City of Sacrifice The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization DAVID CARRAS CO / ' V Beacon Press BOSTON Religion/History In City of Sacrifice, David Carrasco confronts fiercely provocative que violence and civilization. He chronicles the fascinating history of Te: the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonsti religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a te gods. If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for 1 their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and I of city-states? Is civilization built on violence? Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the history of Mesoamerican city but also the inseparability of two passionate hum urbanization and religious engagement. "We know that power, whatever its origin—sacred, natural, ethnic, c or democratic—is an expression of violence. David Carrasco now de shattering, unsentimental truth: civilizations themselves are born and by violence." —Carlos Fuentes David Carrasco is a professor of history of religions at Princeton Un Author and editor of many books, he is editor in chief of The Oxfon of Mesoamerican Cultures. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Cover design: Elizabeth Elsas Imp 'IniversitätshidUüihekWien I Y OF «I em «ÍJ ®T1 Mi am m h Wwk £fwi iá/ rify JĚrm Jařm H M 1 g^r^S'^^ iT^^T W • : {V) H l % ICE IRE ÄND THE ROLE OF VIOLENT IN ClflLIZÄTION Davíd Carrasco "' \ l-i illi mi1 . provocative, timely, and eternal book." —Carlos Fuentes Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 1999 by David Carrasco All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 8765 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ansi/niso specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Text design by Elizabeth Elsas Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carrasco, David. City of sacrifice : the Aztec empire and the role of violence in civilization / David Carrasco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8070-4642-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-8070-4643-4 (pbk.) 1. Indians of Mexico—Rites and ceremonies. 2. Aztecs—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Human sacrifice—Mexico. 4. Human sacrifice—Central America. I. Title. F1219.3.H38 C28 1999 299'.78452—dc2i 99-23752 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO LUGENE ANN WHITLEY CONTENTS introduction Performing the City of Sacrifice i chapter i City as Symbol in Aztec Thought: Some Clues from the Codex Mendoza 15 chapter 2 Templo Mayor: The Aztec Vision of Place 49 chapter 3 TheNewFireCeremony and the Binding of the Years: Tenochtitlan's Fearful Symmetry 88 chapter 4 The Sacrifice of Tezcatlipoca: To Change Place 115 chapter 5 Give Me Some Skin: The Charisma of the Aztec Warrior 140 chapter 6 Cosmicjaws: We Eat the Gods and the GodsEatUs 164 chapter 7 The Sacrifice of Women: The Hearts of Plants and Makers of War Games 188 chapter 8 When Warriors Became Walls, When the Mountain of Water Crumbled 211 NOTES 225 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2J2 INDEX 274 Introduction Performing the City of Sacrifice Thus, they had captured five hundred men of Chalco. These were sent to Tenochtitlan and on the day after their arrival, by order of Tlacaelel and the king, they were immediately sacrificed to the god Huitzilopochtli. In this way the vow that had been sworn was fulfilled, and the temple was reddened with the blood of five hundred men. A fire sacrifice was ordained; this was the most terrible and horrendous sacrifice that can be imagined... A great bonfire was built in a large brazier placed on the floor of the temple. This was called "the divine hearth." Into this great mass of flames men were thrown alive. Before they expired, their hearts were torn out of their bodies and offered to the god. Fray Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain Jonathan Z. Smith said to me when he heard I was writing this book on sacred violence and the city, "Everyone really thinks religion is a marginal social force until you run into a human sacrifice and the matter is opened up again." This book intends to open up the matter of religion by focusing on two of the most vital expressions in human culture, the sacred city and ritual violence. I chose this combination because my encounters with sacred cities in Mesoamerica eventually forced me to confront the practice of ritual human sacrifice in the social world. Aztec settlements in particular were organized around ceremonial complexes, which served as theaters for many kinds of performances, including the ritual slaughter of humans and animals. Our understanding of the history of Mesoamerican religions becomes extraordinarily rich and problematic when we are confronted with pro-a;™;„„„„„<■„ „ť..;„i------„,—i.„r„.u;„i__,----------:„j „.,..;„ <-u„„,----- 2 CITY OP SACRIFICE complex, hierarchical ordering of social life that has been identified as urban. When we try to face up to the accounts of human sacrifice, our assumptions about human nature, social order, and the human imagination are shaken, and the issues of what religion is, does, and means are opened, like cuts in our scholarly position, and the discourse is lit up. These lights from sacred cities and violent acts, which are full of religious meanings, challenge our blind spots. I remember the day my academic deadpan about cities and sacrifice cracked into a tight grimace. I had just looked down into the offering cache at the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City where the skeletal remains of forty-two children lay as a messy remnant of a fifteenth-century, precious offering to the rain gods. The Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was giving me a tour of the site, which was under intense excavation, and said, pointing, "Here is something beautiful and profound in its terror." Peering down into the ritual receptacle where children's skulls and infants' bones lay strewn and tangled in what looked like a chaotic, even wild, arrangement, I could see greenstone beads near several mouths, flakes of blue pigment that had been sprinkled on the bodies, necklaces of greenstone, and several disks with appliquéd turquoise mosaics and turtle shell. I knew from my study of Aztec cosmology that this spot might be one of the entrances to Tlaloc's paradise, the rain god's aquatic afterlife. I felt a visceral response that relocated my attention from ideas to feelings, from my head to my stomach and heart, for I was a father of a young child and I wondered what possible creative hermeneutic turn I could spin onto this scene. When I stood up and gazed around the site with its giant grinning serpent heads, stone warriors leaning against stairways, stone skulls strewn around the site, and the monumental disk sculpture of a dismembered warrior goddess, it was evident that violence against humans was a profound human necessity and practice for the Aztecs in their capital city. The topic of ritual killing has been difficult to gain insight into. This has been especially so when ethno-historical descriptions present us with the density of Aztec violence in the various forms of human slaughter. I used to rationalize difficult questions about who was sacrificed by saying that "The majority of the victims were enemy INTRODU CTION 3 that women and children were also sacrificed in over a third of them. Faced with the ritually choreographed, publicly performed human sacrifices that transported enemy warriors for miles over difficult terrain into the capital; dismembered male and female bodies and hung skulls on monumental racks; painted the shrines, celebrants, and faces of gods with animal and human blood; slashed open the throats of infants; beheaded young women; and dressed teenagers in flayed human skins, I am stimulated to see that religious violence is a major motivating social force and to ask whether sacrifice is a central religious performance in the construction of social order and the authority of city-states, or at least these particular city-states. The Aztec pattern stimulates this general reflection on cities and aggression for two reasons: First, Mesoamerica was the site of one of the most profound social transformations in world history, the process known as primary urban generation. Only five or perhaps six other culture areas managed the evolution of social life from the world of villages to the urban landscape. Second, as we shall see, a major strand of Mesoamerican mythology is associated with this evolution, driven by sacrifice, even monumental sacrifice. My asking about the general symbiosis of ritual violence and the city is reflected, in part, in these Mesoamerican patterns. Sacrifice was a way of life for the Aztecs, enmeshed in their temple and marketplace practices, part of their ideology of the redistribution of riches and their beliefs about how the cosmos was ordered, and an instrument of social integration that elevated the body of the ruler and the potency of the gods. Ritual slaughter within the ceremonial precincts of Aztec life was the instrument, in part, for educating adolescents about their social future, communicating with the many gods, transmitting cosmological convictions, as well as directing social change in the form of imperial expansion. In my mind, this growing awareness led to an alteration of René Girard's claim that "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred"1 to the possibility that in Tenochtitlan the public heart and soul of the sacred was the ritual killing of human beings who were first turned into gods! My sense of the power and significance of religious violence changed that day when Matos showed me the children's remains, and this book 4 CITY OF SACRIFICE sacred landscapes brings became clearer to me over the last decade while lecturing on Aztec and Maya religions in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Japan. After I lectured at Stanford University on Aztec sacrificial practices inspired by myths of cosmic creation, a • graduate student nearly accosted me physically for my use of the term cosmos, which in his words means "order, peace, and harmony in the Greek sense and has nothing to. do with your lecture." He then bumped me as he brushed past me, exclaiming, "Thanks for giving the Casper Weinberger lecture in the history of religions." This awareness of the difficulties that religious violence presents to the public and to the academy continued when my essay "The Templo Mayor: The Aztec Vision of Place" was refused for publication by Parabola magazine because I failed, and then later refused, to insert a disclaimer about the theme of human sacrifice. Published elsewhere, the article won a scholarly writing award, but the message had been sent—religious violence is a very difficult topic for scholars to face, especially for those interested in religion. But the topic has a curious fascination for both the scholarly and lay public. I noticed that audiences were larger when the topic of sacred violence was advertised. Somewhat later, responding to pressures from audiences in post-lecture discussions, I did insert a disclaimer at the beginning of a lecture on ritual violence: that I was not defending this brutal-practice, that it was difficult to turn to these texts day after day, and that seeing the remains of sacrificed children while working at Aztec shrines was particularly challenging in understanding the nature of the ancient city-state. But these comments brought reactions from the other side. Didn't I realize how sacrificial the Christians were; how brutal the Inquisition was; how hungry for martyrdom the Muslims are; how militant the State of Israel is; how devastating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were; how widespread, in military terms, human sacrifice is? I realized that ritual violence troubles, fascinates, and stimulates people to think about their own cultural traditions and religious practices. It also became clear that examples provided by Mesoamerican cultures could help scholars examine the relationships between cities and violence in world religions. Understanding the relationships between sacred spaces, urban set-tines, and ritual killincr is pcnpri-illir imi-K-x-f-int- ,,rVi«»»i ma ,.^w»mu„- INTRODUCTION 5 of violence that take place within or in primary relation to symbolic sites, sacred shrines, and temples. Troubling events, such as the suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, gunshots at the "wailing Wall, gassings in Tokyo, the massacre of people in the Oklahoma bombing, Balkan deportations, rapes and murders within cities or in relation to urban populations, and numerous acts of fanatic violence in sanctified places like churches in El Salvador, criticize our comfortable claims about how sacred places and stories and theologies of hope and prophetic discourses operate at the heart of religious traditions to invigorate and heal human cultures. Ritual violence, tinged and often pulsating with religious cosmologies, national theologies, and cultural mythologies, fill our media representations every day.2 This book is based on essays I wrote over the last two decades, representing, in part, linked studies in the evolution of my thought about the history and imagination of religion. It is organized by three major concerns that should be on the mind of any student of religion and culture: (i) the symbolism of human settlement, (2) the integrative/ destructive powers of ritual performances of violence, and (3) the creative hermeneutics of the history of religions. These concerns reflect my interest in developing a dynamic model of religious performance organized by attention to center and periphery relations. I approach the dynamics of centers and peripheries through reflections on two types of orientatio—meaning the "fundamental process of situating human life in the world. Fixing the human place in existence in a significant way is a religious act when it orients a human being toward the sacred."3 In this book, I extend the meaning of orientatio to include both the discovery and organization of central place and the sacrificial performances that have the power to reorganize, redistribute, and regenerate the central place as a culturally and politically meaningful environment. A great deal of scholarship in the history of religions has been concerned with understanding how myths, hiero-phanies, sacred spaces, and rites help human beings experience and achieve orientation.4 But not enough attention has been given to the supreme sacred places and sites of total social orientation that I am referring to as cities. The traditional cities of Mesoamerica were the sites of permanently established social hierarchies whose asymmetries 6 CITY OF SACRIFICE religions to realize what urban ecologists have made clear, namely, that the urban way of life was not a system contained within the city's walls, or formal boundaries, but rather it spread far beyond the limitations of the built form. Tenochtitlan in particular was a monumental and socially stratified way of life, crystallized in the great ceremonial center but containing organizational capacities extending way beyond its physical limits. As Paul Wheatley has cogently noted in his comparative analysis of primary urban generation, ceremonial cities were the instruments for the creation of "effective space"—that is, the integration of political, social, economic, and symbolic spaces into coherent social worlds. In my view, the urban nature of Tenochtitlan is not to be contrasted with the social world of the countryside but with the pre-urban society that existed over two thousand years earlier and continued to exist on the margins of urbanized social systems. The overall orientation of Tenochtitlan and other Mesoameri-can capitals was achieved through the city's primary export: control. The capacity to control peoples, goods, relationships, meanings, and human lives was expressed in the centripetal and centrifugal powers of the capitals. In this way, the elites maintained the upper hand in dealing with the diversities and challenges of the peripheral societies and kingdoms. Most important for understanding the orientation achieved in the Aztec capital is the acknowledgment of the various cosmo-magical formulas made of traditional symbolic, cosmological frameworks imprinted in the physiognomies of capital cities. As my exposure to the history and morphology of Mesoamerican cities increased, I was continually confronted with the ways ritual violence in the forms of warfare and especially human sacrifice functioned to establish, maintain, and renew widespread social and symbolic orientatio for the capitals and the way of life for their inhabitants. The archaeological evidence, as well as the extensive descriptions of ritual killing, always coordinated in the Aztec city, or altepetl,5 by a closely watched calendar system, indicates that the dynamic daily life of Tenochtitlan was reconstructed as a religiously meaningful landscape, in part, through the sacrifice of teotl ixipitlas, or deity impersonators, in public ceremonial gatherings. These human sacrifices,6 always performed in religious precincts, had profound and detailed .. -I:..: _ .1............ 