Feeding Tezcatlipoca

Tenochtitlan was the Queen of Meso-America.

Tenochtitlan was home to one hundred thousand souls.
It was a city of canals and gardens.

Of temples and palaces.

It was, no doubt, a brightly coloured city, where pretty girls danced joyfully in the sun hoping to catch the eye of a handsome warrior.
Where craftsman plied their trade, creating fine gold ornaments, exquisitely carved, artifacts which bedazzled in their opulent beauty.

They played ball games, did the Aztecs.

And their fields were rich with crops, the people were well fed, the people of this Queen of cities, the centre of a culture that stretched back thousands of years, the latest inheritors of a long line of states and empires that had risen and fallen in this part of the Americas where the possibilities of plentiful sedentary life had made possible a blooming of knowledge and the ability to pass that knowledge on.

It was amongst the greatest cities of the world. It was bigger than Rome, bigger than Venice, it dwarfed London. Only Constantinople amongst the cities of Europe could claim to be its equal.

Its mathematicians could calculate to the day the finer details of this star's 22,000 year rotation period amongst the other stars. And they knew of Zero long before such a curious nothing number was used by European number crunchers.

They had not the wheel and unthinking Europeans smile and say 'They weren't that smart then'.

But what use is a wheel without tractable ungulates to pull your carts?

The Aztec civilisation was a mirror culture, born in isolation, a parallel evolution. Their ancestors had discovered how to weave clothes, build in stone, make swords, worship Gods, all independently of their counterparts on the other side of the vast ocean.

So much that was different, yet so much the same.

And yet.

Underneath it all lay a darkness.
A dark perversion of human thought beyond our comprehension. Beyond our comprehension that a human culture that could build such a civilisation should have had as it's central tenet such a warped perspective on human life.

We judge the conquistadors for their atrocities. But maybe we should see things from their angle.
Because Aztec culture was what they came to first. Aztec religion.
Imagine you were shown what Cortes was shown. And imagine you believed firmly in one God and one message.
How could you think otherwise than that you were dealing with a people so thoroughly seduced by demons that there was no reasoning with them.

And would that not colour your perspective on every native people you encountered?

Imagine you are Cortes, being led through the streets of Tenochtitlan, a guest of honour, flowers garland your neck, the strangers from over the seas, come see, Quetzalcotl returned, come see how we have kept your house.

You mount the steps, the excitement is palpable. The temple priests make way...

And there it is.



Three hundred human hearts, the blood still trickling to the floor. Three hundred human hearts.
And they're proud. Proud of it. Proud of what they are showing you.
Three hundred human hearts.

Because to them, Tenochtitlan flourishes because the Aztecs feed their Gods.

No wonder Cortes decided that The Devil ruled these lands. The people of the New World, were in thrall to demons. They must be freed.

I guess it starts when life is still hard. Gods are a bit like tribal chiefs, they don't gather their food, someone else must do it for them. And there is a hierarchy in nature. Beasts eat plants. People eat plants too, but the beasts which eat plants are better. Gods eat beasts- and sometimes sacrificing a beast to the God is good enough, but really, the people that eat the beasts, that's what Gods like to eat most of all.

The people who give him people, not beasts, they're the ones he'll look after.

Our ancestors did it. But for one reason or another they stopped. They stopped at some point before they started building Thebes and Memphis, Nineveh and Babylon, Athens and Rome.

For some reason the people of Meso-America did not. For some reason, the more they learned, the more they thought their new knowledge was a reward for how well they fed their Gods. Keeping the Gods fed in style became a matter of pride in their cultures.

The more powerful and developed their cities became, the more human hearts adorned their temples.

In 1487 the Aztecs built a temple that was consecrated with ten thousand human hearts...

Quetzalcotl, Tezcatlipoca and Tlaloc were hungry Gods indeed. But the Gods that gave the Aztecs Tenochtitlan deserved to feast perpetually, surely?

The War of Flowers...

That's what they called it.

The peace of the Aztec civilisiation meant that there were no prisoners of war to give to the Gods.
So the War of Flowers was brought in. Two towns would organise a battle, a bit like a football match. A spectator event.
A bit like a battle, fought like a battle. Except it was a battle fought in peace between people who were not enemies.

The losing side was sacrificed.

Because there had to be a constant supply of human hearts. When the blood stopped pumping, the heart was considered 'eaten'.

These were rational people. They lived in a society capable of supporting an infrastructure that could serve a city of a hundred thousand people. In those days, even the British Isles couldn't manage that.

Yet they believed they had to feed their Gods human hearts on a daily basis.

And no qualm of conscience ever interfered with this cheerful slaughter.

And outside those bloody temples craftsmen carved their intricate jewelery and maidens in fine clothes sat in the sun, playing games.

And we wonder how the Germans turned a blind eye to the holocaust?

We are animals and for all we kid ourselves that we're good creatures by nature, we're not.

It is possible to build human culture on the most monstrous concepts imaginable. And it is possible for people to take monstrous concepts for granted and not see anything wrong with them at all- if everyone around them is doing so too. We're logical beings, true, but Aztec culture proves that simply because you push an idea to its limits doesn't mean the idea was right to begin with. I dare say the Aztecs would claim tradition and 'Well it may not seem fair, but it's the only way it works. Don't feed the Gods and no crops will grow. And then we'll starve.'



I wonder will our descendants look back on us in the same way.

How many bleeding hearts does it take to satisfy the feeding frenzy of our Gods of today?