1876.] Bajendralala Mitra— On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. 85 



tor. He was depicted as a handsome man, endowed with perpetual youth. 

 A year before the intended sacrifice, a captive, distinguished for his personal 

 beauty, and without a blemish on his body, was selected to represent this 

 deity. Certain tutors took charge of him, and instructed him how to 

 perform his new part with becoming grace and dignity. He was arrayed 

 in a splendid dress, regaled with incense, and with a profusion of sweet- 

 scented flowers, of which the ancient Mexicans were as fond as their de- 

 scendants at the present day. When he went abroad, he was attended by 

 a train of the royal pages, and, as he halted in the streets to play some 

 favourite melody, the crowd prostrated themselves before him, and did him 

 homage as the representative of their good deity. In this way he led an 

 easy, luxurious life, till within a month of his sacrifice. Four beautiful 

 girls, bearing the names of the principal goddesses, were then selected to 

 share the honours of his bed ; and with them he continued to live in idle 

 dalliance, feasted at the banquets of the principal nobles, who paid him all 

 the honours of a divinity. 



" At length the fatal day of sacrifice arrived. The term of his short- 

 lived glories was at an end. He was stripped of his gaudy apparel, and bade 

 adieu to the fair partners of his revelries. One of the royal barges trans- 

 ported him across the lake to a temple which rose on its margin, about a 

 league from the city. Hither the inhabitants of the capital flocked, to wit- 

 ness the consummation of the ceremony. As the sad procession wound up 

 the sides of the pyramid, the unhappy victim threw away his gay chaplets 

 of flowers, and broke in pieces the musical instruments with which he had 

 solaced the hours of captivity. On the summit he was received by six 

 priests, whose long and matted locks, flowed disorderly over their sable robes, 

 covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import. They led him to the 

 sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with its upper surface somewhat con- 

 vex. On this the prisoner was stretched. Five priests secured his head and 

 his limbs : while the sixth, clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of his bloody 

 office, dexterously- opened the breast of the wretched victim with a sharp 

 razor of itztli, a volcanic substance hard as flint, — and, inserting his hand 

 in the wound, tore out the palpitating heart. The minister of death, first 

 holding this up towards the sun, an object of worship throughout Anahac, 

 cast it at the feet of the deity to whom the temple was devoted, while the 

 multitudes below prostrated themselves in humble adoration. The tragic 

 story of this prisoner was expounded by the priests as the type of human 

 destiny, which, brilliant in its commencement, too often closes in sorrow 

 and disaster."* 



Nor did the Aztecs rest satisfied with this offering to their gods. " The 

 most loathsome part of the story, the manner in which the body of the 



* Conquest of Mexico, I, pp. 68ff. 



J 



