Aztecs: An Interpretation, Inga Clendinnen (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
When Hernán Cortés landed in the New World, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest cities anywhere on earth. It had more than twice the population of Seville, and was (as my grade school history textbooks always nervously assured me) cleaner, more orderly, and more magnificent than any contemporaneous European city. Its ochre towers and pyramids rose like a dream from the shimmering waters of Lake Texcoco. Unlike the organic maze of alleyways that characterized most Spanish cities, Tenochtitlan’s public gardens and temple districts and grand processional ways were a product of the sort of high modernist urban planning that Europe wouldn’t really see until Haussmann’s Paris in the 19th century. The walls of the city shone with lime and were decorated with paintings, so it glimmered like a bauble in the Mexican sun. The soldiers who followed Cortés on the one hand described it as so ethereal it seemed the three causeways joining it to the mainland were anchors without which it might float away, but on the other hand were overawed by the towering height and hallucinatory bulk of the Great Pyramid topped with its twin temples to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc.
In addition to being an architectural miracle, the city and the empire which fed it were also an economic and a social miracle. The Valley of Mexico has a dangerously irregular growing season, lacks crucial minerals, and is frequently subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, drought, and destructive floods. Despite such circumstances, hostile to any sort of economic surplus or capital accumulation, the Aztecs (or more properly, as they called themselves, the ‘Mexica’) managed to create and maintain a complex social order which astonished the Spaniards with its state-run economic guilds, fine gradations of social hierarchy, and carefully mannered etiquette. The questions people usually ask given all of this are, “How did the Spaniards win? And how did they win so quickly and decisively?” I understand the allure of these questions, and why they have captured the imaginations of generations of historians and anthropologists. They are reasonable questions. But after reading Inga Clendinnen’s book I find I no longer have any interest in these questions, because all of my thought is bent towards another one: “Why didn’t God destroy the Aztecs sooner?”
In fairness, He did destroy them pretty quickly. The ancestors of the Mexica wandered into the fertile basin that was to become their empire sometime in the late 1200s or early 1300s. They found it already settled with a mosaic of mostly Nahuatl-speaking city-states, and spent a few decades as mercenaries or tributaries for various stronger powers. One of those petty wars went badly, and they finally settled down as bedraggled refugees on the muck-covered islands that were to be the site of their future glory. Within a hundred years they were the most powerful city in the valley. Fifty years after that they were the unquestioned hegemon and begin to launch wars of imperial expansion towards the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Another fifty years of imperial glory, and then they were destroyed utterly. Or as Clendinnen puts it, “a man whose grandfather had fought as a hireling in another city’s wars in the Mexica’s early days in the valley would himself have seen the glory of their achieved empire, and his son watched its destruction.”
None of this would have come as a surprise to the Mexica.1 Their entire cosmology revolved around the absolute precarity of the world, and they believed that all earthly things were balanced on a knife’s edge between ravenous abyssal powers on one side and the emptiness of the void on the other. Every fifty-two years the entire nation waited breathlessly at the ceremony of the New Fire to see whether the world would continue or not. On a lonely hill outside of the city, senior priests feverishly worked a hand drill upon the naked breast of a bound captive. If the gods sent fire, it meant the world was saved, and the victim’s chest was immediately torn open so that the flame could be fed with his heart and flesh, bubbling and growing within the chest cavity to the relieved cheers of the populace before being carried to the major temples of the city. Everybody knew that if the fire did not come, the world would slip into nothingness and stop existing. Before we are tempted to roll our eyes at this and ask how suspenseful it really could have been, remember that they only got to do it three or four times between the foundation of their empire and its extinction.
That empire was not gentle. Few empires are, but even by the sad standards of human history, the Mexica were extreme. I’m not speaking here about their legendarily creative and inventive ways of humiliating subject peoples,2 I’m speaking about the human sacrifices. No, these were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe.3 If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it. The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:
The killings were not remote top-of-the pyramid affairs. If only high priests and rulers killed, they carried out most of their butchers’ work en plein air, and not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighborhood temples and on the streets. The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots; human thighbones, scraped and dried, were set up in the courtyards of households — and all this among a people notable for a precisely ordered polity, a grave formality of manner, and a developed regard for beauty.