11 r. 1 * « i • r INTRODUCTION 7 increase in human sacrifices, became a way of managing, from within the sacred enclaves of the capital, the unstable social and symbolic dynamics between the imperial center and the allied and enemy periphery.7 At one level, the flux of political history, fortunes, and uncertainties was handled through the immense tribute system by which nearby and peripheral communities demonstrated their dependence upon and servitude to the capital by paying large quantities of goods on a regular basis, always threatened with the pain of human sacrifice or military attack. At another level, this management of center and periphery was symbolized in the ritual systems of debt payments in the form of human sacrifices to the gods and under the authority of the god kings. One important point for the reader to understand is that, according to the descriptions of these sacrifices, much more effort was put into dancing, singing, moving in procession, sometimes long-distance walking, and changing costumes than into the actual act of killing people. The act of ritual death, while centrally important, was not all that these ceremonies were about. A ceremonial landscape is marked and re-marked and is being brought to life at the same time a deity impersonator is being prepared for an ultimate transformation. The Aztec problem of symbolic and political orientation takes on two significant dimensions—orientation through the monumental city and orientation through ritual human sacrifice— and as we shall see in reviewing the mythological and historical record, often monumental human sacrifice. The present study cannot explore the full implications of these patterns of violence, and I plan to take up two troubling dimensions of this sacrificial society in a later study, namely, the cultivation of cruelty and the institutionalization of hatred, which, in part, animated Aztec warrior society. The cycles of rage, grief, and hatred that appear to motivate some of the exchanges between rival city-states are briefly explored in chapters 4 and 5, but much more work needs to be done with the primary sources in order to effectively elucidate emotional hatreds and political cruelties in Tenochtitlan. These dimensions of Mesoamerican history, when turned back on the history of theory about ritual sacrifice, constitutes something of a scandal in religious studies—namely, that all significant theories 8 CITY OF SACRIFICE pletely ignored the most thorough record of real, historical human sacrifice while favoring either distant reports of animal sacrifices or literary sacrifices from Western Classics!8 Why does the physical, pictorial, ethno-historical, and sometimes eyewitness evidence of actual ritual human slaughter provoke so little interest among the major theorists of ritual violence? How can each theory parade right on by the sacrifice of Tezcatlipoca, Spanish soldiers, and horses, and the dismemberment of teenage warriors, adolescent girls, and infant children while constructing general principles of interpretation about human aggression? More recently, Nancy Jay has written a justly celebrated work positing a feminist theory of human sacrifice that almost completely ignores the most vivid evidence available anywhere in the historical record for evidence of the patriarchal sacrifices she criticizes. I am forced to ask why is there such a lack of interest in the Mesoameri-can cases while Christian and Jewish literary exemplum serve as "classic" cases? In the Aztec case, violent sacrifices performed the city. THE DEPTH OF CITIES IN HUMAN LIFE . . . the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse. . ? The expansion of my view of the city as a performance space also developed while working with students in courses on the Mesoameri-can city in comparative perspective. This not only exposed me to complex sets of performances that animated cities, but also with the ways in which cities were religio-political performances themselves. City after city that my students and I examined unfolded their histories as dramaturgical landscapes in which the major ideas, economic exchanges, political ideas, religious beliefs, personal tragedies, and hopes of the populace were acted out through ritual and daily life. Furthermore, it became evident that performance spaces and cultural performances did not just re-present city values but also functioned to re-generate and re-make the cities as meaningful landscapes. The ceremonies brought the city to life.10 While the essays in this book do not explore in detail comparisons with other urban traditions, I do work as a historian of religions interested in useful comparisons and analogies that can draw light to the INTRODUCTION p Geertz's insistence about the reconfiguration of social thought that "theory . . . moves mainly by analogy"11 and constructed a series of resemblances that relate social theory and the city. Each analogy brings influential thinkers into contact with both the analogy and each other. These include but are not limited to (i) city as cosmologi-cal symbol (Otto von Simson, Mircea Eliade, and Paul Wheatley); (2) city as religious community (Fustel de Coulanges and Emile Durk-heim); (3) city as fulcrum of political power (Max Weber and Clifford Geertz); and (4) city as center of economic exchange (Raymond Williams and David Harvey). And now, the city as performance. These comparative exercises in social thought and the city led me to appreciate the city as both the general term for a particular hierarchical patterning of social life and as an opulent trope for the ways in which social differences (class, ethnic, and racial) were subsumed under images and symbols of common if pyramidal cause. In the process, I have made use of Italo Calvino's positions in Invisible Cities, where he shows that the city is as much a metaphysical force in our lives as a material one and in the end escapes from the confines of our series of analogies. On the one hand, the city has the power of redundancy, reiteration, and recreation for it inhabits our minds, or in Calvino's words about one of the invisible cities of Kublai Khan's empire, "the city says everything you must think." The city becomes, especially in those great capitals, the sum of all wonders that "makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts." But these repetitions do not exhaust the power of cities to re-create meaning or open ways to incorporate new meaning, stories, and power, for as with a primordium or ideal type, our discourse falls short of the parts that make up the whole. "However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it."12 As my students and I realized, this redundancy of wonders and concealment of meanings is what is often performed as well as symbolized in some of the grand monuments of cities. Who can doubt that the church Santa Maria della Salute, which for centuries greeted the ships coming in off the Adriatic Sea into the Grand Canal of Ven- irp ann ťnť» trnnnnli tri\rpAf*rc txrnr* iíptiHii-p^ t-rt ií-e K-ie*» ic i t^r»,-£-*i* 10 CITY OP SACRIFICE Venice's canals, houses, colors, gondolas, churches, moods, and curving vistas drove Charles Dickens to write in his Pictures from Italy that "opium couldn't build such a place and enchantment couldn't shadow it forth in vision. . .I've never before visited a place that I am afraid to describe."13 And consider Henry James's observation of the spectacle of the Salute during one of his fourteen visits to the city. The monument that towers over the entrance to the Grand Canal is described as a grand actress on a stage in which the drama of an arrival, greeting, and encounter between complex forces is about to unfold. The classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her salon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scalloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbor; and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different, each splendid in its sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range of Venice.14 I was also stimulated to understand how a city may perform its social hierarchy and royal pathology linking sex, death, and inflated authority when reading Bruno Bettelheim's Freud's Vienna and Other Essays. As Vienna grew to dominate the intelligentsia of the Hapsburg empire, its city fathers not only arranged for the World's Fair of 1873 so that it could perform their empire, but also constructed the Ringstrasse, the monumental avenue that circled the inner city and "was intended to outshine the world-famous Haussmann boulevards of Paris, because the buildings on the Ringstrasse would be even more splendid than those gracing the Paris avenue."15 In this case, the performance is an inter-capital one, with rulers, elites, and architects competing with each other for spectacle and spectacular statements of political or cultural imperial leadership. In this view of the city as a performance, the house of Freud, the intimidations leading to his flight, and the museum that his house has become were all ceremonies of Viennese metamorphosis. I am reminded of the intense competition of Maya city-states during its glowing classic culture, when cere- INTRODUCTION 11 The performance of the psychological depth andpower of British cities is illustrated in the work of Raymond Williams, especially in his The City and the Country. Reading a wide series of literary works, Williams shows how the city and the novel of the city combine to reveal the "true significance of the city," which is the revelation of the "double condition" of humankind. When he comments on Charles Dickens's ability to create a new kind of novel after many false starts, lapses, and versions, Williams notes that London brought together in unique ways "the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured which is the true significance of the city, and especially at this period of the capital city, as a dominant social form."16 The city as a sum of all wonders was most of all a place of new kinds of in-depth human experiences of "unknown and unacknowledged relationships, profound and decisive connections, definite and committing recognitions and avowals" that were brought into contact and exchange. In the city of mutual friends and competitors, enemies and outcasts, "what was important or even decisive could not be simply known or simply communicated, ... it had to be revealed, to be forced into consciousness,"17 or we can say performed into consciousness.18 It is this performing into consciousness and framing consciousness that is also at work in the orientatios and ritual violence of cities in general and Mesoamerican cities in particular. THE ARCHE OF THE CENTER In exploring the capacity of cities to perform culture, communicate cosmo-magical meanings, and direct processes of social, political, and symbolic change and metamorphosis, I am reminded of Charles H. Long's claim that for students of religion, especially in the Americas, the world-wide history of colonialism constituted a "new archě," a fundamentally new orientatio for humankind. Long constructs the rationale for a "new archě" and the importance of linking colonialism to religious studies by first praising and then going beyond Mircea Eliade's concept of "archaic consciousness." Long shows regard for Eliade's creative hermeneutic because "instead of explaining orig-inary constitution (i.e., the constitutions of human life and culture) as only an internal ordering of consciousness, Eliade always related this rnrKftťnHnn ťn cr\mŕ*ť4iincr r\ťhr*r f-lrrn iŕ-c^lí""^ 12 CITY OF SACRIFICE and moon, the earth, stones, trees, water, and plants and animals whose presence, actions, bodies, and patterns stimulated the human mind to open its doors of perceptions and work to employ meaning, powerful ideas, myth, ritual, and ritual specialists to recreate and redirect relations with cosmic beings and entities. In Long's view, humankind underwent and is still undergoing an other internal ordering of consciousness, through the violence, significations, and processes of colonialism carried out over the last five hundred years to constitute the environmentfor the human condition in the postcolonial, postmodern world. Comparing his move with Eliade, Long writes, In an analogous manner I shall attempt to raise the issue of the constitution of religion and human consciousness but instead of seeking for an arena of primordiality, I shall locate this arena within the time and space of the formation of new extra-European cultures, the new mercantilism and the ensuing relationships that took place during the modern period of imperialism and colonialism.20 In my view, the power of this insight, that the social processes of colonialism constitute a new environment for the constitution of religion and human consciousness, should be extended and tested against the history and power of cities to shape society and thought. We can imagine that the city, as humankind s most powerful artifact, has, like the patterns of nature and the processes of colonialism, worked to orient and reorient human thought and culture. The city, playing with the present scheme, would constitute the middle arche or, to push the matter further, the arche of the center and periphery of human history. The patterns of nature as Eliade perceived them constitute the arche of the beginning, while Long's insight suggests the arche of globalization. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the traveler Marco Polo attempts through words, exaggerated gestures, complex signs, and wonders to show to the ruler of the empire, Kublai Khan, the nature of his kingdom. Calvino writes, "Kublai Khan did not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows to any other messenger or explorer of his."211 realize that I am r,1l-*rinrr cr\-rr->f*t-\\\r>rr liUii AA^r/-« T5~l~ t-n t-U ~ *.~„ J™',. T^,,U1~i T/"U~~ „„J INTRODUCTION I3 the ecology of humankind or the performances of Aztec cities. But I hope that like the emperor ofthat narrative, you will give great attention to these pages about the city of sacrifice. It is impressive to me, an explorer of urban settlements in the narratives of the Aztec world, that the very last section of the Florentine Codex reiterates the primordial, political, and economic importance of the city in the lake for both the Aztec and the conquering Spaniards. On the last page of the twelve-volume encyclopedia, collected over a period of four decades in the Basin of Mexico in the sixteenth century, we read that one of the surviving Aztec priests remembers the days when the capital was the sum of all Mexica wonders and demands Cortés s attention to this view. "May the nobleman, our lord the Captain, hear! When there was yet Moctezuma, when there was a conquest, the Mexicans, the Tlatilucans, the Tepanecans, the Acolhuans moved together. All the Tepanecans, all the Acolhuans, and those of the floating gardens—all of us moved together when we conquered."22 The priest recalls how the conquered peoples would return to their cities and bring to Tenochtitlan their riches, tribute as signs of submission. "And later came the people of the cities, the people already conquered. They brought their tribute; their goods went to become the victor's, the green stone, the gold, the precious feathers, and still other precious stones, the fine turquoise, the lovely cotinga, the roseate spoonbill. They gave it to Moctezuma. It arrived there together."23 And then the speaker concludes, showing Cortés, and now us, that this story is preeminently a story of the capital city and its performances. As though both remembering and masking the treasures buried in that greatest container of the stage that was Tenochtitlan—the Templo Mayor1—the speaker to Cortés reports, "All the tribute, the gold was together there in Tenochtitlan." We end in the center, in the city. Significantly, in Nahuatl, the narrative ends with a different word, one that forefronts not the city, but a vein in the earth on which the city sits and from which its gods emerge and leave their traces. The sentence reads "ca umpa, ualmocemaci, in tenuchtiilan in ixquich tlacala- 14 CITY OP SACRIFICE excrement of gods." Gold was the trace of the divine's presence in the earthly spaces beneath and around the human settlements. It was extracted in Aztec times, in part, in response to conquests. Now, led by the "lord" Captain Cortés, a new style of violence, a mass-sacrifice society, swept into the city to extract it, the gods who made it, and all that was Tenochtitlan. With cannon, fire, and Spanish and Indian bodies flung against the city's walls, temples, palaces, people, and barricades, all justified by a new religious vision, the invaders literally blew the city away, and then built their city, which eventually became today's Mexico City, the largest city in the world, on its ruins. Performing the Colonial City. CHAPTER i City as Symbol in Aztec Thought Some Clues from the Codex Mendoza In the ceremonial centers of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica it is also possible to discern the plastic expression of a series of mythical or cosmic conceptions, although the implications of these symbols have notyet been elucidated in all their complexity. Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities One of the most significant developments in recent decades in the study of Mesoamerican cultures has been the realization that the Aztec society encountered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century was a world dominated by that form known as the traditional city. This realization has been the outgrowth of long-term debates on the "nature" of pre-Columbian peoples and the eventual rejection of the anthropological theory that "the pueblo of Mexico" was, according to Lewis H. Morgan, peopled by "ragged Indians" living in the "middle status of Barbarism."1 The Aztecs, saidMorgan, were the Iroquois of the south, and their loosely organized social institutions were proof of "how distant yet were the conceptions of a state or nation among the aborigines of Mexico. . . . They were still a breech cloth people, l6 CITY OF SACRIFICE The first image in the Codex Mendoza depicts the founding of Tenochtitlan as a performance of authority and war as well as a model of cosmological order. In the center of the four sections of the city is the large image of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli landing on the blooming cactus growing from a rock in the lake of Mexico. Notice the ten male leaders, the skull rack, the ceremonial building, and the vegetation distributed around the central section. The human action below shows the Aztec conquests of towns on the periphery of the capital. The entire image is surrounded by calendar signs. (Folio 2 of the Codex Mendoza. Courtesv of the Bodleian Tih CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 1J any civilization in America when it was discovered, and excluding the Eskimos, but one race of Indians, the Red Race."2 A series of impressive studies by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists following the groundbreaking work by Paul KirchhofF have radically revised our understanding of Mesoamerican cultures and identified patterns of settlement, bureaucratic systems, and cultural order that, taken as a whole, represent urbanism as a dynamic way of life.3 Whether investigated in terms and terminology of the stimulus for the rise of stratified societies,4 of the cultural evolution of civilizations,5 or as sacred theaters for the rites of kings,6 the underlying question is no longer whether Mesoamericans constructed cities and states, but what kinds of urban settlements did they invent and dwell within and in relation to.7 In spite of the new focus on the urban character of the ancient Mesoamerican world, there has been until recently very limited attention given to the relationship between cosmological symbols, sacred space, and the development of the monumental ceremonial centers and regional capitals that directed and dominated Mesoamerican cultural life for nearly two thousand years.8 Only in the last decade have really insightful studies of the cosmic symbolism of major temples and precincts been carried out by scholars working on the site-planning principles, cosmology, and religious symbolism of Classic Maya and central Mesoamerican ceremonial centers.9 Those scholars who have emphasized symbolic structures and religious forms in their studies of ancient Mexico have spoken passionately and sometimes brilliantly about the religious symbols within the Aztec city but not very much about the Aztec city itself as a religious form.10 In what follows, I begin to lay out my own approach to the prodigious expressions of sacred space in the Aztec world by focusing on the multivalent character of the imprint of cosmo-magical thought on the ritual and spatial physiognomy of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, which was founded around 1325 and brought under Spanish military control toward the end of 1521.1 use this chapter as an overview, in spatial terms, of the central ordering symbols that permeated and organized Aztec ceremonial centers, trade, warfare, sacrifice, cannibalism, astronomy, and selected cosmological ideas.11 As an ini-h^l „i.mtom, t £,,.