Daily Life of the Aztecs

by Jacques Soustelle

  BUSINESS, WORK, CEREMONIES

  There we have the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, suitably dressed, shod, brushed and made fine: and, as we have

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  seen, at work since dawn. Many of them were still countrymen, although they lived in the city; but unfortunately it is impossible to say what proportion they bore to the others. They either grew maize, vegetables and flowers in their gardens on the islands, upon chinampas or on the lake-shore, or else they went in pursuit of the wildfowl or the fish of the lake. Their tools and their weapons were simple: a diggingstick broadening into a spade for the workers on the land, a net, a bow and arrows, a spear-thrower and a net game-bag for the fowlers and fishermen.

  The head of a noble family said to his sons, 'Never forget that you descend from noble forefathers: never forget that you do not descend from gardeners or wood-cutters. What are you going to be? Would you like to be traders, walking with a stick in your hand and a load on your back? Would you like to be farmers or labourers? Would you like to be gardeners or wood-cutters? I will tell you what you must do. Listen to me and remember what I say. (First) pay great attention to dancing, to the drum and the bells and to singing . . . (then) take pains to learn an honourable craft, like that of making things with feathers, or other handicrafts, because that will give you your bread in time of need; and above all learn about farming, for farming is nourished by the earth . . . Your ancestors could do all those things, for although they were noble and of high descent, they always saw to it that their lands and their inheritance were cultivated. Because if you think of nothing but your descent and your nobility, how will you maintain your family? What will you live on yourself? Nobody has ever seen anybody live on nobility alone.' 74

  In this down-to-earth lesson one can also very clearly see how a nobleman of Tenochtitlan regarded the vocations, and what order he put them in. First come the rites, for it is the rites that he means when he speaks of song and music: this same father makes it certain, for, says he, 'in doing this you will be pleasant to our lord god who is in all places ( Tezcatlipoca) and you will put your hand into the bosom of his treasures'; then come the honourable crafts, such as those of the artist-craftsmen who worked in feathers, gold

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  and gem-stones; and above all agriculture. Of course there was no question of a Mexican noble working on the land like 'a labourer or a gardener'; the suggestion is that he should direct the exploitation of his estate.

  The notion of high blood which certainly exists here, in spite of the disillusioned warning 'Nobody has ever seen a man live on nobility alone', does not follow the same boundaries as it did in our own feudal society, for example. The noble can work with his hands: but he may not become a plain peasant, nor a trader.

  As we have seen, the estates that members of the ruling class controlled were many and extensive, often far, and sometimes very far, from Mexico. Although in theory the land belonged to the state, these people had in fact a tenancy that was becoming more and more like downright ownership: they therefore devoted a considerable portion of their time to visiting their estates and seeing to their proper cultivation. They might, however, be replaced by majordomos, calpixque, some of whom were trustworthy slaves who at length succeeded in growing wealthy and who often freed themselves.

  It must be realised that the household of a great Aztec lord, with its fields and woods, lakes and rivers, its workshops with many women spinning and weaving, and with craftsmen working for the master himself, formed a considerable economic entity which was partially self-supporting and which was a producer of food and clothing. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the unceasing wars and the increasing labour of administration prevented the high officials from giving their own affairs anything but the most general supervision. The gentleman-farmer was becoming more and more an officer, a judge, a courtier or a statesman, and the most important part of the work had passed into the hands of stewards.

  The business of the state and of the 'high command', tlatocayotl, took up the energies of the ruling class to an ever-increasing extent. In the first place there was the war, for which all the young men had trained themselves from their childhood, being so anxious to rise to be tequiuaque, and, if they could, to be promoted to the higher ranks. Then

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  there were the innumerable public offices, which required industry, integrity and conscientiousness in those who filled them. For example, there were the achcacauhtin, the officers of the law who were charged with carrying out the sentences of the courts; there were the judges who sat from dawn until two hours before sunset with only a break for a light meal and a short siesta 75 and who were liable to the death sentence if they accepted a bribe; 76 tax-gatherers who were obliged to go on arduous and dangerous voyages and who were also sentenced to death if they embezzled any part of the tribute; 77 ambassadors who were sent with an ultimatum from the emperor to distant cities and who often escaped only with great difficulty; all these, and many others, such as the teachers who saw to the education of the boys in the local schools, owed their whole time and their whole energy to the service of the state.

