Aztec Religion

The Mexica placed themselves at the end of a sequence. Four previous worlds, each with its own sun, had been created and destroyed; the present one, the fifth sun, was made at Teotihuacan when the gods gathered in darkness and one of them threw himself into a fire to become the sun. In the versions recorded after the conquest the new sun would not move until the other gods gave themselves too. Motion, and therefore time, began with an act of self-destruction.

From this followed a relationship of debt. The gods had spent themselves to make the world habitable, and human beings, made in these accounts from the bones of an earlier creation and from blood a god drew from his own body, owed a return. That return was made in offerings of many kinds: incense, food, flowers, quail, paper, and blood drawn by the worshipper from earlobes, tongue or limbs with maguey spines and obsidian blades. Autosacrifice of this sort was routine, expected of priests daily and of ordinary people at intervals, and it is the context in which the killing of captives belongs rather than a separate category.

The pantheon was large and its members overlapped. Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica patron, was a solar and warrior god of no great antiquity outside their own history. Tlaloc, the rain god, is attested in central Mexico for well over a millennium before them, which is the point of the twin summit of the main temple: the newcomer beside the god of the land. Tezcatlipoca, associated with fate, night, rulership and conflict, and Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent linked to wind, priesthood and creation, appear in the stories as rivals and as aspects of a single pattern.

Gods could also be worn. A priest or a victim dressed in a deity's regalia was treated as that deity present, which is a different relation from representation and does not translate easily.

That the Mexica killed people as a religious act is not in question. It is described in detail in Nahuatl-language testimony as well as in Spanish accounts, depicted in their own art, and confirmed archaeologically. Excavation in the main temple precinct of Tenochtitlan has recovered dedicatory burials, offerings containing human remains, and the platform that supported a rack of skulls, along with towers built from skulls. The remains include men, women and children.

What is disputed is scale and interpretation. The very large totals given in some colonial sources, including figures in the tens of thousands for a single temple dedication, come from writers with reason to present the practice as extreme, were often set down decades after the events, and are not supported by the osteological material recovered so far. Careful accounts therefore attribute such numbers to the source that reports them rather than asserting them, while accepting that the practice was frequent, public and central.

Interpretation has swung. Older writing often treated the rites as evidence of a uniquely bloodthirsty culture; a later reaction proposed material explanations, including a protein-shortage theory that specialists have generally rejected. Current work tends to read the practice in its own terms: as the discharge of a cosmic debt, as an extension of warfare in which the capture of an enemy rather than his death on the field was the objective, and as a public demonstration of imperial power over subject peoples whose gods and whose captives were displayed in the capital.

Two points are often lost. The Mexica were not unusual in Mesoamerica in practising human sacrifice, only in the scale and visibility their empire gave it. And the Spanish who recorded it in horrified detail were themselves prosecuting a war of conquest and conducting public executions and burnings, and their accounts served to justify both.

Almost every written source for Mexica religion postdates the destruction of the society that practised it, and the few that do not are hard to read.

Pre-conquest books were painted screenfolds of bark paper or deer hide. Very few survive from central Mexico, and the origin of the best-known group is contested. The Mexica books themselves are gone, destroyed in the conquest and, according to a later Nahuatl account, already purged once on the orders of the ruler Itzcoatl so that an approved version of the past could stand. What survives is largely from neighbouring peoples, and is pictorial rather than a script recording speech, so it can be interpreted only with help from later commentary.

Colonial compilations supply most of the detail. The largest is the encyclopaedic work assembled over decades by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun, working with Nahua assistants and elderly informants, written in Nahuatl with a parallel Spanish text that does not always say the same thing. Diego Duran, Motolinia and others wrote comparable accounts. These are indispensable and compromised in the same breath: gathered by or for men committed to eradicating what they described, from informants with their own reasons to shape the record, and sorted into European categories of god, idol and devil that may not fit what they were sorting.

Archaeology is the independent check, and has grown far more important since the accidental discovery of a large carved monolith in Mexico City in 1978 led to the systematic excavation of the main temple precinct. Offerings sealed inside successive construction stages can be dated and could not have been edited afterwards. They have confirmed some colonial descriptions and complicated others.

The defensible position is that Mexica ritual is known in considerable detail, that its logic is known in outline, and that statements about numbers, or about what individual people believed, deserve far more caution than they usually receive.