„„— <-u„-r____,.;„„;----------ä ~..i---------u^.jfj;.. _fA. 22 CITY OF SACRIFICE by religious symbols and cosmo-magical thought remembered even through the devastating experience of military conquest and the cultural subordination of the capital. In other words, I see this image depicting a series of relationships that include spatial, social, and symbolic relations vital to the Aztec city. In general, I can see the relations of (i) myth to history and the colonial memory of both, (2) ruler to nobles and their control of social space, (3) the dominant patron god who guided the Aztecs to, and legitimated, the new spatial order and story of the settlement, and (4) center to periphery, including the initial process of political expansion. What is especially evident is the dynamic relationship between the history and mythology of the warrior god and the founding and formation of the city's ceremonial landscape. The frontispiece is both a map and a pictorial event, several strobe light shots of ongoing action combined into one image. This dynamic quality is reflected in the telltale speech glyph of the ruler communicating not only that this is the Chief Speaker, but that the Chief Speaker is speaking! He is having a conversation, apparently a one-way conversation, with the places, people, god, and other signs in the space of the opening folio, performing an illocutionary art of ordering, announcing and, as will be seen in subsequent folios, making things happen according to his semi-divine will. This conversation of mythical center to historical periphery is elaborated again and again in other images within the first part of the Codex Mendoza where various tlatoanis are pictured, often with speech glyphs, in relation to conquered towns. The economic implications of this authoritarian conversation are reflected in Part Two of the Mendoza, where we see the painted list of tributes paid to the capital and the elites. Framed by Time Signs Beginning with the borders, we see that temporal signs, in a series of blue boxes, frame the city and the significant acts depicted below it. Thevet's extravagant signature and title fill the gap at the top left. The year count begins with the sign for "2 House" immediately to the left of the signature. It continues down and around in a counterclockwise fashion, mixing thirteen numbers, presented as dots, with the four year-signs—House, Rabbit, Reed, and Flint Knife—and ^rls „i- i-Ua +■„« «™i«-U 1.1,,, ,„— „;__"T„ r> —a » a„ <-u„ c__;„u —„, CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 23 framed and animated by intricate intermeshing calendrical systems, and this pattern will be discussed in a later chapter.24 For now, suffice it to say that this aspect of the frontispiece is critical to understanding the cosmovision of the city and the Mexica representation of place. Places, like actions, derived part of their power and meaning from their relationship to temporal images. They were places and actions in time and in this case, a sacred place, the city, appears in particular segments of mythicaland historical time. Tlie Central Place Within this temporal frame, the city appears as a large square that was, in the words of the commentator, "divided in the form of St. Andrew's Cross" with stylized blue borders representing the waters of Lake Texcoco. Two blue intersecting lines, apparently representing canals, divide the island city into four quarters. Within these four parts, we see a number of human, vegetal, and cultural images that, while appearing simple in design and size, tell us essential things about the Aztec city and its symbols. In the upper quadrant is an important ceremonial building, perhaps an early version of the temple dedicated to the patron god Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird on the Left).25 It is also possible that this structure was the tecpan, or nobles' house, or a cabildo, a townhouse used for community rituals and meetings.26 In the right-hand quadrant close to the central image is a tzom-pantli, or skull rack, with a single large skull.27 This structure grew to become a prominent part of Aztec ceremonial life and it is significant that it is part of the founding iconography and located so close to the central image. It is interesting that an axis of cultural symbols appears in the central region of the page. The great images of temple /Huitzilopochtli /blooming cactus/rock/shield form the vertical arrangement. Looking horizontally, we see a series of images, including Ten-och the Chief Speaker/Huitzilopochtli/cactus/rock/shield/skull rack. This central cluster combines a sacred center, war, ceremonial structures, and rulership. Within the four quadrants sit ten males, nine identically dressed and one more prominently attired, who were the leaders of Mexica society. Nine of these men appear with a white tilmatli snugly CITY OF SACRIFICE in part, of pre-Hispanic thought, contain clues about the religious imagination of the Aztecs and more specifically about the conception of their city as a cosmic symbol. I hope to show through a new reading of selected images from the Codex Mendoza how the city was a symbol of dynamic relationships between, in part, myths, measurements, history, rulers, nobles, centers, and peripheries. The Aztec version of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, articulated a generation after the city fell to Spanish cunning and aggression, reflected the persistence of their cosmo-magical view of the world. We will see how several pre-conquest cosmological ideas were meaningful enough to enter into a symbiosis with their experience of the conquest, thus ensuring their endurance for at least several generations. THE CODEX MENDOZA AS A SPATIAL STORY What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. Michel de Certeau, "Spatial Stories"12 I choose images from the Codex Mendoza because they serve to raise themes, problems, and hermeneutical opportunities I want to emphasize in this study of Mesoamerican religions. The Codex Mendoza as a whole and the opening scene13 in particular can be used, contrary to what most commentators think,14 to initiate the study of such religious dimensions as sacred space, ceremonial centers, mythology, ritual renewal and human sacrifice, and archaeoastronomy and the calendar, all of which are discussed in later chapters. This single image of the founding of the city also reflects the important issues of center/ periphery dynamics, the performance of head collecting and warfare, as well as the mixed cultures of the colonial period. The frontispiece and many of the other folios constitute something of what Michel de Certeau calls "spatial stories," narrative structures that order and regulate changes and movements through space. De Certeau explores two primary spatial projects, or spatial practices, that produce geographies of action: the tour and the tableau. The tour presents an itinerary that organizes movements through space, through a spatial landscape with emphases on direction, velocities, and time variables. The tableau, which depends on a fixed vision, presents territory as a locative space, emphasizes the static moment, and communicates the í_____1„ J____r -.--.. l -. - r . i r\ st i • .1 . .i . • i CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT Ip tend to give priority to either the tour or the tableau. But, as we shall see, the frontispiece oftheMendoza combines the tour and the tableau in a single description. It is the last move in the tour of migration and the first tableau of the tour of empire!15 My project seeks to illustrate more of the social and symbolic relationships of the Aztec capital by focusing on how some of the symbols and related narratives locate the sacred and cut across social locations. A number of these images are also spatial stories that map out a ceremonial landscape. Another reason for choosing the Codex Mendoza is that it provides access to two kinds of orientatio fundamental to understanding Aztec cosmological and social topography: (i) an understanding as to how they represented their discoveries, achievements, and practices of a cosmo-magical orientation prior to and after the European invasion, and (2) our orientation as students interested in developing a method for understanding the vibrant religious dimensions of the Aztec world. The discussion begins with a description of the creation of the codex and then focuses on the religious dimensions of its many images. THE CREATION OF THE CODEX MENDOZA One of the leading patrons of the native artists in New Spain was the viceroy of Mexico, Don Antonio de Mendoza, who has been called an enthusiastic collector of native "curios." Labeled by one scholar a "Renaissance Maecenas," Mendoza noted how the ravages of the conquest had destroyed countless native artifacts and had effaced the craft traditions that generated them. He was ordered by the Spanish crown to provide evidence of the Aztec political and tribute system, and he responded by inviting trained artists and scribes, who were being schooled at the Franciscan college in Tlatelolco, to gather in a workshop where they could recreate, under the supervision of Spanish priests, the document for himself and the King of Spain16 that became known as the Codex Mendoza. One of the most beautiful and revealing pictorial documents composed under his patronage was the Codex Mendoza (1541-1545), consisting of seventy-one folios on Spanish paper but done largely in the native style and currently bound at the spine in the manner of European books. As Kathleen Stewart 20 CITY OF SACRIFICE dition."17 Picture pages carrying short annotations alternate with pages containing Spanish commentaries and extensive annotations. Together, they provide an all too rare example of how natives and Europeans worked together to tell a story and to present a panorama of a city's life that was at once old and new. The document is divided into three sections, with the first two appearing to have been copied from earlier pre-Columbian pictorials, now lost: (i) the pre-Columbian history of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, beginning with its foundation and the recounting of the wars and conquests of its kings, through to 1523 (on nineteen pictorial pages); (2) a colorful account of the tribute paid to the capital by the four hundred towns in the five regions of the empire (on thirty-nine pictorial pages); and (3) apicto-rial account (on fifteen pages) of some aspects of the daily life, education, warfare, priestly training, crime and punishment, and social stratification of Mexica society. The document was originally composed for the King of Spain, Charles I (also called Emperor Charles V), known as "the king of two worlds, whose address was Spain," as an example "of the strange and the rare, of the arts of the natives of the new world, to explain Mexico to their King across the sea."18 The codex was probably painted by the maestro de pinturas Francisco Gualpuyogualcal, who likely copied the first two sections of it from one or several pre-Columbian manuscripts "now lost." The Spanish annotations appear to have been written by one of three individuals: the priest Juan Gonzalez of the cathedral of Mexico, a nahuat-hto19 of great repute; J. Martin Jacobita, a student of Sahagun, who had attended the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the school set up by the Franciscans to train Indians in Spanish classical education; or the pioneer Friar Andres de Olmos,20 The interpretation of the pictorial material was full of elaborations, as the Spanish translation includes a great deal of information not directly communicated by the pictures. It is also clear that the informants interpreting the picto-grams and ideograms argued over some images, because the commentator noted that controversy left him only ten days to complete the manuscript prior to the ship's departure for the Spanish court. Alas, this high destiny was rudely interrupted by French sailors who attacked the Spanish ship on the high seas and took, among other thinps. the rndexanrl turnpH it-mřř>r t-r> ťVif» Frr»n/-Vi mni+ inrVi<»»-e> it-V.^ CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 21 mographer. Thevet was so excited by the document that he wrote his name and title on it five times, as if trying to make it his companion. After 1587, he became friends with the English navigator Richard Hakluyt, who purchased the codex from him for twenty French crowns. After Hakluyt's death in 1616, Samuel Purchas acquired the Mendoza and translated and published the first section of it in 1625 in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas, His Pilgrimes, calling it "the choicest of my jewels." Finally, it came into the possession of John Seiden, the English jurist who donated it to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it sits today. THE IMAGE OF CITY AND SYMBOL Still another type of Early Colonial space exists, and it, too, has its native precedents. We shall call it "panel space". . . . This kind of space results in a composition that is a single unit filling a single page with a strongly centralized symmetrical pattern. Subordinate elements may be a part of the larger design-year signs, for instance, but they are subject to the over-all unity of the formal pattern much more than in scattered-attribute space. In the Colonial Period panel space is often used as the underlying principle of rather formalized and stylized maps, or it is used as in the Codex Mendoza as a sort of frontispiece. Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period21 Our eyes are drawn to the opening folio of the codex, described by Donald Robertson as a map or symbolic representation of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.22 Actually, it is more than a spatial image or the fixed-panel space referred to previously. It is a spatial story and contains an implicit narrative of the mythical action and performance of the Mexicas founding their city of Tenochtitlan as well as the historical action of warfare, conquest, and transference of magical power from enemy warriors to Aztec warriors. This single image is rich in individual images and symbols that convey information on Aztec cosmological thought, the ideology of warfare, the dynamics of political relations between urban centers and their peripheries, and a sense of monumentality associated with the cult of Huitzilopochtli. Thus, it serves well to provide clues to remedy the neglect, mentioned .»».i.