Daily Life of the Aztecs

by Jacques Soustelle

  'When a man took a prisoner he said, "Here is my wellbeloved son." And the captive said, "Here is my revered father."' The warrior who had made a prisoner and who watched him die before the altar knew that sooner or later he would follow him into the hereafter by the same kind of death. 'You are welcome: you know what the fortune of war is -- today for you, tomorrow for me,' said the emperor to a captured chief. 13 As for the prisoner himself, he was perfectly aware of his fate and he had been prepared from his childhood to accept it: he agreed, stoically. More than that, he would refuse a clemency that crossed his destiny or the divine will, even if it were offered him.

  Tlacahuepan, the Mexican leader, who was a prisoner of

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  the Chalca in the reign of Motecuhzoma I, had distinguished himself so much by his bravery that when he was captured his enemies offered him a part of their territory for himself and the other Aztecs they had taken. He would not only have his life, but he would be lord of that section: they even asked him to command the troops of Chalco. Tlacahuepan's only reply was to kill himself, shouting to his fellow-prisoners, 'Mexicans, I am going, and I shall wait for you.' 14

  The story of Tlahuicole, a lord of Tlaxcala, who was taken by the Mexicans, was no less famous. They admired him so much that instead of sacrificing him they entrusted him with the command of a body of soldiers in the war against Michoacán: but on his return, covered with honours, from this expedition, the Tlaxcaltec refused to withhold himself any longer from his fate. He insisted upon his death, and died upon the sacrificial stone. 15

  To a less extent this was also the attitude of all the other victims. It was the attitude of the young man who, having lived for a year in princely luxury, was to die at the end of it in front of the image of Tezcatlipoca; and it was that of the women who calmly danced and sang while the darkrobed priests behind them waited for the moment to make their heads fall like ears of maize when they are plucked from the stem. The sensitivity of the Indians, moulded by a powerful and very ancient tradition, was not the same as that of the Europeans of their epoch: the Aztecs were unmoved by the scenes in their blood-soaked temples, but they were horror-struck by the tortures that the Spaniards brought with them from the land of the Inquisition. 16

  It is only these foregoing considerations that allow one to understand the meaning of war for the ancient Mexicans, the meaning of the continual war towards which all the energies of the city were directed. Certainly it is not incorrect to interpret the history of Tenochtitlan between 1325 and 1519 as that of an imperialist state which steadily pursues its aim of expansion by conquest. But that is not all. As the Mexican dominion spread, so their very victories created a pacified zone all round them, a zone which grew

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  wider and wider until it reached the edges of their known world. Where then were the victims to come from? For they were essential to provide the gods with their nourishment, tlaxcaltiliztli. Where could one find the precious blood without which the sun and the whole frame of the universe was condemned to annihilation? It was essential to remain in a state of war, and from this need arose the strange institution of the war of flowers, xochiyaoyotl, which seems to have come into being after the terrible famines which ravaged central Mexico in 1450.

  The sovereigns of Mexico, Texcoco and Tlacopan and the lords of Tlaxcala, Uexotzinco and Cholula mutually agreed that, there being no war, they would arrange combats, so that the captives might be sacrificed to the gods: for it was thought, indeed, that the calamities of 1450 were caused by too few victims having been offered, so that the gods had grown angry. 17 Fighting was primarily a means of taking prisoners; on the battlefield the warriors did their utmost to kill as few men as possible. War was not merely a political instrument: it was above all a religious rite, a war of holiness. 18

  At bottom the ancient Mexicans had no real confidence in the future: their fragile world was perpetually at the mercy of some disaster -- there were not only the natural cataclysms and the famines, but more than that, on certain nights the monstrous divinities of the west appeared at the cross-roads; and there were the wizards, those dark envoys from a mysterious world; and every fifty-two years there was the great fear that fell upon all the nations of the empire when the sun set on the last day of the 'century' and no man could tell whether it would ever rise again.

