That’s like reading Captain John Smith’s history of colonial-era Virginia, or accepting Hitler’s view of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It is hardly unbiased history.
In fact, Cortés landed on the