The scale of it boggles the mind. The Mexica record with pride a single festal occasion on which over twenty thousand victims were sacrificed, the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as four lines of manacled slaves trudged along the great processional ways towards their doom. It was the job of special priests to greet the captives as they entered the city and to explain in detail the honor that was to await them. And it was always human beings. Many primitive cultures have practiced forms of animal sacrifice. The Mexica were neither primitive, nor interested in animals. There was also no “othering” at work here. The Mexica knew that they were killing people who thought and felt and dreamed and loved as they did. Indeed, that was the entire point of it. They constructed an efficient and well-run machine that had as its sole purpose delivering living, breathing, conscious and informed human beings to the killing-stone or the furnace. A whole battery of sophisticated psychological techniques were employed to ensure the compliance of the victims to the end.4 Yes, the Spaniards lacked the vocabulary to describe it, but we who live in the aftermath of the twentieth century do not.
Clendinnen writes: “It is the combination of violence with apparent impersonality, the bureaucratic calculation of these elaborated Mexica brutalities, together with their habituated and apparently casual incorporation into the world of the everyday, which chills.” And it’s obvious that she’s thinking of the Holocaust. Indeed, of all the twentieth-century genocides that one still holds a special horror because its perpetrators were not uneducated peasants and yokels but mannered men with a taste for Beethoven and Brahms. Reading Clendinnen’s descriptions of the Mexica — their beautiful art, their subtle religious debates, their gleaming city — gives one much the same feeling. Indeed, Clendinnen herself is simultaneously won over by their charms and also a little bit horrified at her own response. She writes like one of those women who fall in love with serial killers. And come to think of it, the Mexica are a little bit like a serial killer in societal form, with the full panoply of Dark Triad personality characteristics on display: witty, charming, charismatic, sadistic, utterly devoid of empathy. They are so far out of distribution, I had no idea a culture like this could exist. How did they get this way?
There’s a cliché phrase beloved of twentieth century American conservatives: “Ideas have consequences.”5 For the most part, this blog has emphasized the opposite. At times we’ve taken an almost quasi-Marxist tone when unpacking the ways in which material conditions and technological constraints create the deep substrate of social dark matter that shapes your activities, your preferences, and your very self-conception in ways you cannot see. Of course, this is not a one-directional causal chain, and this is what Marx got wrong. Culture and belief are themselves a form of technology that can loop back and create material conditions, and real social history is driven by the complex interplay between the two. And yet that phrase, “ideas have consequences,” it haunts me now. I don’t think I realized just how dark its implications were until I read about the Mexica.
Aztec cosmology, philosophy, and religion are a type of cosmic horror avant la lettre. If you’re unfamiliar with cosmic horror, it’s a genre of speculative fiction that features humanity as an utterly insignificant speck within a cold and uncaring universe filled with inconceivably powerful and inscrutable entities. These godlike beings have as much concern for mankind and all of its works as you do for an amoeba living on an anthill that you accidentally kick over. The genre mixes a healthy dose of existential dread into all of its imaginings — everything we know and care about is like the film of a soap bubble that could pop at any moment, or worse, could become the plaything of something infinitely old and infinitely cruel.
Most people think the genre was codified by Howard Phillips Lovecraft in the early twentieth century, but they’re wrong: it was codified by the Mexica in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. We’ve already covered the Mexica belief that the universe might wink out of existence at any moment.6 When it came to the gods, some of them were actively malevolent (and much ritual action went into trying to maintain the frail membrane between our world and theirs), but most of them were just casually and inadvertently destructive — especially the ones associated with natural forces. They went about their business with as much mind for human affairs as human beings have for flies, and in doing so would cause enormous upheavals and disasters as a matter of course.
If a god is rampaging through your backyard and about to destroy the solar system, you may wish to redirect it. The problem was it was astonishingly hard to get the attention of these gods…but there were ways… Imagine being an ant and trying to get a person’s attention. It would be hard, unless you put on the most magnificent and over-the-top ant spectacle ever. And it turned out that the gods were especially sensitive to fear and pain, hence the daily offerings of blood made by every adult Mexica, and hence the grotesque self-mutilations performed on holy festival days:
After the invocation of the god and the offering of incense, the priests had their tongues pierced by obsidian blades, and then drew through the slit a sequence of rods of wood, varying in thickness, we are told, from a thumb to ‘the space one can encircle with the thumb and forefinger’. Senior priests were committed to forcing four hundred and five rods through their tongues, and the more junior two hundred. This exercise initiated an eighty-day fast, with the forcing of the rods through the tongue repeated every twenty days. (It is painful to imagine that deliberate breaking-open of the barely healed flesh.) For the second eighty-day fast it was the turn of the common people, who imitated the priestly sacrifice at a less heroic level, being content to draw through their tongues ‘little rods as thick as duck’s quill’… There were other even more strenuous exercises, as, for example, the slitting of the penis and the passing through the slit of a rope some fathoms long…
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