  In all the cities and throughout the countryside the fires were put out: the close-packed crowds, filled with intense anxiety, gathered on the slopes of Uixachtecatl, while on the mountain-top the priests watched the Pleiades. The constellation mounted towards the zenith: but would it go on? Or would it stop, and would the hideous monsters of the end of the world come swarming out? The astronomer priest made a sign: a prisoner was stretched out on the

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  stone. With a dull sound the flint knife opened his chest and in the gaping wound they spun the fire-stick, the tlequauitl. The miracle took place and the flame sprang up, born from this shattered breast; and amid shouts of joy messengers lit their torches at it and ran to carry the sacred fire to the four corners of the central valley. And so the world had escaped its end once more. But how heavy and blood-drenched a task it was for the priests and the warriors and the emperors, century after century to repel the unceasing onslaughts of the void.

  HEAVEN AND EARTH

  The Aztecs were above all 'the people of the sun'. 19 Their supreme god Uitzilopochtli personified the sun at its height, the blazing sun of noon. His mother Coatlicue, 'she of the serpent skirt', a terrestrial goddess, had borne innumerable stellar gods before him, gods called 'the four hundred of the south', as well as the lunar goddess Coyolxauhqui, the incarnation of the shades of night. According to tradition 20 Coatlicue was miraculously got with child by a ball of feathers that fell from the sky -- the soul of a human sacrifice -- and her son, born already armed with his fire-snake (xiuhcoatl) made his brothers and his sisters flee as the sun chases away the night and wipes out the stars.

  The early days of Uitzilopochtli were hard, for then he was no more than the obscure god of a small wandering tribe, travelling on men's backs across the dusty plains of the north. At that time he was 'only a plebeian, no more than a man', çan maceualli, çan tlacati catca, but he was also naoalli, tetzauitl, 'a wizard, an apparition (a marvel).' 21 His fortunes improved with those of the tribe that he led, and by the sixteenth century he reigned over the Aztec empire as the sun reigns over the world. 'Thanks to me the sun has risen,' he cried, through the mouth of his priests. 22

  As the god of a tribe of hunters and warriors from the north, Uitzilopochtli belonged to a group of stellar and celestial gods who had been brought down by the northern nations that had invaded Mexico -- gods such as Tezcatlipoca, the god of the Great Bear, of the night sky, the protean

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  wizard who sees all in his obsidian mirror, the 'young man', Telpochtli, who protects the young warriors; and Mixcoatl, the god of the Milky Way, the protector of hunters and, under the name of Camaxtli, the national god of Tlaxcala.

  It may be that the nomads of the steppes knew only a small number of deities and that their religion was essentially, if not entirely, astral. The settled people of the central plateau, on the other hand, from the remotest antiquity had worshipped the agrarian gods of growth and the rain. The greatest of these was Tlaloc, with his mask of snakes, he who piles the clouds upon the mountain-tops where the Tlaloque live, the little rain-gods, and who sends out either the beneficent rain or the devastating hurricane at his pleasure and who can release the horror of drought upon the land. 'Oh my lord, magician-prince, truly it is to you that the maize belongs,' they said to him. 23 He was the supreme god of the peasants as Uitzilopochtli was that of the warriors. And as we have seen his place was on the top of the great teocalli of the capital beside Uitzilopochtli's and equal with his: his high-priest ranked with the high-priest of the sungod. The sun and the rain, the two great forces that rule the world, shared the high place of a city that had been founded by a people
of nomadic warriors turned farmers.

  Tlaloc's companion Chalchiuhtlicue, 'she who has a skirt of gems', was usually placed beside him, together with Uixtociuatl: Chalchiuhtlicue was the goddess of sweet water and Uixtociuatl of salt water and of the sea -- she was the goddess of the guild of salters.

