for feasts and to invalids in moderation, and old people over seventy seem to be represented in one of the picture-writings as having liberty of drunkenness, young men found drunk were clubbed to death and young Women stoned. For such offences as witchcraft, fraud, removing landmarks, and adultery the criminal had his heart cut out on the altar, or his head crushed between two stones, while even lesser punishments were harsh, such as that of slanderers, whose hair was singed with a pine-torch to the scalp.
Based on conquest as the Aztec kingdom was, and with the most bloodthirsty religion the world ever saw, the nation was, above all, a fighting community. To be a tried soldier was the road to honour and office, and the king could not be enthroned till he had with his own hand taken captives to be butcheredWar. on the war-god’s altar at his coronation. The common soldiers were promoted for acts of daring, and the children of chiefs were regularly trained to war, and initiated by being sent into battle with veterans, with whose aid the youth took his first prisoner, but his future rise depended on how many captives he took unaided in fight with warlike enemies; by such feats he gained the dignity of wearing coloured blankets, tassels and lip-jewels, and reached such military titles as that of “guiding eagle.” The Mexican military costumes are to be seen in the picture-writings, where the military orders of princes, eagles and tigers are known by their braided hair, eagles’ beaks and spotted armour. The common soldiers went into battle brilliant in savage war-paint, but those of higher rank had helmets like birds and beasts of prey, armour of gold and silver, wooden greaves, and especially the ichcapilli, the quilted cotton tunic two fingers thick, so serviceable as a protection from arrows that the Spanish invaders were glad to adopt it. The archers shot well and with strong bows, though their arrows were generally tipped only with stone or bone; their shields or targets, mostly round, were of ordinary barbaric forms; the spears or javelins had heads of obsidian or bronze, and were sometimes hurled with a spear-thrower or atlatl, of which pictures and specimens still exist, showing it to be similar in principle to those used by the Australians and Eskimo. The most characteristic weapon of the Mexicans was the maquahuitl or “hand-wood,” a club set with two rows of large sharp obsidian flakes, a well-directed blow with which would cut down man or horse. These two last-mentioned weapons have the look of highly developed savage forms, while on the other hand the military organization was in some respects equal to that of an Asiatic nation, with its regular companies commanded each by its captain and provided with its standard. The armies were very large, an expedition often consisting of several divisions, each numbering eight thousand men; but the tactics of the commanders were quite rudimentary, consisting merely of attack by arrows and javelins at a distance, gradually closing into a hand-to-hand fight with clubs and spears, with an occasional feigned retreat to draw the enemy into an ambuscade. Fortification was well understood, as may still be seen in the remains of walled and escarped strongholds on hills and in steep ravines, while lagoon-cities like Mexico had the water approaches defended by fleets of boats and the causeways protected by towers and ditches; even after the town was entered, the pyramid-temples with their surrounding walls were forts capable of stubborn resistance. It was held unrighteous to invade another nation without a solemn embassy to warn their chiefs of the miseries to which they exposed themselves by refusing the submission demanded, and this again was followed by a declaration of war, but in Mexico this degenerated into a ceremonial farce, where tribute was claimed or an Aztec god was offered to be worshipped in order to pick a quarrel as a pretext for an invasion already planned to satisfy the soldiers with lands and plunder, and to meet the priests’ incessant demands for more human sacrifices.
Among the accounts of the Mexican religion are some passages referring to the belief in a supreme deity. The word teotl, god, has been thought in some cases to bear this signification, but its meaning is that of deity in general, and it is applied not only to the sun-god but to very inferior gods. It is related that Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Tezcuco, built a nine-storied Religion. temple with a starry roof above, in honour of the invisible deity called Tloquenahuaque, “he who is all in himself,” or Ipalnemoani, “he by whom we live,” who had no image, and was propitiated, not by bloody sacrifices, but by incense and flowers. These divinities, however, seem to have had little or no place in the popular faith, which was occupied by polytheistic gods of the ordinary barbaric type. Tezcatlipoca was held to be the highest of these, and at the festival of all the gods his footsteps were expected to appear in the flour strewn to receive this sign of their coming. He was plainly an ancient deity of the race, for attributes of many kinds are crowded together in him. Between him and Quetzalcoatl, the ancient deity of Cholula, there had been old rivalry. As is related in the legends, Quetzalcoatl came into the land to teach men to till the soil, to work metals and to rule a well-ordered state; the two gods played their famous match at the ball-game, and Tezcatlipoca persuaded the weary Quetzalcoatl to drink the magic pulque that sent him roaming to the distant ocean, where he embarked in his boat and disappeared from among men.