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Victims were tethered to the center and provided only with dummy weapons. Warriors fought them to the death. Both Aztecs and their enemies were sacrificed. For the Aztecs it was an honor. But sacrifice was a powerful tool for intimidating enemies. Rulers were expected to prove their worth by capturing live victims for sacrifice to the sun god.
And their blood then ritually makes the land fruitful. It fertilizes the land. So that in that way the blood of the slain will contribute towards the rebirth of vegetation in the rainy season and the flowers that go all with that. So the blood and flowers is a way of referring to this great cycle of life and the rhythm of human activities that unfolds within the changing seasons.
Looking at these bloody rituals from a present-day perspective, it’s difficult to understand the people who performed them and easy to condemn them as a brutal alien race. Perhaps from the context of their age, the Aztecs have been judged harshly. Ross Hassig has scrutinized the historical records.
But at the same time they were sacrificing people. Of course, we have the Inquisition going on in Spain in which people were being killed for heresy. We have criminals and political enemies, having their heads placed on stakes, on the tower of London. And so there’re, there’s plenty of barbarity at this time to go around for almost all people. It’s easier for people to see another group as being strange and different and look how quaint, look how bizarre, look how weird they are, rather than go through the actual difficult research of trying to make them explicable, trying to make them human and understandable on our own terms.
Making the Aztecs human and understandable is the challenge for David Carrasco.
Many of our descriptions of ancient societies are so simple. But in fact the Aztecs show us that human beings are complex. To take the simple notion that they are bloody people and show that they are both people after the blood and after the flower, is to bring us to a wonderful image of understanding and asking about the nature of complexity.
Aside from the violence, it seems, there was a much gentler side to Aztec life. An extraordinary love of beauty emerges in the most popular of their arts, poetry. Poets were loved and highly revered. One of the most famous was also a great architect of the empire.
It’s not true that we come to this earth to live. We come only to sleep, only to dream.
It’s an extremely beautiful poetry which essentially sings about the fleetingness of life, the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, the price we'll spend to be on Earth, the beauty of the things that’s around us, flowers, love, women and children. All these things are celebrated by the Aztecs and speak of the human spirit, which I think, is not only similar but superior to ours
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tether: v. （用绳或链）拴（牲口）
fertilize: v. 使肥沃
scrutinize: v. 细察；细阅；仔细审查
barbarity: n. 残暴的行为, 残忍
quaint: adj. 奇怪的
explicable: adj. 可解释的
gentler: adj. 温和的,优雅的
fleetingness: n. 短暂
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