  The earth was symbolised by a monster with wide-open jaws which swallows the sun in its setting, the remains of the dead and the blood of the sacrificed. The monster was always put on a level with the 'old god', the father-god associated with the mother-goddess, that is to say Xiuhtecuhtli, the god of fire, 'the lord of the turquoise', sometimes called Otontecuhtli, 'Otomí lord' -- the ancient tribe of the central plateau having in effect worshipped a divine pair. But besides these there were a great number of terrestrial deities, 'the mother of the gods', 'our revered mother', 'our ancestress', 'the she-snake', 'the obsidian butterfly', all

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  wonderful and formidable goddesses, sources of life and death: Aztec sculpture represents them with an extraordinary balance of realism in the details and of the most esoteric symbolism in the conception, with features that are half human and half animal, and with macabre ornaments. 24

  They are compared in hymns to the white and yellow flowers that open when the rains come, or described as standing in 'the sacred maize-field', centlateomilco, waving the magic bell that makes the grain-bearing plant come up. 25 They are the Great Mothers who gave birth to the young god of maize, Centeotl, and the young gods of music, dancing and flowers, Xochipilli and Macuilxochitl. The two faces of the world and of life, benign and terrifying, are brought together in them.

  Not far from them and often represented with the same kind of attributes although she was of a different origin (her cult seems to have been brought in from the Huaxtec country in the north-east) was Tlazolteotl, the goddess of carnal love and of sin and of confession. It was to her that one could, through a priest, confess one's sins; but, unlike the Christian practice, this happened only once in a man's lifetime. The goddess was called tlaelquani, 'the eater of filth', that is to say, 'she who eats sins'.

  For the ancient Mexicans, as for many other agricultural peoples, there was a close link between the moon and vegetation. Metztli, the moon, had been closely followed in its phases and eclipses by the native astronomers since Mayan times. The terrestrial goddesses were at the same time goddesses of the moon.

  There were also uncountable numbers of little local gods who were held to protect the harvests and make them plentiful. Usually each one had the name of the town or village where he was worshipped -- Tepoztecatl, for example, 'he of Tepoztlán' -- and as a body they were called the Four Hundred Rabbits. The rabbit was held to represent the moon, for it was a rabbit that the Mexicans saw in the dark patches on its face. These rustic gods had their festival at the end of the harvest, and at these feasts the octli flowed in abundance: they were therefore also the gods of drunkenness. 26

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  While Tlazolteotl came from the north-cast, it was probably from the south, from the Pacific coast, that they imported the terrible cult of Xipe Totec, 'our lord the flayed one', the god of the goldsmiths and also the deity of the spring rain, the renewal of nature and the fresh growth. His victims were dedicated to him during the month Tlacaxipeualiztli and transfixed with arrows so that their blood should drop on the earth like rain: then they were flayed.

  The priests put on their skin, dyed yellow to look like gold leaf, and this magical act, which symbolised the way the earth 'makes a new skin' at the beginning of the rainy season, induced the vegetation to come again. Xipe Totec was called 'the drinker by night' because it was at night that the fertilising rain came down. They called upon him most pitifully, crying, 'Oh my god, why do you make us beg so hard? Put on your golden clothes.' And they thanked him in a heart-felt way -- 'My god, your gem-like rain has fallen.' 27

  That was one of the aspects of the eternally-repeated drama of the year, the rebirth of the forces of nature and of growth after they had apparently died in the dry season. The whole of ancient Mexican thought, and their whole vision of the world, turned about this central idea, whether it concerned man or nature.

  DEATH AND REBIRTH

  Maize and the garden plants are born in the occident, in the western garden of Temoanchan where the earthgoddesses live, the sources of life. Then they undertake a long journey under the ground (that of germination) praying the gods of rain to guide them on their road: at last they come up in the east, the country of the rising sun and of youth and plenty, the 'red land' of the dawn where the bird quetzalcoxcoxth sings. 28

  Venus, the morning star, is born in the east; then she disappears, and she is seen again as the evening star in the west. She has therefore traversed the world as a shuttle traverses the cloth: she is the symbol of death and rebirth.

