Introduction
art and craftsmanship, which, in the days of the later Aztec "Empire," were sent to Mexico in the form of tribute from Puebla and Vera Cruz, may be reckoned among the principal treasures of the capital.
The culture of the Valley of Mexico, as the Spanish Conquistadores found it, was therefore obviously complex. Here, successive waves of nomads had come in contact with a form of civilisation higher than their own, and had absorbed it according to their capacity, adopting a settled form of life, and devoting themselves to agriculture and the practice of arts and crafts. But they did more than receive, they modified, interpreted, and imposed. To take an instance from the Aztec alone; like most Nahuatl tribes, they brought with them a tribal god, Huitzilopotchli, who was regarded as their personal leader, a deity who was, at any rate originally, a star-god (though later he became associated with the sun), a god of hunting and war. When they settled in the Valley, and turned to agriculture and craftsmanship, they adopted whole-heartedly the worship of Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, the two gods of the Valley-dwellers who presided respectively over these departments of life. I mention two only of the local deities who held a place in the Aztec pantheon, but there were very many more, and their number tended to increase as the Aztec grew in power and came into contact with tribes outside the alley. The Aztec, in fact, showed a remarkable tolerance and catholicity in religious matters, and if they insisted upon the paramountcy of their own tribal god, Huitzilopochtli, it is at least significant that, when the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan was built, the shrine of Tlaloc, the old fertility-god of the Valley, shared the summit with that of the tribal god of the conquerors. A detailed analysis of the component elements of Mexican culture as found by the Spaniards is far beyond the scope of a mere introduction, but a very illuminating illustration is afforded by funerary rites. There were two methods practised in the disposal of the dead—inhumation and cremation. The method depended upon the cause of death. Men killed in battle or on the stone of sacrifice (in the Aztec mind there was no distinction, either was the fitting death of a warrior) were cremated. Men drowned, or dying of dropsical affections, were buried. Prescott knew that these two methods existed, but did not understand their true significance. The souls of the cremated were supposed to be translated to the Paradise of the Sun, with whom, in the days of Aztec domination, Huitzilopochtli was identified. The
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