- _—___» .f J.:. -i___._-.. -C___J___^____i:___i. ---------1-......1____ 24 CITY OP SACRIFICE to emphasize the appearance of these nine men because it is reminiscent of the nine lords of the night who accompany many cosmic images and appear, albeit in a different arrangement, in the cosmic image of one of the most impressive surviving pre-Hispanic codices, the Codex Fejérváry Mayer. The tenth man, immediately to the left of the large cactus in the center, is the most prominent leader. He is distinguished by a blue speech glyph in front of his mouth, signifying that he is the tlatoani, or speaker. The Spanish annotation refers to him as being "especially gifted with leadership abilities."28 The mat on which he sits is finely woven to signify that he is the "lord of the mat" and occupies the place of authority.29 His elevation above the others is further marked by his black body paint (signifying his priesdy status), smears of blood on his temple and right ear, indicating bloodletting, and loosely tied hair, showing that he was a priest. His name is expressed by the thin line attached to the sign above and behind him, which is a blooming cactus growing from a stylized rock. This image translates as "Tenoch," written "tenuch" (stone-cactus fruit) on the front of his white garment. It seems significant to me that his quadrant contains the largest number of original leaders, in fact four, who became an important governmental group in the subsequent history of the community.30 Several different kinds of vegetation also are distributed throughout the four quadrants. All these signs surround the huge central image, which shows an eagle with extended claws perched on a blooming prickly pear cactus growing from a stylized rock. This entire image, appearing in a number of colonial documents and as a part of the national emblem for Mexico, is the place-event sign for Tenochtitlan. Strictly speaking, the place sign is the cactus growing from a rock. This sign of orientation in space metamorphoses into an event sign with the presence of the eagle. What was tableau is topped by the sign of tour?1 The eagle represents the sun, and the god Huitzilopochtli and his posture and location on the cactus signify the arrival of the Aztecs, led by their god of war, into the valley of Mexico. It appears that the rock out of which the cactus is growing is also a stylized human heart. Below this sign of the city's place and origin, almost supporting the rock, is a large Aztec war shield with seven eagle-down feathers and six spears attached. We are nrPQPnťprl "with a rr*Trm1ť»-vcirrn -íxriťh CMrťM-ol Immrfi nf mMninrr Thr* CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 2$ When the circular down balls, or ihuiteteyo design (with four circles around a central feather, signifying cosmic order), are added to the shield, it becomes a symbol of sacred conquest. This image communicates the idea that Tenochtitlan's power and authority derive at the moment of its foundation from warfare, the war god, and the warrior. This idea is also reflected in the attacking posture of the giant eagle's claws. The entire central image can be translated to express The Aztecs arrived, led by their war god Huitzilopochtli, and Tenochtitlan was the seat of conquest and authority. The Periphery: War and Expansion The geographical, social, and military implications of this central emblem deepen when we look at the signs, postures, and actions portrayed in the bottom third of the frontispiece. Below the scene of the founding of the capital are two episodes of Aztec conquest. These conquests take place outside the city and ceremonial center in a peripheral location to the central emblem. Away from the city, but still within the cosmo-temporal frame of the fifty-one-year count, the Mexicas carry out conquests against the communities of Colhuacan (Curved Hill) and Tenayuca (Rampart Hill). What impresses me is the fact that this military action reflects the painter's concern for place, and even the religious orientation of place, as well as the presentation of Mexica monumentality at the periphery of the city. In fact, we see the first signs of center-periphery dynamics. Historically, both sites were located on the periphery of the island, with Tenayuca on the northern edge of the lake and Culhuacan on the southern edge. The two place glyphs are prominent features attached to temples, both of which are tipped and burning. The standard glyph in the codex for the conquest of a community—a tipped and burning temple-—highlights a central feature of the religious dimensions in the manuscript that is seldom remarked upon by most commentators. The main images by which Tenochtitlan is represented link military power and political authority with religious symbols and sacred places. What would otherwise (for modern secular interpreters) be seen as geographic or socioeconomic relations in space here become religiously oriented, denoted, and interpreted. The tipped and burning temple signifies that the 20 CITY OP SACRIFICE The expression of Mexica dominance is illustrated by the posture, costumes, and especially the size of the two pairs of warriors. As Frances Berdan and Patricia Anawalt comment in their description of the scene, All four warriors wear ichcahuipilli, the standard Mesoamerican armor of thick quilted cotton. In keeping with the greater glorification of Te-nochtitlan, only the armor of the Mexica warriors is detailed, showing marks of the quilting. Both of these conquerors wear their hair in the "pillar of stone" style and carry the ihuiteteyo shield, symbolizing their city. One carries the maquahuitl, the obsidian-inset warrior club; the other wields a wooden battle stick, the huitzoctli.32 What is impressive is the emphasis on the size and martial readiness of the Mexica warriors. They not only dwarf the enemy warriors and symbolically subdue them by forcing them to crouch by pushing their shields on their heads, they are also the tallest figures on the entire page, certainly larger than the ten leaders, including Tenuch (Stone Cactus Fruit), and even taller than the great eagle image of Huitzilo-pochtli in the center of the page. If we focus on the warriors' shields subduing the head of the enemy, another possibility comes into view. The Aztec warrior may also be gripping the temillotl (the sacred shock of hair) of the enemy as an act of ritual dominance. In Aztec thought, grasping another's temillotl was equivalent to capturing the tonalli, one of the essences or souls of the person. This reflects still another religious dimension to the folio s actions. Whether or not the size factors are a post-cortquest or pre-Hispanic device, the impression is that the Mexica warriors were monumental figures and, through the temple imagery, war was seen as an action with religious meanings crucial to the foundation and expansion of the city. This nexus was reiterated by the fact that the nine assistants to Tenuch were warriors. As will be seen later in this book, the collection of nine warriors, deities, or levels of the cosmos had profound cosmological significance in the geometry of the universe. And the image of the city's founding rests on the interaction of images of sacred place, war, and ideal, giant warriors. The Spanish commentator reflected this interaction of images by saying, CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 27 the place and site of the Mexicans. And as the people had developed as daring and warlike, they gave vent to their spirit by overcoming their neighbors. Thus by force of arms they manifested (their power) by subjecting as vassals and tributaries two towns near Mexico called Colhua-can and Tenayuca. . . 33 The spatial relations of these various images have not received the comment they deserve. The connections between the center and periphery are reflected in the images of warriors captured at the edge of the city, which are linked to the image of their destiny, in part, as skulls on the tzompantli located close to the center of the settlement. The cosmo-magical significance of the warrior is reflected in the military expansion of the city and symbolized in the founding of the ceremonial center through the linked images of the warrior/god/eagle Huitzilopochtli and the shield. The entire image presents a series of give-and-take relationships—the Aztecs gave their best military- and deity-ordained shots to the periphery and took control of temples, warriors, and tributary goods. And again, we see the interplay of tour and tableau. The scene within the blue lines signifying the lakes signals the end of a tour as it also celebrates the tableau of Mexica authority and ceremonial city. The action of conquests below, signaling the expansion of Mexica power into new territories, reflects the tour of warrior cults. In this way, we are witnessing an image that is both tableau and tour, and the itinerary for the future is signaled in these spatial relationships that were also the cues for stories. The Periphery and the New Fire The frontispiece image yields still more clues and pointers about the city that became a symbol of so many Aztec myths and institutions. Focusing again on the marginal calendar count, which falls one short of the fifty-two-year cycle, or xiuhmolpilli (bundle of reeds), we note that one calendar date, 2 Reed, in the bottom right-hand corner, draws special emphasis. A fire-drill glyph rises from the year-sign, attached by a single thread, showing that this was the year of the famous New Fire Ceremony, one of the most profound and inclusive ceremonies of the Mexica world. Since this ceremony is interpreted in chapter 3, suffice it to say here that once every fifty-two years at the 28 CITY OF SACRIFICE sacred site of the Hill of the Star, beyond the limits of the Aztec capital. After household goods were destroyed and all fires extinguished, the populace waited in the darkness and watched in anticipation for the new fire to be lit on the chest of a sacrificed warrior. This fire was then taken down the mountain to the center of the city and placed in the shrine of Huitzilopochtli, from whence it was then distributed to all parts of the empire. This path of the New Fire indicates that the Mexica were redistributing their cosmo-magical power, in the form of a fire generated out of the sacrifice, from the capital (the main center of all redistribution) to the periphery. It is important that the spatial relationships between the capital and the periphery of the Hill of the Star and the other communities, which were joined during the New Fire Ceremony, parallel the peripheral location of the New Fire Ceremony glyph in the right-hand corner of the frontispiece. My point is that this bottom section of the frontispiece, combining the Mexica conquests and the sign of the New Fire Ceremony, tell us that the page is much more than a "symbolic map of the founding of Tenochtitlan." It is a spatial story of several major rituals and social practices of domination, astronomy, and cosmic renewal—a very cosmological image indeed. One of the most meaningful patterns is the spatial sense of the interconnectedness of the ceremonial structures (temple of Huitzilopochtli, skull rack) and the alleged enemy communities of the Aztec world. Finally, it is important to remember that this image was painted long after the Aztec empire's rise to extraordinary heights and twenty years after its collapse. Its symmetry, its sense of centeredness, and the signs of expansion, all circumscribed only by the cosmic signs of ca-lendrical passage and renewal, combine to suggest not only the tableau of foundation but the future tour of the boundless Aztec empire, a place that became, through ritual and political metamorphosis, the performance of imperial success. Now, as a way of gaining a significant advantage into the cosmological and social meaning of this rich image of Aztec origins and spatial order, I will utilize Paul Wheatley's discussion of city and symbol in traditional urbanism. CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 2g utilized, applied, and challenged his model.34 While some of these responses are discussed in subsequent chapters, it is appropriate to outline aspects of his cosmo-magical model here. According to Wheatley, cosmo-magical consciousness was generally expressed in a worldview that (i) saw the "real" powers of the cosmos as transcending "the pragmatic realm of textures and geometrical spaces," and (2) demanded that human beings, if they wished to participate in that reality, strive to bring the human social order into coordination and harmony with the divine society of the gods, and vice versa. Wheatley's perceptions were initially developed out of sustained reflection on the evidence about urban symbolism in traditional China and were then honed through a series of comparative exercises with other areas of primary urban generation. The construction of capitals, which functioned as "ideal types" for their cultures, was achieved not only through the imitation of archetypes, but through processes of discovery and analysis of the patterns of nature and the construction of a model of this discovery and analysis. More than imitation is at work here. Human beings in the ancient city understood their society to exist within a mythic-cosmic setting,35 «id what we call politics, social organization, economic exchange, and ritual performance took their cues, profounder meanings, and reasons for existence from the gods, ancestors, and forces they understood to emerge and fold back into that mythic cosmic setting on a continuous, regenerative schedule. In what I consider to be one of the most succinct statements of the paramount importance of studying urban settlements as a means of understanding religion and culture, Wheatley writes, It is the city which has been, and to a large extent still is, the style center in the traditional world, disseminating social, political, technical, religious and aesthetic values, and functioning as an organizing principle conditioning the manner and quality of life in the countryside. Those who focus their regional studies on peasant society to the exclusion of urban forms are—as I have stated elsewhere—as deluded as Plato's prisoners (or in another sense, Beckett's) who mistake flickering shadows on a wall for reality. They, too, are turning their backs on the generative force of ecological transformation and seeking the causes of the great tides of social change in ripples on the beach of history.36 JO CITY OP SACRIFICE those religions where "human order was brought into being at the creation of the world, there was a pervasive tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital."37 Wheatley, who utilizes the works of Mircea Eliade and René Berthelot in this regard, is eager to point out the sense of confidence that early urban societies displayed in being able to regulate a tight fit between the patterns of the heavens and the patterns of society. He notes, It must be emphasized at the outset, albeit perhaps supererogatively, that the various models of this kind which provided frameworks for the evaluation of spatial significance in the past were not simple-minded attempts by unsophisticated men of an earlier age to explain the causality of natural and human phenomena, but rather protosciences whose central objective was to demonstrate the unity of all existence. They were not "primitive" in the sense of undifferentiated thought systems as Lévy-Bruhl employed that term, but offer magnificent exemplars of associative, or coordinative thinking, utilizing a logic no whit less rigorous in its own way than that of contemporary science. Nor were the intellectuals who elucidated and elaborated them fanciful dreamers. Rather they were organizers of knowledge, codifiers, builders of systems, men who shared a corporate consuming passion for distinction, definition, and formalization, who conceived a universe order so precisely that, to borrow a metaphor from one of the Chinese exponents of this style of thought, one could not insert a hair between the parts.38 This pattern of thinking, with its confidence in tight parallelism, was expressed in at least three aspects of spatial organization in the traditional city, (i) the symbolism of the center, (2) its cardinal axiality, and (3) its architectural parallelism between macrocosmos and mi-crocosmos. Wheatley notes that in the seven areas of primary urban generation there was a tendency to dramatize the cosmology by reproducing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos in which "terrestrial space is initially generated by and subsequently structured about, an existentially centered point of ontological transition between cosmic planes," an axis mundi, a center.39 This central point becomes the quintessential sacred precinct and is usually marked by the construction of a series of special ritual buildings. In this ritual construction CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT p city, is joined to techniques of spatial orientation that attempt to align the major causeways, thoroughfares, or sections of a capital city with the cardinal compass directions of the universe, "thus assimilating the group's territory to the cosmic order and constructing a sanctified living space or habitabilis within the continuum of profane space."41 These four guiding highways that emerge from the central ceremonial precinct, the theater of sacred ritual, act as centripetal and centrifugal guides, magnetizing the sacred and social energies into the center and diffusing the supernatural and royal powers outward into the kingdom. This centering and cardinal orientation, these attempts to coordinate supernatural forces and social forces, are also elaborated plastically, that is, when a city or its ceremonial center not only "marks the spot" and controls the lines of force, but actually represents and signifies in its design and structure a cosmic struggle, a myth or divine drama.42 Though I work with the pattern of center and periphery a great deal in later chapters, I want to emphasize here the centripetal and centrifugal forces generated by the interaction of ceremonial centers and marketplaces situated within the limits of major urban settlements. Some of the most impressive forces at work in favor of urban settlements are the magnetic economic institutions and power relations that draw travelers, pilgrims, merchants, artisans, rulers, and military units into their confines. As we shall see in this study of the first two parts of the Codex Mendoza, all the meaningful activities, including warfare and trade, were pictured in terms of the "central zone," or "effective space," of the city. The point here is to emphasize that the symbols of cities need to be explored for the dynamics of their centripetal and centrifugal power and not only for their power to denote and fix locations in space. The magnetic abilities of ceremonial complexes, like the one pictured in the Mendoza, are twins to the centrifugal, extensive needs of urban settlements to saturate the spaces, minds, technology, and symbol systems of other communities and geographies with their styles, messages, and authority. Wheatley's work on the cities and symbols of the traditional world shows how rulers and their cosmo-magical systems thrive, in part, on the exercises of the diffusion of authority, ,_______.....J . ITI • T 1 ^-. 