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bhaines's review against another edition
Interesting meta stuff about the difficulty of interpreting a culture from such a distance, and how you might approach it.
Very readable. Picture of Aztec culture, feasting and local communities, the importance of the warrior to everything, the priesthood, the relation to the sacred.
Some of the fun parts:
- all the gods are sick: xipe totec 'our lord the flayed one', tezcatlipoca 'the mirror's smoke'
- the flower wars, and general focus on war totally separate from what seem like practical goals, the importance of bringing back captives live in order to sacrifice, the taboo on helping people in your own army
- that aztec sacrifice differed in details and scale but wasn't unique in general. the last pawnee morning star sacrifice was in 1838.
- the importance of 'dependence' in human relations and displayed through feasting and in relations with gods, through theatrical suffering
- the identification with maize, so that flesh and maize are sometimes indistinguishable, that life is vegetable growth. blood debt owed to the earth goddess.
- 5 days outside of the calendar when pregnant women potentially turn into demons and end the world
- "Women were the favoured targets, the males surrounding them, and then, with a shout of 'Have a bag, lady', whacking them with the bags."
- gender relations that weren't equal, but also lacked a lot of the subservience / violence / fear of christian things
- if you're a good warrior you come back as a butterfly, women come back as evil spirits that turn children into animals
- artwork, lots of very permanent stone sculpture and very impermanent featherwork, icons, focus on juxtaposition, quincunx
- very strict requirements to be a priest (450 ~inch wide rods through the tongue every 20 days for 80 days, trials over many days of fasting with any error punished by beatings and expulsion)
- ixiptlas who were treated as gods, and given access to the palace before being sacrificed
- the first thing midwives said to babies ended with 'perhaps thou wilt merit death by the obsidian knife'.
Very readable. Picture of Aztec culture, feasting and local communities, the importance of the warrior to everything, the priesthood, the relation to the sacred.
Some of the fun parts:
- all the gods are sick: xipe totec 'our lord the flayed one', tezcatlipoca 'the mirror's smoke'
- the flower wars, and general focus on war totally separate from what seem like practical goals, the importance of bringing back captives live in order to sacrifice, the taboo on helping people in your own army
- that aztec sacrifice differed in details and scale but wasn't unique in general. the last pawnee morning star sacrifice was in 1838.
- the importance of 'dependence' in human relations and displayed through feasting and in relations with gods, through theatrical suffering
- the identification with maize, so that flesh and maize are sometimes indistinguishable, that life is vegetable growth. blood debt owed to the earth goddess.
- 5 days outside of the calendar when pregnant women potentially turn into demons and end the world
- "Women were the favoured targets, the males surrounding them, and then, with a shout of 'Have a bag, lady', whacking them with the bags."
- gender relations that weren't equal, but also lacked a lot of the subservience / violence / fear of christian things
- if you're a good warrior you come back as a butterfly, women come back as evil spirits that turn children into animals
- artwork, lots of very permanent stone sculpture and very impermanent featherwork, icons, focus on juxtaposition, quincunx
- very strict requirements to be a priest (450 ~inch wide rods through the tongue every 20 days for 80 days, trials over many days of fasting with any error punished by beatings and expulsion)
- ixiptlas who were treated as gods, and given access to the palace before being sacrificed
- the first thing midwives said to babies ended with 'perhaps thou wilt merit death by the obsidian knife'.
niecierpek's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
It’s an in depth , scholarly analysis of Aztec cosmology, culture and its rituals, gender roles and daily living. The study is very interesting, and judging by the number of citations in other works that I supplemented my reading with, definitive and influential, but I had to read it very slowly and with frequent breaks. Violence and torture seem to have permeated Aztec lives. Bloody rituals and inflicting torture on fellow human beings, which they raised to the level of macabre art and profound religious experience, is something I can take only in small doses.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Cannibalism, Death, and Torture
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