Aztec religion and mythology
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The main deity in the Mexican religion was their sun god and war
god, Huitzilopochtli. He directed the Mexicans to found a city on
the site where they would see an eagle, devouring (Not all
chronicles agree on what was devouring, one mention it was a
precious bird, and while Father Duran indicate it was a snake, this
is not mentioned in any prehispanic source) perched on a fruit
bearing nopal cactus. According to legend, Huitzilpochtli had to
kill his nephew, Cópil, and threw his heart on the lake. But, since
Cópil was his relative, Huitzilpochtli decided to honor him, and
caused cactus to grow over Cópil´s heart which became a sacred
place. Legend has it that this is the site on which the Mexicans
built their capital city of Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan was built on
an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco where modern-day Mexico City
is located. This legendary vision is pictured on the Coat of Arms of
Mexico. |
According to their own history, when the Mexicans arrived in the
Anahuac valley around Lake Texcoco, they were considered by the
other groups as the least civilized of all. The Mexicans decided to
learn, and they took all they could from other peoples, especially
from the ancient Toltec (whom they seem to have partially confused
with the more ancient civilization of Teotihuacan). To the Mexicans,
the Toltecs were the originators of all culture; "Toltecayotl" was a
synonym for culture. Mexican legends identify the Toltecs and the
cult of Quetzalcoatl with the mythical city of Tollan, which they
also identified with the more ancient Teotihuacan.
In the process, they adopted most of the Toltec/Nahua (code)
pantheon, but they also made significant changes in their religion.
As the Mexican rose in power, they adopted the Nahua gods at equal
status to their own. For instance, Tlaloc was the rain god of all
the Nahuatl-speaking peoples. They put their local god
Huitzilopochtli at the same level of the ancient nahual god, and
also replacing the Nahua Sun god with their own. Thus duality Tlaloc/Huitzilopochtli
represents the duality of water and fire, as evidenced by the twin
pyramids uncovered near the Zocalo in Mexico City in the late 1970s,
and it reminds us of the warrior ideals of the Aztec: the aztec
glyph of war is "burning water".
Another significant Mexican deity was the earth mother goddess
Tonantzin. It was her shrine in the northern section of today's
Mexico City which was later transformed into the Shrine of Our Lady
of Guadalupe, a central icon in Mexican Catholic belief, and dances
of pre-Hispanic origins are still performed there to this day. This
was an incarnation of Coatlicoe, the goddess of the snake skirt and
mother of Huitzilopochtli.
The Nahua concept of god is somehow different from the European
concept. It would be better to call them spirits, so most scholars
prefer to translate the word "teotl" as "lord" instead of "god".
Those entities, mixed their attributes with others. Since they had
no dogmas, their religion was constantly evolving.
Human sacrifice
For most people today, and for the European Christians who first met
the Aztecs, human sacrifice was and is the most striking feature of
Aztec civilization.
Human sacrifice was practiced throughout the Aztec empire. One
important place where evidence of human sacrifices has been found is
at Tenochititlan, the main Aztec city buried under today’s Mexico
City. The excavation of the offerings in the main temple has
provided some insight in the process, but the dozens of remains
excavated are far short of the thousands of sacrifices recorded in
popular accounts.
The antecedents of human sacrifice in the Aztec culture
For millennia, the practice of human sacrifice was widespread in
Mesoamerican and South American cultures. It was a theme in the
Olmec religion, which thrived between 1200 BC and 400 BC. Later the
Maya also made human sacrifices, but the Aztecs practiced it on a
particularly large scale.
Assessment of the practice of human sacrificeIn the book of the "anonymous informants" of Sahagun, an Aztec
defends the practice of human sacrifice, asserting that it was not
much different from the European way of waging warfare : Europeans
killed the warriors in battle, Aztecs killed the warriors after the
battle.
While this practice may seem barbaric by modern standards, accounts
by the Tlaxcalteca, the main enemy of the Aztecs, show that at least
some of them considered it an honor to be sacrificed. In one legend,
the warrior Tlahuicole was freed by the Aztecs but eventually
returned of his own volition to die in ritual sacrifice. This
penchant for human sacrifice proved to be the undoing of the Aztecs.
Their need for a continual supply of victims drove many neighboring
cities to the side of the Spaniards.Aztec religion in contemporary societyIn recent decades, a number of groups are trying to revive the Aztec
religion. In the process, these groups are mixing concepts from
European and Indian esoteric traditions, thus reinventing the
prehispanic religions. Groups of them gather at the Aztec pyramids
every solstice, dressed in white, while "recharging" their
"energy"). Many of these a groups completely deny the practices of
human sacrifice and anthropophagy. While the archeological evidence
unearthed to date do not support the huge numbers recorded in
popular accounts, the evidence does seem to indicate that they were
real, and can not be denied. |
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