1 • 1 I "* j2 city op sacrifice tf.nochtitlan: the foundation of heaven With these elements of cosmo-magical thought in hand (the symbolism of the center, cardinal axiality, centripetal forces, and centrifugal drives), I now turn back to the Codex Mendoza and related contextual material in order to widen and deepen our perceptions of how Te-nochtitlan was an effective symbolic space. Several later chapters elaborate on the way cities act (and lead urban dwellers to act) as places of cosmo-magical, political, and economic relationships. As an Aztec lyric poem reveals, the capital city of Tenochtitlan was considered the material expression of the Mexica conviction that they had come to occupy the axis of the cosmos. From where the eagles are resting, from where the tigers are exalted, the Sun is invoked. Like a shield that descends, so does the Sun set. In Mexico night is falling, war rages on all sides. Oh Giver of Life! war comes near. ... . . . Proud of itself Is the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan Here no one fears to die in war This is our glory This is Your Command Oh Giver of Life Have this in mind, oh princes Who would conquer Tenochtitlan? Who could shake the foundation of heaven?44 The city was eulogized as a proud, invincible place, the center of the vertical structure of the cosmos that linked the human world with the commands of the supreme deity Ipalnemohuani ("he by whom we live"), or the Giver of Life.45 Before commenting on the key phrase, the city as "foundation of heaven," it is important to note the parallels between the clues from the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza and the COlinletS. difr/tdtmnt ariA imoii« in l-hmo cHnmt TV,a nn^ninn. CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 33 "where the eagles are resting" and "the sun is invoked" refer at once to both the celestial resting place of the Sun God and his alignment on the blooming cactus in what will be the heart of Tenochtitlan. This celestial/terrestrial possibility is supported by the next two lines, which speak of the sun descending from the sky and sinking into the earth! The reference to the "shield" and the "rages" of war reminds me of the Aztec shield of war and authority and the battles, simply presented below the scene of the city's foundation, in the Codex Mendoza. The poetic images where "war rages on all sides" and soon "comes near" parallel the spatial relations in the pictorial image where warriors are captured outside the city but whose skulls end up on the skull rack near the central shrine. These are pictorial and poetic expressions of the centripetal relations I am emphasizing. This parallelism is followed by the boastful order/question, Have this in mind, oh princes Who could conquer Tenochtitlan? Who could shake the foundation of heaven? Tenochtitlans glory must (like Calvino's cities) be kept in mind for it is the unconquerable "foundation of heaven." The song ends with a reiteration of the Mendoza claim that the city, from its very foundation, existed through arrows and shields. My interpretation of this verse turns on the significance of the Nahuatl phrase in itlaxillo in ilhukatll, which León-Portilla renders as the "foundation of heaven" and Bierhorst translates as "the prop of heaven." Another usage of this term appears in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex as a description of warriors as itlaxilloan altepetl, meaning "they (the warriors) are the mainstay of the city." León-Portilla's translation points to the cosmological significance of the great social order, which was eulogized in poem and frontispiece. The reference to the city as aground of the celestial world becomes more acceptable when we realize that the Aztecs conceived of their cosmos as containing three superimposed sections: the heavens, the surface of the earth, and the underworld. An ensemble of pictorial and written sources, including the Codex Vaticano Latino 3738,46 shows us that the vertical ordering of the cosmos consisted of thirteen celestial layers ..:„:.__. _i_____^1. _ _. ....i. . 1...:......: • . ,1.......i... . r ^v............. .1 34 CITY OP SACRIFICE tlan, the "Place of the Dead." This dense vertical column was joined by the central region, Tlalticpac, the "Earth Surface." The lynchpin was the city of Tenochtitlan. At the time of the Spanish contact, thirteen deities inhabited the thirteen levels, which were designated the "Sky of the Paradise of the Rain God" the "Sky of the Star-Skirted Goddess," the "Sky of the Sun," the "Sky of the Salt-Fertility God," the "Sky Where Gyrating Occurs," the "Sky That Is Blackish," the "Sky That Is Blue-Green," the "Place That Has Corners of Obsidian Slabs," the "God Who Is White," the "God Who Is Yellow," the "God Who Is Red," and the "Place of Duality." The layers below the earth had such names as the "Place for Crossing the Water," the "Place Where the Hills Crash Together," the "Obsidian Mountain," the "Place of the Obsidian Wind," the "Place Where the Banners Are Raised," the "Place Where People Are Pierced with Arrows," the "Place Where People's Hearts Are Devoured," the "Obsidian Place of the Dead," and the "Place Where Smoke Has No Outlet."47 The underworld is subject to interpretation later in this book, but I can say here that the claim that Tenochtitlan was the "foundation of heaven" demonstrates that it was considered to be the groundwork, or fundamental place of social and ritual work to prop up the heavens and serve as a passageway into the underworld. This claim that the capital was the axis mundi of the cosmos takes on horizontal and historical significance in the various accounts of the peregrination of the Mexicas through a landscape of ordeals before arriving, under the tutelage of their patron god Huitzilopochtli, in the Basin of Mexico. Most stories of their journey tell that the Mexicas had left their primordial home, Aztlan, the "Place of White Reeds," and Chicomoztoc, the "Place of the Seven Caves," and taken a long, arduous journey in search of a new home. Several pictorial manuscripts present a detailed itinerary of their adventures and hardships. They discover the new site of their city through the appearance of an omen. The key image of this omen is, of course, the giant eagle landing on the blooming cactus growing from a rock. While a number of versions of this foundation story exist,48 Diego Durán's account found in CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 35 able to us. Durán's native informants told him the story of how Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God of War, appeared in a dream to the shaman priest, Cuauhtlequetzqui, who later recounted the appa7 rition. The scene is described in rich detail. After stating all these things, Cuauhtlequetzqui cried out, Know, O my children, that this night our god Huitzilopochtli appeared to me. Remember, on our arrival in this valley. . . Our enemies drove us from that region, but Huitzilopochtli commanded us to kill Copil and this we did, taking out his heart. And standing in the place where the god commanded, I threw the heart into the reeds: it fell upon a rock. According to the revelation of our god when he appeared to me this night, a prickly pear cactus standing upon a rock has grown from this heart and has become so tall and luxuriant that a fine eagle has made his nest there. When we discover it we shall be fortunate, for there we shall find our rest, our comfort, and our grandeur. There our name will be praised and our Aztec nation made great. The might of our arms will be known and the courage of our brave hearts. With these we shall conquer nations, near and distant, we shall subdue towns and cities from sea to sea. We shall become lords of gold and silver, of jewels and precious stones, of splendid feathers and of the insignia. We shall rule over those people, their lands, their sons and daughters. They will serve us and be our subjects and tributaries. Our god orders us to call this place Tenochtitlan. There will be built the city that is to be queen, that is to rule over all others in the country. There we shall receive other kings and nobles, who will recognize Tenochtitlan as the supreme capital. And so, my children, let us go among these marshes of reeds, rushes, and cattails, as our god has indicated. Everything he has promised us has come true; thus we shall now find this place for our city.49 The phrases "rule over all others" and "who will recognize Tenochtitlan as the supreme capital" show that for the informants of Durán, years after the conquest, Tenochtitlan was remembered as the axis mundi of the wider society, subduing others, gathering wealth, and exercising its magnetic political authority, ". . . we shall subdue . . . from sea to sea . . . become lords of gold and silver. . . of splendid feathers and of the insignia ... to rule over all others in the country . . . [and] we shall receive other kings and nobles." The text goes on to 36 CITY OF SACRIFICE ward the rays of the sun," they humbled themselves, and the god "humbled himself, bowing his head low in their direction." The Mexicas "marked the site," rejoiced, and rested. Their first community action was the construction of a shrine to the god, the shrine that, as we will see in the next chapter, became the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. The site of this city and temple was not only discovered through a vision, it came to embody the Aztec vision of place, par excellence. Another version of the city's founding tells that one of the priests who saw the eagle then dived into the lake and disappeared. When he failed to surface, his companions thought he had drowned and they returned to their camp. The priest soon returned and announced that he had descended into the rain god Tlaloc's underworld, communicated with the deity, and was granted permission for the Mexica to settle in this sacred place. This shows that a true axis mundi, an opening to both the celestial and underworld realms, was ordained by the sun god and the water god of the earth. It was to be, as the place sign suggests, the center of authority on the horizontal plane as well as the vertical.50 THE FOUR-QUARTERED CITY Our principal image from the Codex Mendoza shows that the space of the city was divided into four parts, suggesting that it was laid out to conform to the cosmo-magical principle of cardinal axiality.51 One of the main goals of this chapter is to illustrate the profound commitments the Mexicas developed to an overall urban design and sense of cosmic orientatio in their geography. The four-quartered orientation of the city appeared to the conquistador Hernán Cortés during his reconnaissance and entrance into the lakes of the Basin of Mexico. In the Second Letter to King Charles I, his report suggests further evidence of a cardinal orientation of Tenochtitlan, here referred to as Temixtitan: "The great city of Temixtitan is built on the salt lake, and no matter by what road you travel there are two leagues from the main body of the city to the mainland. There are four artificial causeways leading to it, and each is as wide as two cavalry lances. The city itself is as big as Seville or Cordoba."52 Fortunately, Cortés ordered a map miflp nf ťnp ť^níifŕ* iclinrl ritxr /miK1icHr*r1 in KTnrpmiiprii in TC3,A CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 37 into five major sections with extended artificial causeways leading out from an enormous ceremonial center. In his article "The Internal Structure of Tenochtitlan," Edward E. Calnek summarizes the present archaeological consensus on the spatial layout of the Aztec capital, stating that "Tenochtitlan (but not Tlatelolco) was divided into four great quarters, marked off by four avenues that extended in the cardinal directions from the gates of the ceremonial complex."53 According to the extensive legendary account in Diego Durán's História, this spatial division was dictated by the deity who founded the city, Huitzilopochdi. The text reads that after the Aztecs had labored over the construction of their god's temple, Huitzilopochdi spoke to his priest, saying, "Tell the Aztec people that the principal men, each with his relatives and friends and allies, should divide the city into four main wards. The center of the city will be the house you have constructed for my resting place. And let each group build its part of the city as it wishes."54 The divine command was to lay out the new settlement on the five-part model of the horizontal cosmos, assimilating the form of the city to the form of the four quadrants and the center, which constitute the cosmos. This spatial order was formerly achieved following the coronation of the first Aztec King, Acamap-ichtli, "Handful of Reeds," when the Aztec elites gave their four sectors the name Nauhcampa, meaning the "Four Directions of the Wind." It is clear from archaeological evidence and other relevant maps that the city was divided by four major highways that crossed at the foot of the Templo Mayor and drove straight out of the heart of the city, passing through a great platform surrounding the entire sacred precinct.55 Recent studies have shown that the intersection of the four great causeways was located at the foot of HuitzÜopochtli's shrine at the Templo Mayor and not in the central axis joining his temple to Tlaloc's.56 It must be emphasized that these symbolic roads had a crucial impact on life in the city. As Jorge Hardoy, an urban geographer who has studied this city, notes, "These two streets, converging on the solid ground of the original island, were continuations of the causeways which served the dual purpose of crossing the lake and avoiding the swampy chinampa areas. The causeways not only connected the city j8 CITY OF SACRIFICE While it is evident from extensive archaeological work in Meso-america that the practice of four-quartered orientation of settlements varied a great deal, it is also clear that the Aztecs were drawing upon the traditional ordering of a capital city, developed as far back perhaps as the Teotihuacan era but certainly by their royal predecessors, the Toltecs.58 In the tenth-century Toltec capital of Tollan, located fifty kilometers north of Tenochtitlan, from which the Aztecs claimed their legitimate right to rule Mexico, we find the construction of major ritual buildings modeled on the cardinal points of the compass.59 The relevant text reads, "He the Prince, i-Reed Quetzalcoatl, built his house as four: house of turquoise, house of redshell, house of whiteshell, house of precious feathers. There he worshipped, did his penance and also fasted."60 Another extended description of the ceremonial buildings in Tollan states, Wherefore was it called a Tolteca house? It was built with consummate care, majestically designed: it was the place of worship of their priest whose name was Quetzalcoatl. It was quite marvelous. It consisted of four (abodes). One was facing east: this was the house of gold: for this reason it was called house of gold: that which serves as the stucco was gold plate applied, joined to it. One was facing west, toward the setting sun: this was the house of green stone, the house of fine turquoise. For this reason was it called the house of green stone. One was facing south, toward the irrigated lands. This was the house of shells or of silver. . . .One was facing north, toward the plains. . . . this was the red house: red because shells were inlaid in the interior walls, as those stones which were precious stones were red.61 One reliable interpreter of these descriptive phrases, Leonardo Lopez Luján, argues that they refer to a cosmological model, an archetypal Tollan, and not actual buildings in the historical city of Tollan. He notes that in the História de los Mexicanospor Sus Pinturas there is a similar description of the four houses of Tlaloc around a central patio, which refers to a celestial place and not architectural buildings.62 Aztec cosmology and the city that symbolized it derived their general plan, or at least shared their principle features, from a wider Mesoamerican paradigm of the cosmos. The finest image we have, which has a strong resonance in the colonial production of the Codex iijt~.. J.-. - :„ *.!- „______:.._.___. _ r ^1. ...... /~<_________*. jií-_:._ _^____.........i CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 39 deities, birds, and appropriate colors.63 This paradigmatic image, combining a calendar, body parts, gods, colors, and ritual objects, presents the cosmos as four trapezoidal-shaped quarters of the universe surrounding the central image of a great warrior with weapons whose blood is streaming into the four quarters of the universe. One prominent orientation feature of the Fejéruáry-Mayer, which shows up again in the Mendoza image, is that each of the four quarters is centered by an identical type of image with three parts, that is, a blooming tree growing out of a cultural image (temple, sacrificial bowl, celestial spirit, or earth deity) with a sacred bird on top. This pattern of orientating the four quarters is repeated in the central image of the Mendoza, that is, the stylized rock (heart), blooming nopal, and eagle. Further, Tenochtitlan's four-quartered organization surrounding the militant god (in both the Mendoza and actual architectural order) is in a fashion similar to the Fejérváry-Mayer, which has the war god bleeding and poised for battle in the center.64 Archaeology and the study of colonial maps have shown that each of the city's four quarters was a replication of the larger image of cen-teredness, in that each quarter had its own central temple complex that housed the deities of the groups who inhabited that quarter of the city. Durán's informants said, "Huitzilopochtli commanded them to distribute the gods among them (the four districts) and that each barrio choose a special place where these deities might be revered. Thus, each neighborhood was divided into many small sections according to the number of idols it possessed."65 A marketplace and administrative center were part of each quarter s central precinct. Thus, each quarter had its own sacred pivot, reproducing the image of the center that dominated the city as a whole. This pattern of centering was further duplicated and miniaturized in the many barrios of each quarter, each of which had a local ceremonial precinct consisting of a temple, a small market, and a school. Calnek writes, The barrios—conceived as territorial units—were marked by a structure that housed the patron deities of the group. This structure was evidently part of a large complex that also included a telpochcalli (young man's house) and in most or all cases, a plaza or market. ... In addition to pro- 40 CITY OF SACRIFICE provided, in short, a kind of civic center in relation to which the social identities of the greater part of the urban population were most immediately expressed, and additionally, where a great variety of activities essential to the urban neighborhood were conducted.66 Center and Periphery Returning to the abundant images of the Codex Mendoza, it is possible to see the traces, if not the actual outlines, of centrifugal and cardinal orientation in sections of the manuscript, which are often ignored as resources for studying the religious dimensions of the Aztec city. I am reminded of Edward Shils's observation that central value systems and their authoritarian ideologies have a powerful tendency to saturate the social and mental space of every society. Place after place within the society is visited, penetrated, and changed by the symbols and values of the "central place" even as local communities