He was spread-eagled face-up on a low stone block. Four priests held his arms and legs. A fifth cradled his head. More often than not, as a sixth priest’s obsidian knife moved towards his breast, the Aztec sacrificial victim was peaceful, relaxed, resigned to his fate, aware that he would soon go straight to the paradise of the sun.
And the blade would open his chest with a sideways cut through the ribs and breastbone; and his heart would be wrenched out, held up to the sun, and placed in the “eagle dish,” made of wood or stone.
...
By the middle of the fifteenth century, human sacrifice had become the centerpiece of Aztec culture and religion in Central Mexico. In 1487, at the dedication of the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, (one of the four sons of the primordial couple), 20,000 captives were killed. The victims stood in four lines which stretched for two miles through the streets of Tenochtitlán, the capital city. The priests worked around the clock for four days until the deed was accomplished. And again, the majority of the victims went willingly. Such is the enduring power of religion and culture over centuries.
In the complex pre-Columbian mythology of Mexico, no god was held in higher esteem than the Sun, so essential for crops, for life. The Aztecs believed that the Sun and therefore the Universe owed its existence to a primordial self-sacrifice of the gods. They believed that man was created when Quetzalcoatl co-mingled his own blood with the bones he collected from the land of the dead.
The elaborate and familiar Aztec Calendar Stone is nothing more than a schema describing the relationship between gods and men in the performance of the rites essential to the well-being of the Universe. Blood offering was intrinsic to Aztec thought, both as a remembrance of the original acts of the Gods and, more practically, as continual nourishment for the Sun.
Both the victim and the captor participated willingly in this bizarre dance of death. Warriors in the Meso-American culture were raised with the idea that death in the service of the gods was noble and essential to the well-being of the society.
The Aztecs practised a ritualistic warfare known as "the flower war,” similar to the concept of coup in certain North American tribes. On the battlefield the vanquished submitted willingly, becoming part of a mystical kinship in which the blood-link was through ritual sacrifice instead of family.
For a year--a Sun Cycle--the victim was treated like a nobleman. He was revered as a Lord, as a living God. His hours were given over to music, to pleasure, to excellent food and drink. He was paraded through the city and the people paid him tribute, as befits the One Who Keeps the Sun Alive.
He was married to four young women, and when his time finally came, carrying the memory of his god-like year and with anticipation of his immortality-soon-to-be, he submitted, happily, to the flashing blade.
Feathered Serpent, Ruth Karen, Four Winds Press, New York, 1979.
Aztec Thought and Culture, Miquel León-Portilla, University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.
Everyday Life of the Aztecs, Warwick Bray, Dorset Press, New York, 1987.
Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, Miguel León-Portilla, University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.
On Mexico and the Aztecs:
An Aztec father advises his son
Bernardino de Sahagun
Human Sacrifice and the Aztecs
Malinche
Mictlan
Nahuatl
Ometeotl, beyond time and space
Popocatépetl
Quetzalcoatl
Talk like an Aztec
Teotihuacan
Tlazolteotl, the Filth Eater
What points its finger at the sky?
Xipe Totec
Below the Line