Science: The Aztecs Revisited

> To honor the spring god Xipe, Aztec priests flayed human beings and clad themselves in the tattered hides. This symbolized the new vegetation in which the earth clothes itself.

> To honor the fire god Huehueteotl, captives were tossed into pits of coals to sizzle while the black-clad priests danced. Just before they died they were fished up with hooks. Their chests were sliced open with sharp stone knives and their hearts wrenched with practiced skill from their blistered bodies.

> When warfare netted too few victims, Aztec tribes arranged a ceremonial combat, called the War of Flowers. No one was killed in the battle, but prisoners were used for human sacrifices.

> As many as 20,000 captives were sacrificed at one time in the Aztec metropolis. Victims’ flesh was sometimes eaten “in the belief that the eater can absorb the virtues of the eaten.”

These are among the cheerful points of Aztec history mustered by Archeologist George Clapp Vaillant of the American Museum of Natural History in his new book Aztecs of Mexico (Doubleday Doran; $4). Assembling the wealth of new historical evidence dug up since William Hickling Prescott finished his great Conquest of Mexico in 1843, it will muffle the sighs which four generations have sighed over “the tragic destruction of a great culture by lustful Spanish barbarians.”

Disillusion came quickly to the Spaniards themselves. At the sight of the white Aztec metropolis and its great temples amid blue lakes, green slopes and high peaks, a roughhewn, hard-bitten soldier of Cortez’ army in 1519 cried, “It is like the enchantments they tell of in the Legend of Amadis! Are not the things we see a dream?” But soon he smelled the sickening stockyard stench which was wafted from the gorgeous temples, saw thousands of skulls threaded on poles in the public squares.

The Aztecs were very unlike the Incas of Peru. “The Andean peoples, to generalize broadly, concentrated on the material technique of supporting life,” says Vaillant, “the Middle American peoples [i.e., Mayas and Aztecs] on spiritual, or more accurately, supernatural methods.” Symbols of Inca culture were their vast aqueducts and irrigation systems. Symbols of Aztec culture were their mighty pyramidal temples.

The Inca Empire was a “benevolent, monolithic state, unique in American annals as the only governmental system which combined territorial expansion with the amalgamation of conquered peoples into a social whole.” The Aztecs only seemed to form an Empire. They “lived in independent tribal or civic groups and created a religious art and architecture without rival in the Americas.”

In Aztec religion there was no ethical concept—its heaven, like the Greek Hades, was devoid of moral significance. Aztec theology held that in bygone eras mankind had been successively wiped out by jaguars, by hurricanes, by fiery volcanic rains. The Aztecs in 1519 believed that their world would in time end amid horrendous earthquakes controlled by the Sun God. So with a relentless if grisly logic, they propitiated the deities at all costs, offering up mankind’s most precious possession, its own lifeblood.

The conquering Spaniards did not blood-bathe the heathen Mexicans as the Inquisition destroyed heretics in Spain. Instead, Crown & Church at first tried to make good Christians and Spanish citizens out of them. Twenty of the 190 coats-of-arms granted during the conquest of Mexico and South America were given to Indians, and Spaniards often married Indian “princesses” under the delusion that the Aztec nobility, like that of Europe, was hereditary (actually it was earned). As great a blow to the Aztecs as the Spanish conquest was the English victory over the Armada. Mexican communication with the Crown & Church was thereby weakened, and the greedy, uncontrolled colonists only after 1588 began enslaving the Aztecs.