  The Mexicans had a lofty conception of public service and of the authority that went with it: the greatest lord was bound to obey the orders of a simple messenger bearing the commands of a court of law. 78 But at the same time the laws and customs were terribly severe: woe to the drunken judge, the over-accommodating judge; woe to the dishonest civil servant. The sentence of the king of Texcoco was always quoted as an example -- he, bearing that one of his judges had favoured a noble against a maceualli, had the unrighteous justice hanged. 79 If the power was very great, the duties were very heavy.

  The higher a man rose in rank, the less time he had for himself. The accounts of the conquerors describe Motecuhzoma's palace continually filled with a crowd of officials and warriors 80 who passed their whole day there. And one may cite those general sessions called nappualtlatolli 81 ('the eighty days' speaking') which took place at the end of each period of four months by the native calendar, during which all outstanding political or judicial business was dealt with, the sittings lasting from dawn until night. Still more, one may cite the councils -- the Tlatocan at Mexico and the four great councils at Texcoco -- which, to judge by the accounts that have come down to us, were a positive endurance test,

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  with their uncountable speeches full of stylised eloquence and loaded with traditional figures. The Mexican upper class was, by definition, that part of the nation which devoted itself to public life; but public life laid very heavy burdens upon them, and took up by far the greater share of their time and energies.

  As for the priests, who together with the civil or military officials made up a great proportion of this upper class, their entire life was out of their personal control, since their religious duties occupied them both day and night and since unfaithfulness to their vows brought upon them the severest kind of punishment. The tenth statute of Nezaualcoyotl 82 punished the lecherous or drunken priest with death. It may be observed, in passing, that the gravity of the sentence always increased in proportion with the rank of the culprit: the punishment for a plebeian who was drunk in public was a severe admonition and the shame of having his head shaven; for a noble, it was death. 83 It was also death for a noble who had robbed his father, whereas a maceualli guilty of the same crime got off with penal slavery. 84 Duty, responsibility and danger increased with power and wealth.

  Judges and law-courts have often been referred to: it appears that law and court cases had a large place in everyday life. The Indians were of a litigious nature, and they kept the lawyers busy. In the towns and villages of the provinces there were courts of first instance, whose judges pronounced upon relatively unimportant cases. Above them, at Mexico and Texcoco, there were judges, natives of each region, for the cases that were sent up to them from those regions.

  The court of appeal for the whole empire sat at Texcoco: it was made up of twelve judges,
and it sat every twelve days under the presidency of the king of Texcoco to decide the most difficult cases. No case could last for more than eighty days, for the whole object of the general sessions was to wind up all unconcluded business.

  It was a most uncommonly expeditious system. Each trial brought into being a file, kept by an official of the court who noted down in pictographic writing all the testimonies and the sentence, which was immediately put into force.

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  It may be added that this mediaeval Mexico had no knowledge of judicial torture, of the 'question' and the rack which was only suppressed in France in the eighteenth century. 85

  The degree to which the members of the ruling class were taken up by their duties is surprising; but one is positively astonished when one tries to count up the time that they had to devote to worship and to ceremonies. Of course everybody in Mexico took part in the innumerable holidays, or rather holy days, and in the complicated rites which took place on them; but here again it was the dignitaries who bore the brunt.