[1] These deities are not easily analysed, but on the other hand Tonatiuh and Metztli, the sun and moon, stand out distinctly as nature gods, and the traveller still sees in the huge adobe pyramids of Teotihuacan, with their sides oriented to the four quarters, an evidence of the importance of their worship. The war-god Huitzilopochtli was the, real head of the Aztec pantheon; his idol remains in Mexico, a huge block of basalt on which is sculptured on the one side his hideous personage, adorned with the humming-bird feathers on the left hand which signify his name, while the not less frightful war-goddess Teoyaomiqui, or “divine war-death,” occupies the other side. Centeotl, the goddess of the all-nourishing maize, was patroness of the earth and mother of the gods, while Mictlanteuctli, lord of dead-land, ruled over the departed in the dim under-world. There were numbers of lesser deities, such as Tlazolteotl, goddess of pleasure, worshipped by courtesans, Tezcatzoncatl, god of strong drink, whose garment in grim irony clothed the drunkard’s corpse, and Xipe, patron of the goldsmiths. Below these were the nature-spirits of hills and groves, whose shrines were built by the roadside. The temples were called teocalli or “god’s house,” and rivalled in size as they resembled in form the temples of ancient Babylon. They were pyramids on a square or oblong base, rising in successive terraces to a small summit-platform. The great teocalli of Huitzilopochtli in the city of Mexico stood in an immense square, whence radiated the four principal thoroughfares, its courtyard being enclosed by a square, of which the stone wall, called the coatepantli- or serpent-wall from its sculptured serpents, measured nearly a quarter of a mile on each side. In the centre, the oblong pyramid of rubble cased with hewn stone and cemented 375 × 300 ft. at the base, and rising steeply in five terraces to the height of 86 ft., showed conspicuously to the city the long processions of priests and victims winding along the terraces and up to corner flights of steps. On the paved platform were three-storey tower temples in whose ground-floor stood the stone images and altars, and before that of the war-god the green stone of sacrifice, humped so as to bend upward the body of the victim that the priest might more easily slash open the breast with his obsidian knife, tear out the heart and hold it up before the god, while the captor and his friends were waiting below for the carcase to be tumbled down the steps for them to carry home to be cooked for the feast of victory. Before the shrines reeking with the stench of slaughter the eternal fires were kept burning, and on the platform stood the huge drum, covered with snakes’ skin, whose fearful sound was heard for miles. From the terrace could be seen seventy or more other temples within the enclosure, with their images and blazing fires, and the tzompantli or “skull-place,” where the skulls of victims by tens of thousands were skewered on cross-sticks or built into towers. There also might be seen the flat circular temalacatl or “spindle-stone,” where captives armed with wooden weapons were allowed the mockery of a gladiatorial fight against well-armed champions. The great pyramid of Cholula with its hemispherical temple of Quetzalcoatl at the top, now an almost shapeless hill surmounted by a church, was about thrice as long and twice as high as the teocalli of Mexico. A large fraction of the Mexican population were set apart as priests or attendants to the services of the gods. The rites performed were
such as are found elsewhere—prayer, sacrifice, processions, dances,- ↑ One of the most important sources for the ancient Mexican traditions and myths is the so-called “Codex Chlmalpopoca,” a manuscript in the Mexican language discovered by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg. It is the interpretation of different mythological and historical Mexican picture-writings, composed by an anonymous author some time after the conquest and copied by Fernando de Alva (Ixtlilxochitl, 1568–1648). It belonged to the priceless collection of Mexican documents brought together in the 18th century by Lorenzo Boturini (see his “Catálogo del Museo historic indiano,” appendix of his Idea de una nueva historia general de la America septentrional, Madrid, 1746, § viii., No. 13). It is named there Historia de los reynos de Colhuacan y de Mexico. Other copies of the same manuscript, made by Leon y Gama, José Pichardo, Aubin and Brasseur, exist in the Paris National Library in the Aubin-Goupil collection. Brasseur died before he could realize his plan to publish the whole MS. in Nahuatl with a translation. Some extracts are to be found in his Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique, and in Leon y Gama, Dos Piedras . . ., ed. Bustamente (Mexico, 1832). Larger fragments of the Ixtlilxochitl copy were published in the Anales del museo nacional de Mexico, tom. iii., appx. pp. 7–70; but in this edition the Mexican text is very corrupt, and the two Spanish translations are by no means exact. The Paris MSS. and the Ixtlilxochitl copy were carefully collated by Dr Walter Lehmann (see Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1906, pp. 752–760; Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, nouv. sér. vol. iii. No. 2; Dr E. Seler, Verhandlungen des XVI. Internationalen Amerikanisten-Kongresses, Vienna, 1909, II., pp. 129–150). The precious Ixtlilxochitl copy was found by Lehmann in the library of the National Museum of Mexico, and arrangements were made for the publication of the whole MS. by him in conjunction with Professor E. Seler. Another very important MS. was discovered by Dr Lehmann, in Guatemala. It is the MS. of Father Francisco Ximenez, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y de Guatemala, in three big volumes in folio, which contain the famous Spanish translation of the Quiché myths or the “Popol-Vuh.” The MS. was bought at the expense of the duke of Loubat, who decided to present it, after the death of Dr Lehmann, to the Royal Library at Berlin.