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  In divinity the planet was called Quetzalcoatl, 'quetzalsnake', or 'plumed serpent', a name which can also be interpreted as meaning 'precious twin', since the two appearances of the planet are like two twin stars. Quetzalcoatl sacrificed himself upon a pyre, and a brilliant star was seen to rise from the flames. Under the name of Xolotl, the dogheaded god, he went under the earth, down to the hell of Mictlan, to seek for the worn bones of those long dead, in order to make living men out of them.

  Was not Uitzilopochtli, the conquering sun, the reincarnation of a dead warrior? He was born miraculously, as we have seen, and it was the soul of a man killed in battle or in sacrifice that impregnated his mother the earth. His name 'the humming-bird (uitzilin) from the left' means 'the reborn warrior from the south', for the south is the left-hand side of the world, and warriors are reborn in the minute, brilliant body of a humming-bird.

  Thus neither nature nor man are to be sent to an everlasting death. Resurrecting forces are at work: the sun comes up again each morning after passing the night 'under the holy plain' teotlalli iitic, that is to say, in Hades; Venus dies and is reborn; the maize dies and is reborn; the whole world of plants, struck dead in the dry season, arises more beautiful and younger each season of the rains, just as the moon dwindles in the sky and returns according to the rhythm of its phases.

  Death and life are no more than two sides of the same reality: from the earliest times the potters of Tlatilco made a double face, 29 one half alive and the other skull-like; and the dualism is also to be found in innumerable documents. Perhaps no people in history have been so much haunted by the grim presence of death as the Mexicans; but for them life came out of death, as the young plant comes from the mouldering seed in the earth.

  As for man himself, and what became of him after his death, our knowledge is still somewhat incomplete. It is sure, however, that some kinds of immortality were provided; but without any moral connotation, either of reward or of punishment. The warrior who died in battle or upon

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  the stone of sacrifice became a 'companion of the eagle', quauhtecatl, that is to say, a companion of the sun. Every day he would take his place with his fellows in the brilliant and happy company that surrounded the luminary from the time that it rose in the east until the time that it reached the zenith. These immortal soldiers filled their sunlit hours with war-songs and mock battles; and after four years they were reincarnated as humming-birds, flying from flower to flower in the warm air.

  As soon as the sun had passed the zenith it came into the western side of the world, the 'female side', ciuatlampa, because that was where the goddess-mothers lived and also the women who died in childbirth and who thus became goddesses too, the Ciuateteo. It was they, in their turn, who accompanied the sun from the zenith to its setting.

  Other dead people had been selected by fate for a very different kind of eternity: those upon whom Tlaloc had set his mark and who had been drowned or struck by lightning or who had died of a disease thought to be brought about by water -- dropsy, for example. The peasant god had reserved his own paradise for them -- Tlalocan, an idealised vision of the eastern tropics, a green co
untry of flowers and warm rain; it was a garden of repose and plenty, where the blessed lived for ever in a peaceful happiness.

  In this way the two ideologies of the two elements that had formed the Mexican people came together; the first element hunters and warriors, worshippers of a sun-god, and the second settled peasants whose deity was the god of the rain. For the first there was the brilliant road from the orient to the zenith, and for the others the mild happiness of abundance without trouble or labour in the moist green tropical paradise.

  But what happened to the others, to those who were not singled out either by Uitzilopochtli or Tlaloc? It was but a dreary outlook for these undistinguished corpses, for they had nowhere to go except Mictlan, the underworld which lay beneath the great steppes of the north, in the cold, twilit country. Mictlantecuhtli and his wife Mictecaciuatl reigned there: the Mexican Pluto's face was covered with a bony mask, and he sat among owls and spiders.

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  Even so, it was not easy for the dead man to reach his last resting-place. He had to wander four years in the underworld, together with a 'soul-companion', a dog that was cremated with him; four years in which he had to undergo the furious attacks of an icy blast, 'the wind of obsidian', escape from voracious monsters, and at last cross the Nine Rivers, on the other side of which began Hades. And there, dissolving as it were into the void, he vanished totally and for ever.