  Their presence was very often called for in the sacrifices, dances, singing, processions and parades not only in the town, but more than once right round the lake. The solar year was divided into eighteen months of twenty days (plus the five intercalary days of evil omen, during which all activity was reduced to a minimum) and a fresh set of rites and ceremonies belonged to each of these months. 86 Some at least of these called for a very great effort from a very large number of people, an immense amount of organisation and a very considerable expense.

  It was not the priests alone who celebrated the rites, but on the contrary some part or other of the population, according to the month: it might be the young men, the girls, the warriors, the dignitaries, certain guilds like that of the pochteca or the goldsmiths; or often it might be the whole nation that took an active part.

  During the seven first days of the month called 'the great feast of the lords' 87 the emperor had the whole population served with food and drink 'in order to show his good-will towards the humble people (maceualtzintli)'. Every evening, at sunset, the songs and the dances began, in the light of torches and braziers, 'and sometimes Motecuhzoma came out to dance'. For long hours on end the warriors and the women, holding hands, came and went between the rows of braziers and torch-holders; the dancing and the rhythmic chanting did not stop until well on into the night.

  On the tenth day there began the series of sad and cruel ceremonies in which the central Rôle was played by a woman

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  dressed and adorned to represent the goddess of the young maize, Xilonen. Her face was painted yellow and red; she wore a head-dress of quetzal-plumes, a turquoise necklace with a golden disk hanging from it, embroidered clothes and red sandals. In her hand she carried a shield and a magic rattle, the chicauaztli. In the night before the sacrifice 'everybody stayed up, nobody slept, and the women sang the hymns of Xilonen. And at dawn the dances began. All the men, indeed, the war-chiefs, the young men, the officers, everybody carried the maize-stalks that they called totopantli ('bird-flags'); and the women danced also, going with Xilonen.' Everybody, dancing and singing, advanced in procession through the twilight and the dawn towards the temple of the maize, Cinteopan, while the priestesses beat the two-toned gongs and the priests sounded their horns and conchs. The procession surrounded the woman who for a few hours was the incarnation of the goddess, and it carried her forward with it towards her fate: she had scarcely entered the Cinteopan before the officiating priest stepped forward, with his gold-hilted flint knife in his hand; and the headless Xilonen became a goddess in her death.

  'Then, for the first time, they ate the cakes of young maize'; the women and 'the maidens who had never looked at any man'; danced and each person made maizecakes and offered them to the gods.

  The fifth month, Panquetzaliztli, began with songs and dances, which took place each evening from sunset to midnight. Nine days before the great feast of Uitzilopochtli, the preparation of the sacrificial victims began; they were ritually bathed, and everybody, the captives and the captors, danced the 'dance of the serpent' together during part of the night.

  On the twentieth day the captives went to take their leave of their masters, singing 'as if their voices were going to break, as if they were hoarse', and dipping their hands in ochre or blue paint they left the marks of them upon the lintel or the jambs of the door. Then they began to put on the ornaments that had been got ready for them. At dawn there began the great procession of Paynal, the little

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  messenger-god who represented Uitzilpochtli: it went from the centre of the capital to Tlatelolco, from there to the villages of the shore, Popotlan, Chapultepec, and as far as the outskirts of Coyoacán. Now and then the procession stopped and some victims were sacrificed. When Paynal, having made this long circuit, reappeared at Tenochtitlan and entered the sacred precinct, the conchs sounded, and one by one the captives were sacrificed upon the stone, before the gate of Uitzilopochtli's temple.

  Other customs had a character not unlike that of the popular merriment at the time of our Carnival. During the first days of the month Atemoztli, the priests and the young warriors formed themselves into opposing bands and fought with twigs and reeds. If the warriors captured a priest 'they rubbed him with agave leaves, which caused him to itch and to burn; and if one of the young warriors were taken the priests scratched his ears, arms, chest and legs with a thorn until he cried out. And if the priests managed to chase one of the young men into the palace, they pillaged it, carrying off all the mats, the carpets made of rope, the seats with backs, the beds and the stools. If they found any gongs or drums they took them too; they carried off everything. And if the young warriors pursued the priests into their monastery (calmecac), they too sacked it, and carried off the mats, the conchs and the chairs.'