work to adapt them to local conditions. One of the most intense concerns of the painters of the Mendoza is the reiteration of the importance of place and place signs. All the action of the first two sections of the manuscript, especially warfare and trade, is presented in relation to the category of place and place names.67 Page after page of the conquest section is a pictorial interplay between the combined images of the particular Aztec ruler with his war shield and the series of place signs and tipped and burning temples of the conquered towns. The underlying pattern of the first part of the Codex Mendoza, which Elizabeth Hill Boone shows to be "a victory chronicle" rather than a secular history of the city, is the pattern of the expanding frontier of the main settlement through the practice of warfare.68 For instance, when we view the successive mappings of the territorial expansions of each ruler's conquests in the work of Berdan and Anawalt, we are witnessing not just a victory chronicle but a chronicle of imperial expansion and the saturation of central Mesoamerica by the sa-cralized military power of Tenochtitlan.69 The expanding interplay of centrifugal and centripetal force begins with the very modest four conquests of Acamapichtli (13 76-13 96) in the nearby southern region of the lakes, to Huitzilihuitl's (1397-1417) eight conquests further east and north, to Chimalpopoca's (1418-1427) paltry two conquests to the south and north, to Itzcoatľs (1428-1440) explosive twenty-three victories largely in the western and southern regions, through Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina's (1441-1469) thirty-three fur- CITY AS SYMBOL IN AZTEC THOUGHT 4I ther to the south and the east, and Axayacatl (1470-1481) with thirty-six conquests reaching further toward the eastern coast and the conquest of the sister city of Tlatelolco. This is followed by Tizoc's (1481-1486) disappointing fourteen to the south, west, and north, and Ahuitzotl's (14.87—1502) forty-five conquests on the borderlands, which expanded the empire's territorial reach to unprecedented limits. Ahuitzotl's military campaigns reached into the Tehuantepec and Xoconochco regions along the Pacific and deep into Oaxaca. Finally, we arrive at the forty-four victories of Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (1503-1520), which focused on consolidating conquests within the boundaries established by his predecessor. It is significant that his campaigns led to an escalation in the flowery wars with Tlaxcala and its allies. During his reign, massive campaigns against the Tlaxcalans were conducted in earnest, although the stalemate between the two powers continued. Moc-tecuhzoma's forces conquered numerous towns to the south, east, and north of Tlaxcala; this may reflect a strategy of isolating Tlaxcala from potential allies and material resources. The flower war hadbecome a serious war. [Author's note: Moctecuhzoma, Motecuhzoma, and Motecu-zoma are variant spellings of Moctezuma.]70 Boone's innovative interpretation of Part 1 of the Mendoza links the victory chronicle of the expanding central authority of Tenochtitlan to the pattern of tribute payments and shows how centrifugal forces were tied to centripetal capabilities of the elites of Tenochtitlan. The expansion of the city's power outward is always reintegrated back into the substance of the capital, that is, economic gain and redistribution in the capital. When we review the bright series of folios depicting the tribute payments of scores of towns and cities to the capital, we witness, in material and symbolic terms, the Aztec pattern of urban control over the peripheries. Boone writes about the relations of the conquest and tribute sections of the Codex Mendoza: It presents only the reigns of the Mexica rulers and the towns they claimed to have subjugated, omitting mention of other events—such as natural climatic phenomena, building programs, religious celebrations, and the births of rulers—found in other pictorial histories. This focus on the monarchy and its conquests may have been selected for the first Codex Mendoza section as a way of preparing the reader of the codex for the tribute list that follows, for the dynastic conquests werefundamental in creating the tribute empire: 4ß CITY OF SACRIFICE the wall nearest the lake shore and then hovered for a while above Coyo-nacasco. Prom there it moved out into the middle of the lake where it suddenly disappeared. No one cried out when this omen came into view: the people knew what it meant and they watched in silence.85 They knew that the magic of their cosmos had turned against them. This is a striking example of how cosmo-magical consciousness could interpret and sustain an Aztec sense of order long after it had been shattered. Thirty years after the conquest, in a Spanish-run society, Aztec survivors poignantly reaffirm the cosmological conviction lodged in their minds: The collapse of their central city was influenced not primarily by Spanish arms and intentions, but by the pattern of their heaven. It is important to note that Mexico City has been the center of a nation for over five hundred years, making this sacred location the oldest continuous capital in the Americas. Carlos Fuentes refers to it as "city of fixed sun. . . city ancient in light. . . witness of all we forget . . . old city cradled among birds of omen. . . city in the true image of gigantic heaven."86 It was a gigantic image of heaven and earth, sun and water, magnet of the people and heart of the empire that, in spite of upheavals, betrayals, immense migrations over centuries, and periodic earthquakes of Geological and political natures, has periodically resurfaced as a reminder, as a "witness of all we forget." There is an ironic persistence, a haunting, of all this today, for the center of Mexico has once again magnetized the glances of Mexico's citizens and archaeologists around the world. The most prominent structure of the entire capital, Coatepec, or the Templo Mayor, has been excavated and transformed into a museum that is visited by over a million people each year. As Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, the director of excavations, said recently, reflecting my concerns about centers and models, "Our efforts have focused on excavating this single ceremonial precinct as a means of understanding the entire Aztec empire." The task of this chapter has been to explore the cosmo-magical symbols and spatial stories through which the Mexicas organized and interpreted their urban-centered world. It is to this quintessential material center, the quintessential collecting place and symbol of that "vision of place," the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, that we can now turn with a greater ability to appreciate its cosmological-religious dimensions. CHAPTER 2 Templo Mayor The Aztec Vision of Place To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city constituted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi... to reproduce the universe. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane More can be said for the thesis that all orders and forms of authority in human society are founded on institutionalized violence. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans When the Spaniards arrived in the Basin of Mexico and first saw the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they were startled by its architectural order, social complexity, and spatial organization. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a sergeant in Cortés's troop, left us this memorable first impression of the Aztec capital: During the morning we arrived at a broad causeway and continued our march towards Iztapalapa and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of the soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say. . . and the lake itself was crowded with canoes and in the causeway there were many bridges at intervals and in front 50 CITY OP SACRIFICE of us stood the great City of Mexico ... we went to the orchard and garden, which was such a wonderful thing to see and walk in, that I never tired of looking at the diversity of the trees, and noting the scent which each one had, and the paths full of roses and flowers, and the many fruit trees and native roses and the pond of fresh water . . . and all was cemented and very splendid with many kinds of stone (monuments) with pictures on them, which gave much to think about.1 Compare that reverie with one of the last impressions the Spaniards had of the Aztec city before the conquest. During the ferocious Spanish siege of Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs made a desperate sacrifice of captive Spaniards to their sun and war god, Huitzilopochtli, whose shrine sat on top of the Great Temple, the Templo Mayor, located in the heart of the ceremonial center, When we retreated near to our quarters and had already crossed a great opening where there was much water, the arrows, javelins and stones The Coyolxauhqui Stone depicting the dismembered body of the warrior goddess Coyolxauhqui was discovered at the foot of the stairway leading up to the top of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan. Notice the blood flow, with j ewels attached, just above her left knee. Each elbow and knee wears the mask TEMPLO MAYOR 51 í:; could no longer reach us. Sandoval, Francisco de Lugo and Andres de ■ Tapia were standing with Pedro de Alvarado each one relating what had happened to him and what Cortés had ordered, when again there was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobos and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them all was terrifying, and we all looked towards the lofty Pyramid where they were being sounded, and saw that our comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Cortés were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed. When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with some knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies and the flesh they ate in chilmole.2 These radically different impressions of Aztec life and religion, one emphasizing the peaceful mood, architectural order, and natural delights of a capital city, and the other lamenting the horrifying human sacrifices of Spaniards at the Great Temple, reflect the incongruous and enigmatic image of Aztec life that has troubled modern readers for centuries.3 For students of American Indian religions and cultures, this fractured image raises questions of the most profound and emotional sort. For instance, how could a people who conceived of and carved the uniquely marvelous Calendar Stone,4 and developed one of the most accurate calendrical systems in the ancient world, spend so much energy, time, blood, and wealth in efforts to obtain and sacrifice human victims for every conceivable feast day in the calendar?5 Why did a people so fascinated by and accomplished in music, sculpture,6 featherwork, astronomy, craft industries, poetry,7 and painting become so committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife? Why did the people who under- $2 CITY OF SACRIFICE through the texts is an image of startling juxtaposition of Flowers, Songs/Blood, Cut! We may come to a greater understanding of the Aztec situation by focusing our attention on the Aztec "vision of place," that is, the way they conceived the character of their cosmos and their vital and pressured role within it. By knowing a culture's sense of its own place and position in the cosmos, through a reading, in part, of its creation myths, we can become familiar with the central and dominant concepts, paradigms, and enigmas ofthat culture.8 In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mexico, the city of Tenochti-tlan was the place upon which a vision of empire was founded. This capital, and especially its amazing ceremonial center, was the place where the Aztec vision of cosmic order and dynamics was expressed in stone, wood, color, sound, myth, ritual, and the drama of sacrificial rites. From this ceremonial theater, Aztec symbolic language, social character, and political authority flowed outward to influence over four hundred towns and cities in central Mesoamerica.9 But the power of the city worked in the reverse direction as well. The magnetic pull and prestige of this grand settlement made it the gathering place of central Mesoamerican pilgrims, luxury items, ambassadors, traders, gods, gifts for the gods, diplomats, and nobles, all of whom were periodically located and constrained within the boundaries of this island community. The Aztecs intended that everything powerful, beautiful, and meaningful would flow into the ceremonial landscapes of the city. As the second quotation from Diaz del Castillo, earlier in this chapter, suggests, the quintessential example of Aztec symbolization of cosmological order and imperial intention within the larger precinct was the Great Temple, which dominated the ceremonial center. In fact, numerous other references to the rituals performed at the Great Temple during Aztec times,10 plus the amazing discoveries at the excavations of the temple's base in Mexico City,11 demonstrate that this shrine was not only the axis of their universe, it was the imago mundi, the architectural image of their cosmic order and sense of political destiny. The mythology, shape, sculpture, and ceremony associated with the Templo Mayor reveal that more than any other single structure, it embodied the Aztecs' vision of their place in thf iimrlA "Rii<-*Vi4» í.,,«-.,.™,,------------C-------1-------------..------ -1- ' TEMPLO MAYOR 53 hatred, and fear of the outsiders. When we examine the mythic expressions of this vision of place, we find that the whole language of symbols and social structure that followed were mied with messages of religious violence, sacrifice, and even monumental sacrifice of enemies, slaves, women, and children. This is an important point for historians of religions concerned with understanding how sacred spaces, throughout the traditional world and especially in Mesoamerica, oriented the political order of societies. It appears that these imago mundis were permeated with and expressive of religious patterns of violence, conquest, and extreme brutality. As Walter Burkert showed in Homo Necans, the ties between religio-political authority in its most sophisticated expressions and institutionalized violence (not just eccentric violence) are foundational and inextricable. The evidence from Mexico City suggests that the matter of extreme violence in the center of the world is due to both cosmogonic myths of its foundation and to eccentric relations with the peoples, lands, and forces beyond the confines of the Aztec island. In this chapter, I expand my previous discussion of spatial stories to talk about "storied spaces of sacrifice," or the stories that give us a vivid sense of the sacrificial meaning and purpose of the vision of this imago mundi that attracted the ritual activities of the Aztecs and so fascinated and terrorized the Spaniards. I also want to complicate the Aztec image of their own supreme cen-trality and the prestige of the category of the symbolism of the center by uncovering the symbolic objects and rebellious forces of the Mex-ica peripheries buried in the floors of the Great Temple and disguised in the myths of the birth of the gods of the sun. HERMENEUTICS AND THE TEMPLO MAYOR The ruins of the Great Temple were excavated during the intense archaeological period of 1978—1982. Today, small localized digs and analyses continue at the site, which has been turned into one of the finest teaching museums in the Americas.12 The excavation is extremely important for students of Indigenous American Religions because it uncovered the foundation and treasures of a structure that reflected the Aztec sense of cosmic and political order, military expansion, religious inspiration, and authority. Unlike the majority SO CITY OP SACRIFICE Aztec mythology, understood in the light of the history of religions, and the two dimensions of orientatio at the Templo Mayor reflected in the opening quotations—monumental ceremonial space and monumental ritual death—and to suggest that both types of monumentality were stimulated by historical crisis. Specifically, I approach this coincidence through a direct interpretation of two major mythic episodes in the Aztec tradition, the myth of Huitzilopochtli's birth at the mountain of Coatepec and the cosmogonic myth of the Creation of the Fifth Sun at the sacred city of Teotihuacan.20 IMAGINATION AND THE TEMPLO MAYOR I must note the tentative nature of this chapter because the Templo Mayor is not only a paradigm of the postclassic Mesoamerican world, but continues to be, for modern scholars, at least two other things—a puzzle and a scandal. It is a puzzle because it contained so many bits, pieces, parts, and shapes of the Aztec world arranged according to a plan that we have still only partially discerned. There are an enormous number of questions raised by the groups of masks, rebuildings, chronology, child sacrifices, strange deity images, Teotihuacan and Toltec symbolism, pervasiveness of Tlaloc imagery, and absence of images of the young, vital war god Huitzilopochtli. It will take several decades to figure out the full design of this puzzle. The scandal of the Templo Mayor resides in its pre-Hispanic use as a theater for large numbers of human sacrifices of warriors, children, women,21 and slaves. Although we have been aware of this shocking practice (for us) for almost half a millennium, the scholarly community has been remarkably hesitant to explore the evidence and nature of large-scale ritual killing in Aztec Mexico. As I discuss in later chapters, all major theories of sacrifice and human sacrifice have ignored the most compelling record available. Something repulsive, threatening, and apparently mind-boggling about the increment in human sacrifices has confounded theologians, anthropologists, and other scholars in their consideration of Aztec ritual.22 The exemplary, puzzling, and scandalous nature of this temple and the excavation demands an approach similar to the one articulated by Peter Brown in his essay on imaginative curiosity, "We must ask ourselves whether the imaginative models that we l_..:..- ._- ..l___..-- J___fl. :_^_............../r: _: _ ..i.l__ .____:____J l:nr~*___*.:_.