THE LUSTER OF ANCIENT MEXICO 



17 



Human sacrifices were adopted by the 

 Aztecs early in the fourteenth century, 

 about 200 years before the Conquest. 

 Rare at first, they became more frequent 

 with the wider extent of their empire, 

 till at length almost every festival was 

 closed with this cruel abomination. These 

 religious ceremonials were generally ar- 

 ranged in such a manner as to afford a 

 type of the most prominent circumstances 

 in the character or history of the deity 

 who was the object of them. A single 

 example will suffice. 



PRISONERS IX THE ROLES 0E GODS 



One of their most important festivals 

 was that in honor of the god Tezcatli- 

 poca, whose rank was inferior only to 

 that of the Supreme Being. He was 

 called "the soul of the world," and sup- 

 posed to have been its creator. 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 rep- 

 resent 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 flow- 

 ers, of which the ancient Mexicans were 

 as fond as their descendants at the pres- 

 ent 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 favorite 

 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 

 be his companions, and with them he con- 

 tinued to live in idle dalliance, feasted at 

 the banquets of the principal nobles, who 

 paid him all the honors of a divinity. 



THE FATAE DAY 0E SACRIFICE 



At length the fatal day of sacrifice ar- 

 rived. The term of his short-lived glo- 

 ries 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 transported 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 witness the consummation of 

 the ceremony. As the sad procession 

 wound up the sides of the pyramid, the 

 unhappy victim threw away his gay chap- 

 lets 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 mys- 

 tic import. They led him to the sacri- 

 ficial stone, a huge block of jasper, with 

 its upper surface somewhat convex. 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 

 it sill — 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 toward the sun — an object of w T orship 

 throughout Anahuac — cast it at the feet 

 of the deity to whom the temple was de- 

 voted, while the multitudes below pros- 

 trated themselves in humble adoration. 

 The tragic story of this prisoner was ex- 

 pounded by the priests as the type of hu- 

 man destiny which, brilliant in its com- 

 mencement, too often closes in sorrow 

 and disaster. 



WOMEN AND CHILDREN OEEERED UP 



Such was the form of human sacrifice 

 usually practised by the Aztecs. It was 

 the same that often met the indignant 

 eyes of the Europeans in their progress 

 through the country, and from the dread- 

 ful doom of which they themselves were 

 not exempted. There were, indeed, some 

 occasions when preliminary tortures, of 

 the most exquisite kind — with which it is 

 unnecessary to shock the reader — were 

 inflicted, but they always terminated with 

 the bloody ceremony above described. It 

 should be remarked, however, that such 

 tortures were not the spontaneous sug- 