  This same element of antagonism, and the same temporary permitting of acts that would at other times be severely punished, is also found in the month Tititl. This time it was the little boys who were armed with bolster-like bags filled with paper or leaves and who attacked the girls and the women. They had sticks or branches to defend themselves: but the urchins did their best to take them by surprise -- they would hide their sacks and surround an unsuspecting woman, and then suddenly banging her with bags they would all bawl out 'Here is a bag, lady.' After this they would run away, laughing. 88

  These ceremonies, whether they were terrible or beautiful, or as horrifying as the Tlacaxipeualiztli, which finished in a dance of the priests dressed in human skins, or as happy as

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  that of Tlaxochimaco, in which avalanches of flowers ran in all the temples, necessarily took up a considerable part of the time, the labour and the resources of the community. They were both very frequent and very long, most scrupulously observed -- each detail was laid down with extraordinary care -- and all the more numerous and absorbing in that Mexico, the capital of the empire, participated in every cult and worshipped every god.

  For this reason the Mexicans had the reputation, even among their near neighbours -- those of Texcoco, for example -- of being so religious that it was impossible to know how many gods they honoured. 89 But in order to have a clear idea of what this continual religious activity meant to them, it is necessary for us to redefine the words 'rite' and 'ceremony', and to strip them of the conventional attributes that they have acquired in our civilisation.

  For the ancient Mexicans there was nothing more vitally important than these motions, these songs, dances, sacrifices and traditional actions, because as they saw it, these things assured the regular succession of the seasons, the coming of the rains, the springing of the plants upon which they lived, and the resurrection of the sun. The Mexican nation, and above all the priests and the dignitaries, was engaged day after day in a continually renewed white-magic operation, a perpetual collective effort without which nature itself would be destroyed. It was therefore the gravest of life's occupations, the most imperative of dut
ies.

  Nevertheless, this great preoccupation with religious ceremony did not prevent either the guilds or the people from following their ordinary callings. In their workshops the craftsmen cost and chiselled the gold, and at the same time the pochteca made ready for their voyages or sold the goods that they had brought back from the distant provinces. Commerce, in all its forms, spread through the markets and in the streets: a host of minor trades provided those who worked at them with at least something to help towards their family's maintenance. Women sold those maize cakes called tamales to passers-by, as well as atolli, a maize porridge, cocoa ready for drinking, dishes seasoned with

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  peppers and tomatoes, and cooked meat. But it was men who displayed maize, calabash-seeds, oil-seeds, honey, saucepans and mats. 90 No doubt they all did their best to attract clients by praising their wares and crying them with those traditional cries that give a street its life. The hurried lawyer hastening to the court, like the official going to his office or the countryman spending a day in the town to sell his produce, would stop for a moment and eat a snack before going on. The timber-carriers, panting as they trotted under their heavy load, would come down from the mountains; and some would go in relays so as not to fail under the weight of the beams and rafters. Elsewhere a team of labourers called out by the local authority would be repairing an aqueduct under the orders of an official.

  The system of the tequitl, or requisitioned collective labour, to which the plebeians were liable, provided for the execution of public works. In this manner the authorities had very considerable quantities of labour at their disposal; and it was thus, for example, that the great dike called 'the old water-wall' (ueue atenamit) was built in the time of Motecuhzoma I, by workmen called up from all parts. 91 By the same system, too, Indians from Texcoco, Atzcapotzalco, Tlacopan, Coyoacán, Xochimilco and four other towns cut the canal to bring the water from a spring to Mexico, under the reign of Auitzotl. 92 'An ant-hill, one would have said,' observes the chronicler; and indeed it is exactly an ant-hill that one thinks of at the spectacle of the quiet, efficient, orderly work that fills all the industrious length of the day.