__1 TEMPLO MAYOR $J human, to enable us to understand and to communicate to the others the sheer challenge of the past."23 In my view, the imaginative models of the history of religions do provide a useful approach to the "sheer challenge of the Aztec past" and its great temple. THE TEMPLO MAYOR AS IMAGO MUNDI The most imposing and powerful structure in the grand ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan was the Templo Mayor. Early colonial depictions, such as the one found in the Códice Durán, emphasize the monumentality of the Templo Mayor.24 There it is presented as a four-sided pyramid resting on a large base. The pyramid actually consisted of two vertical structures, each with a separate stairway, joined down the middle and leading to the two shrines on top. The commentator of the Códice Durán notes, "On top there was a platform supporting two temples adorned with merlons. The god Tlaloc was in one temple and Huitzilopochtli was in the other. Leading up to their shrines was a double stairway down which were thrown the bodies of sacrificial victims."25 Its sustained importance as the sacred center of the capital is reflected in the fact that it was enlarged frontally twelve times during the less than two hundred years of its existence. Its size and the imperial vista it provided were described by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, We stood looking about us, for that huge and cursed temple stood so high that from it one could see over everything very well, and we saw the three causeways which led into Mexico, that is the causeway of Iztapalapa by which we had entered four days before, and that of Tacuba, and that of Tepeaquilla [Guadalupe], and we saw the fresh water that comes from Chapultepec which supplies the city, and we saw the bridges on the three causeways which were built at certain distances apart through which the water of the lake flowed in and out from one side to the other, and we beheld on that great lake a great multitude of canoes, some coming with supplies of food and others returning with cargoes of merchandise; and we saw that from every house of that great city and all of the other cities that were built in the water it was impossible to pass from house to house, except by drawbridges which were made of wood or in canoes; and we saw in those cities Cues and oratories like towers and fortresses and all gleaming white, and it was a wonderful thing to behold; then the houses 6O CITY OF SACRIFICE work on Quetzalcoatl demonstrated. In terms of the history of religions, this combination of Coatepec, Tula, and the prestige of origins reflects a "mythical geography," a geography that transcends but influences the political geography of the singers and storytellers. Association with Tula and its beginnings sanctifies action and individuals related with it.30 In this case, the Aztec poets have created a prestigious space for Huitzilopochtli's birth by linking the Toltec capital, source of the sanctity of kings and cultures, with Coatepec, the source of their own god, and then casting this linkage in the setting of in illo tempore, his creation, his beginnings. At the center of this landscape, at the axis mundi, where the origin of Huitzilopochtli was revealed, the Mother of the Gods, Lady of the Serpent Skirt, is sweeping the temple. She is identified as the mother of "the four hundred gods of the south," especially one, Coyolxauhqui, by name. The Miraculous Pregnancy of Coatlicue, the Mother Goddess The narrative continues, "there fell on her some plumage." Following the narration of the cosmological setting comes a short episode of the miraculous impregnation of the Mother Goddess by a small ball of "fine feathers" that fell from above. This form of engendering a god reflects a common Mesoamerican pattern. In this case, the divine semen descends from the sky in the form of white feathers, replicating what Lopez Austin calls the "process of the descent of divine semen into the earthly sphere to create new beings."31 It is significant that the meeting point of heaven, in the form of the fine feathers, and the earth, in the form of the Mother Goddess, is the hill Coatepec. The joining of sky and earth symbols in this simple way represents a hieros gamos, a sacred union of the above and the below in order to produce a deity. The Four Hundred Children Prepare for War Hearing of their mother's pregnancy at the sacred mountain, her four hundred children "were very angry, they were very agitated, as if the heart had gone out of them. Coyolxauhqui incited them, she inflamed the anger of her brothers, so that they should kill her mother." The third and longest episode in the myth details the ferocious prepa- TEMPIO MAYOR 6l between the unborn Huitzilopochtli and his mother and uncle, a military march and a crescendo of motion leading to the ascent of the mountain. The entire action is laced with a ferocity of the divine warrior cultivated by Coyolxauhqui. The episode reveals, among other things, the martial ideal par excellence of the Aztec warrior who builds himself up into a berserk mode of being through ritual array and communal incitement. It is also revealing that this berserk response to the pregnancy at the temple on the mountain begins at the periphery of the mythical geography and moves toward the center.32 This movement is especially important for understanding the increment in human sacrifice that took place at the Templo Mayor. The episode begins with the report that the four hundred gods of the south were insulted by Coatlicue's pregnancy, and Coyolxauhqui exhorts them with "My brothers, she has dishonored us, we must kill our mother" and the inquiry of who fathered "what she carries in her womb." The scene abruptly shifts to the mountain, where Coatlicue becomes very frightened and saddened by the threat from her children. Then Huitzilopochtli, still in her womb, calms her with the promise "Do not be afraid, I know what I must do." The action then shifts back to the four hundred gods of the south who decide to kill their mother because of this disgrace, "they were very angry. . . very agitated . . . Coyolxauhqui incited them . . . she inflamed them." They respond to this mounting anger by attiring themselves "as for war." While they dress and groom themselves as warriors, one of the four hundred, named Cuahuitlicac, sneaks to Coatepec and reports every movement and advance toward the hill to Huitzilopochtli, who, still speaking from the womb, instructs his uncle, "Take care, be watchful, my uncle, for I know well what I must do." The text bears repeating at this point. And when finally they came to an agreement, the four hundred gods determined to kill, to do away with their mother, then they began to prepare, Coyolxauhqui directing them. They were very robust, well equipped, adorned as for war, they distributed among themselves their paper garb, the anecuyotl, the nettles, the streamers of colored paper, they tied little bells on the calves of their legs, the bells called oyohaulli. Their arrows had barbed points. Then they began to move. 02 CITY OP SACRIFICE carefully from the womb, "Now they are coming through Tzompan-titlan. . . Coaxalpan... up the side of the mountain. . . now they are on the top, they are here." Coyolxauhqui is leading them. Huitzilopochtli's Birth At the climactic moment of their ascent, "Huitzilopochtli was born ... he struck Coyolxauhqui, he cut off her head. . . Huitzilopochtli pursued the four hundred gods of the south, he drove them away, he humbled them, he destroyed them, he annihilated them." The entire song has been building toward this dramatic devastation, not just of the sister Coyolxauhqui, but of the entire warrior population that attacks the mountain. When Coyolxauhqui arrives at the top of the mountain, Huitzilopochtli is born fully grown, swiftly dresses himself as a great warrior, and dismembers his sister with a serpent of fire. The text is specific not only about her head being cut off, but about her body falling to pieces as it rolls down the hill. Now we gain a fuller understanding of the meaning of Coatepec in the drama. The Templo Mayor was called Coatepec by the Aztecs and consisted of, as noted earlier, a huge pyramid base supporting two temples, one to Huitzilopochtli and one to Tlaloc.33 Two grand stairways led up to the shrines. The Coyolxauhqui stone was found directly at the base of the stairway leading up to Huitzilopochtli's temple. On both sides of the stairway's base, completing the bottom of the stairway's sides, were two large grinning serpent heads and numerous others jutted out from the different walls of the pyramid. The image is remarkable. The Templo Mayor is the architectural image of Coatepec, or Serpent Mountain. Just as Huitzilopochtli triumphed at the top of the mountain, while his sister was dismembered and fell to pieces below, so Huitzilopochtli's temple and icon sat triumphantly at the top of the Templo Mayor with the carving of the dismembered goddess far below at the base of the steps. This drama of sacrificial dismemberment was vividly repeated in some of the offerings found around the Coyolxauhqui stone in which the decapitated skulls of young women were placed. And it appears from surviving descriptions of sacrifice that the bodies of victims toppled down the steps and landed on the stone below. The suggestion is that there was a ritual re-enactment of the myth at the dedication of the stone sometime in the latter part of the fifteenth century.34 TEMPLO MAYOR 63 Mythical Escalation of Sacrifice Most interpretations of this myth end with the dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui and the realization that the Templo Mayor and the architectural arrangement of Huitzilopochtli's temple and the Coyolxauhqui stone replicated this cosmogony. However, a further reading of the myth holds a major key to the significance of this vision of place. Following Coyolxauhqui's dismemberment, there is a total reversal in the location of berserk, ferocious action—away from the attacking warriors onto the person of Huitzilopochtli. Before, it was Coyolxauhqui who generated the ferocity of battle and transmitted it to her siblings. Now, it is Huitzilopochtli who embodies enormous aggression and attacks. We are repeatedly told about his aggression, but, most important, that he attacks and sacrifices nearly all the other deities in the drama. It is a myth not just about one sacrifice, hut about a sudden increment in human sacrifices to include innumerable warriors who come to the Templo Mayor/Coatepecfrom the distant regions of the Aztec world, Consider the text. Huitzilopochtli "was proud" and drove the four hundred off the mountain of the snake, but he did not stop there, "He pursued them, he chased them, all around the mountain . . . four times." Here we see reference to the symbolic number four representing directions, but also perhaps to the four previous cosmogonic ages. The text is emphatic regarding this ritual combat and the aggressions of the god, "with nothing could they defend themselves. Huitzilopochtli chased them, he drove them away, he humbled them, he destroyed them, he annihilated them." The text does not end there but continues to portray this ritual aggression in more vivid terms, "they begged him repeatedly, they said to him, 'It is enough.' But Huitzilopochtli was not satisfied, with force he pushed against them . . . stripped off their gear [their ornaments] ." The aggression of Coyolxauhqui and her four hundred siblings dissolved before this one great warrior who did more than defeat and kill them, he obliterated their existence. Finally, he took their costumes, their symbols, and "introduced them into his destiny, he made them his own insignia." In this act of symbolic possession, Huitzilopochtli transformed their obliteration into his own power, integrating the ritual array, the spiritual forces of their costumes, into his own design. This is a remarkable act of paradigmatic value because, as 64 CITY OP SACRIFICE the excavation has shown, over seven thousand ritual objects from conquered and allied communities were literally collected, integrated, and arranged according to Aztec cosmic symbolism into the base of the Templo Mayor.35 The Historical Epilogue Following Huitzilopochtli s victory, "the Aztecs venerated him, they made sacrifices to him . . . and his cult came from there, from Coatepec, the Mount of the Serpent." The myth ends with a direct reference to the paradigmatic role this action played in Aztec religion. We are told that Huitzilopochtli was a "prodigy" who was conceived miraculously, "he never had any father," and that sacrifices were made to him in exchange for his rewards. In this final section of the song, we are taken out of the mythic realm of the story into the socio-historical purpose of the divine action—to practice the religion of Huitzilopochtli and his manner of birth. As at the beginning, we are solidly placed on the peak of Coatepec, which is identified as the origin of not only the god, but also his cult of incremental human slaughter. The narrative ends, "and his cult came from there, from Coatepec, the Mountain of the Serpent as it was practiced from most ancient times." What we learn from this Aztec statement about myth, sacred space, and sacrifice is that Coatepec was the vision of place, the mythic place where a god was bom who sacrificed—not sacrificing just one god, but ferociously sacrificing an abundance of gods as his first act of life. We are also instructed that this place and these actions were the source of a cult, a religious practice of many sacrifices, many ascents, and many ritual combats. Reference to the practice of this cult appears in the reports of Diego Durán, whose informants told him that the events at Coatepec were performed every year in the national festivals of the Aztecs during the month of Panquetzaliztli (Banners Are Raised). This ceremony was highlighted by a foot race called Ipaina Huitzilopochtli (the haste, velocity, or swiftness of Huitzilopochtli). Durán's comments reveal the relation of the myth and the theme and activity of the ceremony: "Thus was named this commemorative celebration because while the god was alive he was never caught, never taken prisoner in war, was always triumphant over his enemies, and, no matter how swift he goes, none ever caught up with him. He was the one who caught them. Therefore this feast honored his speed."36 It is as TEMPLO MAYOR 65 tl tough the swiftness of his birth and transformation into an adult warrior, followed by his pursuit and execution of warriors in the last episode of the myth of Huitzilopochdi, become the model for this attitude in the ritual. The Templo Mayor and related actions located at the heart of the city and empire represent the dramatic cosmic victory of Huitzilopochtli and the Aztecs over celestial and terrestrial enemies. When victims ascended the Great Temple dressed in plumes, were forced to dance in symbolic ecstasy, and were sacrificed before being thrown down the steps of the temple, a ritual repetition was being performed to reenact a mythic beginning that told of the systematic, violent destruction of gods from the periphery. This song provided a model of violence for the institution of ritual authority that resided at Coatepec. CENTER AND PERIPHERY Until now, we have seen abundant evidence that the Aztec city was structured by a series of meanings and activities associated with the "Symbolism of the Center." It is apparent to me that the usual way in which some historians of religions and anthropologists conceive of the category of the center does not constitute a thorough interpretive approach for understanding the Templo Mayor's history and meaning. A peoples vision of place reflects their strategies, mechanisms, and performances for integrating their potent symbols with their social organization and historical developments, their theology, ontology, and social ambitions. In this regard, it is vitally important, at least in the Aztec case, to be aware of not only the integrating powers of the axis mundi, but also to acknowledge and interpret the impulses of expansion of a sacred center and the results. The previous chapter showed how this process of the expansion of Aztec sacred space paralleled the development of Tenochtitlan from the site of the nopal to the shrine of Huitzilopochtli and spread to the four quadrants of the city and eventually the organization of tribute payments for the empire. But it is also necessary to understand the historical, social, and symbolic tension that developed between the centripetal character and centrifugal tendencies of both the capital and its main shrine. For example, Edward Shils has shown that great centers are ruled by elites whose authority has "an expansive tendency. . . a tendency to expand the order it represents towards the saturation of territorial space . . . the periphery. Rulers, simply out of their possession of authority and 66 CITY OP SACRIFICE the impulses it generates, wish to be obeyed and they wish to obtain assent to the order they symbolically embody."37 Yet these impulses of expansion will inevitably lead to involve- ; ment in peripheral and competing traditions of value, meaning, and authority, which sometimes results in tentative and fragile arrangements of power and authority between the center and the periphery. Though peripheral systems and their symbols may be weaker within a hierarchy of an empire, they nevertheless have the potential to threaten the center with disbelief, reversal, and rebellion. It is within this kind of situation that W B. Yeats s famous line has direct relevance, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Although I will not go into the Mesoamerican pattern in detail here, it is evident that some ancient Mexican kingdoms were arranged similarly to what Stanley Tambiah calls "pulsating galactic polities," that is, kingdoms in which the capital cities, designed as imago mundis, were in constant tension and antagonism with the surrounding allied and enemy set- | dements. In these "pulsating" kingdoms, the "exemplary centers" are sometimes deflated by rebellion and disputes with unstable factions that threaten to bring about processes of disintegration on a large scale. In Southeast Asia, this resulted in the continual relocation of capital cities and an eccentric and unstable understanding of authority.38 While Mesoamerican polities