CITY OF SACRIFICE: THE AZTEC EMPIRE AND THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE IN CIVILIZATION - DAVID CARRASCO

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The Aztec kick continues. I think I’mma read one more book on this topic, now that I’m all deep into this. Unlike THE FIFTH SUN this is not a history. Carrasco is not a historian, he’s a scholar of religion, a discipline I think of as more speculative and hermetic. I feel like I trust Townsend more, overall, since she’s taking a wider view of the nature of the contact between Europe and Mesoamerica. Townsend’s more critical of the various codexes and Spanish accounts that exist whereas Carrasco is more interested in analyzing them and creating theories of religion and space. For example, Carrasco treats as plausible the story about Montezuma mistaking Cortes for Quetzalcoatl, a piece of Spanish propaganda that I thought Townsend did a good job debunking. Nor does he get into the problems surrounding the term “Aztec”. But Carrasco isn’t interested in the “truth” of this encounter, insofar as literal facts are concerned, he’s project is to try to reconstruct the Aztec religious worldview and show us something about how cosmo-magical deposition can be read into the physical of a city. The whole thing was very interesting, I was a bit bored by talk of creating “magic circles” with movement around the city, this seemed connected to some larger Religious Studies debate that I’m fully on the outside of, but a few concepts really jumped out to me.  First, the whole heart-ripping thing, that lurid ceremony that occupies such a large chunk of people’s conceptions of the Aztecs, is fascinating to think of as a representative and symbolic of an empire doing almost the exact opposite of the empire I live in. What people think of as the Aztec Empire is more correctly understood as the triple-alliance of Mexico-Tenochtitlan , Texcoco and Tlacopan, who over a course of about 100 years before Spanish contact, expanded an Empire in what is now central Mexico that reached, through allies, and defeated enemies and subjugated populations,  to both coasts. What is interesting, and to Western understanding horrifying, is the obsession with not killing one’s enemies on the battlefield but rather capturing them in order to bring them to the exact center, both literally and mythologically (the temple is on the site of the vision of the Eagle eating the snake that remains on the Mexican flag), in order to use them in a series of ceremonies, culminating with their hearts being pulled out on top of the tallest man-made structure in the hemisphere. What I find fascinating is how much work and effort was put into this display of war and violence at the center of your social structure. Currently, I live as a citizen of what is to the current world what the Aztec triple-alliance was to central Mexico in the 15th century, namely the largest, most violent empire. What is interesting to me is the extent that America chooses not to center the violence being done at the frontier but rather to do the opposite, to push away and disengage from that violence as much as possible. Newspapers won’t show bloody carnage, during the Bush years one couldn’t even film the flag-draped coffins of service members. Osama wasn’t captured to be tried and killed under our laws and on our land, he was killed (on camera but we’ll never see it) and dumped in the ocean and erased. The violence isn’t here, it’s out there. We no longer need to demonstrate our empire’s strength, by stacking skulls in a massive, fearsome tzompantli, it’s taken as a given. Perhaps this very belief that war was sacred and the point was to use it as a tool to fulfill various religious and cultural obligations rather than a true, annihilating fight to the death that the Europeans were more familiar with that gave them (the Europeans) the advantage.

I would have liked to see more comparisons between the Mexica specific religious beliefs versus the beliefs of other groups in the area. My understanding is that these ethnic city-states each had a pantheon that partially overlapped with others. Tlaloc, for instance, seems to be a very old and widely worshipped figure. Was adding the war-god Huītzilōpōchtli a major turning point, since it seems to be a Mexica thing. Your neighbors taking up the war/human-sacrifice god as their patron deity must have been seen as a really bad sign. In fact, it seems telling that the Temple Mayor features 2 shrines on top, Huītzilōpōchtli to the south and Tlaloc to the north. Seeking to architecturally reinforce that this new hummingbird god was the equal of a deity that preexisted Aztec culture by at least 800 years.

The next Aztec book I’m trying to cop is about Tezcatlipoco, to me, the most confusing god in the Aztec pantheon. This book has an amazing chapter on his celebration, Toxcatl. This year long event requires selecting, from the war captives, the most beautiful, tall, articulate and perfect warrior. He lived as a in ixiptla in teteo (a person acting as the human embodiment of the god, they’re used for multiple gods and used in multiple ceremonies) for Tezcatlipoco. He learns high diction and to play the flute and goes around the city being showered in gifts and treated like a god for a year. He is given 4 wives, who are themselves in ixiptla in teteo for various female sexuality and fertility goddess. Finally, he travels to Chalco, walks up the pyramid of his own free-will, breaking a flute on each step before being sacrificed then flayed, is skin placed on next year's selection. That’s an amazing story. Where is the movie about that guy’s year? Maybe center it around the last pre-contact year, the man dies not knowing the entire world he’s giving his life to is about to be irreparably destroyed. This is also a good candidate for the books about Mexico City/Mexico (my list: Savage Detectives, Down and Delirious in Mexico City, The Story of My Teeth, Labyrinth of Solitude, History of the Conquest of New Span and one really great overview of Mexican History I read, really long, that now I can’t remember the name of). The relation between violence and religion and civilization is a dark corner to poke around in I’m glad Carrasco is making headway. 1521 Hearts offered to the fifth sun.