did not relocate capitals as often as did cultures in Southeast Asia, the disintegration and relocation of imperial centers (Teotihuacan, Tollan, Azcapotzalco, Tenochtitlan) did take place in significant numbers. This is an important point, be- ; cause it suggests that centers not only dominate and control peripher- < ies, but peripheries influence and sometimes transform centers, even a center as aggressive and dominant as Tenochtitlan. With this pattern in mind, we can turn back to the evidence uncovered at the Great Temple to see the impact of peripheral territories on the capital city. We will see that threats from the Aztec past, as well as from the competing traditions of their contemporary world, transformed the Templo Mayor and the city it sanctified. SYMBOLS FROM THE PERIPHERY Ahuitzotl then requested that the royal officials have the majordomos, TBMflO MAYOR 67 of great value and in quantity. There were countless articles of clothing and many adornments, both for men and for women, of great richness, and an amazing quantity of cacao, chiles, pumpkin seeds, all kinds of fruit, fowls, and game.39 As noted earlier, the Templo Mayor was the symbolic gathering place of the great tribute network of the Aztec empire.40 Not only was it the material expression of Aztec religious thought, it was also, as Pro-yecto Templo Mayor has clearly shown, a ritual container of sacred, symbolic gifts from many parts of the unstable, shifting political geography of the empire. Over 7,000 ritual objects were found in the 131 burial caches, and about 80 percent of them came from distant towns and city-states. Leonardo López Luján's excellent synthetic study shows, for example, that the many animal remains spread throughout the offerings include species whose "natural habitats lie a considerable distance from Tenochtitlan. The animals identified came from four different ecological zones; the temperate zone of the Central Plateau, the tropical forests, the coral reefs, and the coastal estuaries and lakes."41 Thus far, over two hundred species within eleven zoological groups have been identified as originating from distant ecosystems. Just considering the fish buried at the Templo Mayor, biologists are impressed by the predominance of specimens from the waters and reefs of the Gulf of Mexico.42 And it appears that selective fishing was used in choosing which fish and elasmobranchs were offered to the gods in the capital. But the burial of these objects within the floors and rooms of the Great Temple incorporated more than just natural habitats. They were also expressions of short- and long-distance social relations. The complex and vulnerable social world the Aztecs strove to control within and well beyond the Basin of Mexico consisted of small local states, called tlatocayotl,43 in constantly shifting alliances and rebellions with one another. These city-states consisted of small, agriculturally based, politically organized territories under the control of a city that was the seat of government, ceremonial center, and home of a ruling class that claimed descent from the gods. Conflict and warfare were constant, and the conquest of one tlatocayotl by another resulted in the imposition of significant tribute on the conquered people. As the 68 CITY OF SACRIFICE mous. The city's prestige and wealth depended to a large degree on these enormous amounts of tribute payments, which flowed into the capital and insured economic superiority for the royal house, the nobles, and the common citizens. A symbolic portion of these payments, collected by the workers and specialists of these outlying societies, were brought to the capital and ritually buried at state ceremonies. In this way, the social and natural habitats of peripheral communities were symbolically contained at the axis mundi. López Luján's work on the offerings of the Templo Mayor reveals that the ritual specialists of the capital were concerned with the "management of inner space" of the caches, a management guided by a symbolic language that was developed to establish effective communication with the living and dying gods, vital forces, and sacred entities who dwelled within the great shrine.44 This language, claims Lopez Luján, is akin to writing but was not expressed in writing. He notes, The information. . . shows that archaeological contexts have a great similarity to ritual syntax and to verbal language. If this is correct, we will find two kinds of archaeological syntax: an "internal" one, corresponding to the distribution of objects within a container or receptacle, and an "external" one, related to the arrangement of the offerings with respect to architectural structures. In this sense, we could speak of a "language" of the offerings that resembles the basic principles of writing—a language not only expressed in signs and symbols, but also with grammatical (or contextual) rules.45 There was also an abundance of fabricated goods in the offerings, the greatest percentage of which were from peripheral communities. These included Mezcala-style objects, including around 160 masks and 200 anthropomorphic, full-size figures as well as scores of greenstone, obsidian, and animal and plant representations. Overall, there was a striking diversity of objects, symbols, and meanings that reflect the pattern of centripetal forces in relation to the tribute section of the Codex Mendoza as discussed in the previous chapter. López Luján notes that "the most common offerings assembled very diverse materials (for example, bone awls, copal, quail, beheaded skulls, alligators, 1111 ■ 1 ■ r rrl 1 \ .....I _ .. .11______t-:.____a.„m~\ ~C TEMPLO MAYOR 69 If we follow López Luján's suggestion about the religious, gift-giving language of the offerings, we can say that the grammatical or contextual rules evident in the offerings reveal two types of idioms: a cosmological language and a complex social, center-periphery idiom. For example, there are many offerings dedicated to the rain god Tla-loc that symbolize, among other things, the distant sacred landscapes of his mountains, paradise, caves, and seas.47 This suggests that the Templo Mayor was not only the replica of Hutizilopochtli's birth mountain, but also of Tlaloc's paradises associated with the earth, which spread out far beyond the city. The priests at the Templo Mayor collected into the shrine's architecture the powers of Tlaloc, making it a vivid image of Tlaloc's sacred landscape. In this manner, the language is one of cosmological incorporation; the sacred peripheries of the cosmos come to the center of the Aztec capital. Many of these objects display the cosmic themes of creation and relations with supernatural. But the second idiom of the management of inner space reflects the social, horizontal relations of conflict, conquest, and sacrifice. Throughout the ethno-historic sources, we read of the dynamic and rebellious rulers and peoples of other towns who challenge the exemplary Aztec capital, sometimes forcing long-distance military campaigns and large expenditures of goods and men that resulted in victories and defeats. This combination of a balanced cosmology with a disruptive social history may alter Geertz's formulation of the exemplary center continually poised to dominate with the illusion of effortlessness. As Stanley Tambiah rightly notes in his criticism, Geertz's model paints "all kings at the summits of exemplary centers as still points, immobilized into passivity and reflective trances. The higher their position and the greater their kingdom's glory and prosperity, the more they were reduced to 'mere signs among signs.' "48 In Aztec history, still points alternate with seismic disruptions. We witness constantly shifting, shrinking, bulging lines of an empire harshly contained. Aztec rulers were always either mobilized for war at the perimeter, on the brink of armed conflict within the realm, or at war near and far. During the reign of Ahuitzotl (1486-1502), the provinces of Tecuantepec, Xolotla, Izhuatlan, Miauatlan, andAmax-tlan, located far from the royal capital, decided to "block the way to A . 1.1 1 -lit . ,-. 70 CITY OP SACRIFICE would sack the natural and luxury items of these regions. The Aztec ruler responded by launching a major war that, in this case but not all cases, succeeded in destroying the rebellious armies and multiplying the amount of rich tribute that came into Tenochtitlan. The account of the conflict includes telling words about the social and political significance of tribute. "All of this opulence was directed toward demonstrating Tenochtitlan's greatness and magnificence, also to please the allied lords, to make them favorable to Tenochtitlan, and to have them at this city's orders when the need came."49 If the court, capital, and temple of Moctezuma reflect the supernatural world, which they surely do, they also reflect the political struggles of center/periphery; the center is engorged with tribute from the border communities that periodically rejected its authority, usually with catastrophic results. But whatever the results, the Aztecs felt compelled to display and incorporate foreign symbols into their public rituals and burials. The Aztec capital and the Templo Mayor are then both an exemplary center and an exemplary periphery! This integration of peripheral places is elaborated in one of the most stunning discoveries to date, the oŕFerings of Chamber 2, at the base of the stairway in front of Tlaloc's shrine, in which a large number of finely carved masks were mixed with images of the gods Tla-loc, Xiuhtecuhdi, and Chalchiuhdicue, a sacrificed puma, and other greenstone images in one burial. The three layers of offerings contained, among other items: 3,997 conch shells; 2,178 greenstone beads; 98 sculptures and 56 masks from the Mezcala region; and a puma's skeleton covering the eastern side of the deposit.50 The Mezcala sculptures and masks are particularly indicative of center/periphery relations, as the Guerrero region of Mexico always had unstable, flimsy political relations with the Aztec capital. These masks have distant, frightening, awe-inspiring faces that were carved in many different settlements under Aztec domination. They display different artistic styles, emphasizing different facial features, and were apparently offered as a special tribute to the Great Temple for some auspicious ceremonial event during the period 1469-1481. They are not only signs of sacred offering, but signs of subjugation. Valuable objects, perhaps symbolic faces of different allies or frontier communities, were buried at the world's axis. There is also an important temporal aspect to some of the other TEMPLO MAYOR 7I caches that contained masks and objects associated with the ancient civilizations of Teotihuacan (ioo C.E.—650 c.E.) and Tula (900 c.E.— 1150 c.E.).51 One of the most remarkable offerings was of a small, mint-condition, Olmec jade mask that was probably carved two thousand years before the first of the temple's eleven facades were constructed. In these precious ancient treasures we see the Aztec commitment to integrating the symbols of ancient civilizations into the shrine. TWIN TEMPLES One of the most puzzling aspects of the Templo Mayor is its twin temples. The pattern of crowning a pyramidal base with two temples appears to be an Aztec innovation, but an important debate has developed about the cause and significance of this style. The first group, elaborated by Esther Pasztory, argues that the magnificent cities of Teotihuacan, Tollan, and Chollolan, with their great pyramids, imposing stone sculpture, complex social structures, long-distance trade systems, religious iconography, and sacred genealogies for kings, intimidated and inspired the Aztecs to measure up to and integrate the classic heritage into their own art and politics.52 For example, the truly monumental four-quartered city of Teotihuacan (Abode of the Gods) was revered as the place where the present cosmogonic era was created. Aztec kings periodically went to the ancient shrines to perform sacrifices and re-establish ties to the divine ancestors and sanctity that dwelt there. The subsequent Toltec civilization of the Great Tollan and the cult of Quetzalcoatl were viewed as the quintessential source of artistic excellence, agricultural abundance, and ritual renewal and the place where giants had perceived the divine plan for human society.53 Pasztory argues that these cities "cast a giant shadow over the Aztecs who could not help feeling small and inferior by contrast."54 Plagued by a sense of illegitimacy and cultural inferiority, the Aztecs, who had recently descended from the wandering Chi-chimecas, made shrewd and strenuous efforts to encapsulate the sanctified traditions of the past into their shrine. This is reflected in the fact that the Templo Mayor supported great shrines to the ancient god Tlaloc, as well as to the newcomer Huitzilopochtli. As the excavation of the Templo Mayor proceeded, several small temples were discovered immediately adjacent to it that were decorated with Tlaloc sym- 72 CITY OF SACRIFICE bols associated with Teotihuacan architecture. On the obvious level, Tlaloc's presence represents the greatforces of water and moisture that were absolutely critical for agricultural conditions of the lake and sin rounding lands. Elaborate ceremonies were held, involving the s.n i i-fice of children to Tlaloc, in order to bring the seasonal rains to the land.55 But Tlaloc's prominence at the shrine displays another Aztec concern as well. Tlaloc was the old god of the land who had sustained the great capitals of pre-Aztec Mexico. He represented a prior structure of reality in a cultural and supernatural sense. He had given permission to the Aztecs to settle in the lake, and he was therefore the indigenous deity who adopted the newcomers. As a means of legitimating their shrine and'city, the Aztecs were forced to integrate the great supernatural and cultural authority of the past into the Templo Mayor.56 Other scholars, such as Matos Moctezuma, argue that the symbolism of two temples is a "clear superstructural image of an economy based on agriculture and on tribute obtained by military conquests of other societies."57 The widespread cults of farmers and warriors are joined at the center of the world to insure communal commitments, productivity, and mystification of their labors. A third group argues that the twin temples are primarily reflective of the ancient and consistent cosmo-magical worldview of a series of co-incidentia oppositorium, including the oppositions and complements of sky/earth, dry season/rainy season, summer solstice/winter solstice, two cosmic/geographical mountains (Coatepetl/Tonactepetl), and cults of the gods Tlaloc-Tlatltecuhtli/Cihuacoatl-Coatlicue Co-yolxauhqui.58 This approach places the dual design not within the Aztec search for political legitimacy or economic balance, but within the traditional religious concepts shared with a large number of post-classic societies in the central plateau from whom the Aztecs derived parts of their cosmovision.59 However, as clearly shown by the richness of the data and the obvious entanglements of political power to mythology, it is a reduction to limit and fold the specific style of Mexico life into the general cosmo-magical plan in this manner. The prominence of Huitzilo-pochtli's story and shrine clearly and uniquely reflects Mexica history, inferiority, and rise to power. In addition, the Mexica's "dual identity" of being labeled, in their own day, as both civilized owrfprimitive TEMPLO MAYOR 7} must be taken into account. In a sense, the twin temples reflect not only the twin cosmic mountains and their associated symbolism, but also the ascent of Huitzilopochtli and his people up the social pyramid to his place of great prominence. The practice of integrating the images of the great cultural past is also reflected in the discovery of an elaborately painted Chac Mool in front of one of the earliest Templo Mayor constructions. This backward reclining figure, which was perhaps a messenger to the fertility gods, holds a bowl on his lap that was used to hold the heart of sacrificial victims. But Chac Mools were definitely not Aztec. They were Toltec figures who appeared in prominent ceremonial centers of the Toltec cities. The statue's surprising appearance at the Templo Mayor again suggests Aztec insecurity and concern to bring the superior cultural past into their mighty present. TEMPLO MAYOR, PERIPHERIES, HUMAN SACRIFICE When the completed edifice was considered to be perfect, the king sent his emissaries to the provinces and cities to invite all the rulers and nobles there to be present at the solemn festivity for the dedication of the temple. All were asked to bring slaves for sacrifice, as tribute, which was obligatory on these occasions. With these instructions, the ambassadors set forth. . . The rulers of those cities accepted the invitation and promised to take the prisoners they were obliged to give.60 The Templo Mayor was the scene of elaborate human sacrifices that increased to large numbers during the last eighty years of Aztec rule.61 Human sacrifice was based upon a unique and complex religious attitude that is explored in detail in subsequent chapters. In brief, it was believed that the human body was the vulnerable nexus of vital cosmic forces and was filled with divine essences that needed periodic regeneration. One means to this regeneration was called teomiqui, to die divinely or "dying like a god dies," which meant human sacrifice. Specific parts of the human body, especially the heart, the head, and the liver, contained animistic entities that were gifts and presences of the gods and could be returned to them as gifts through ritual sacrifice. Offerings of the divine fire embedded in the head and the heart were especially crucial for the sun's continued motion through the heavens and the earth's subsequent renewal of time, crops, human life, and the divine forces of the cosmos.62 In some of these sacrifices, hu- 74 CITY OP SACRIFICE man hearts were offered to the sun and the blood was spread on the Templo Mayor's walls (as well as on other shrines and god images) in order to coat the temple with divine energy. Other parts of the body were also ritually used, including hair, skin, limbs, and the skull. The Aztec rulers were, in general, in charge of this process and had the responsibility of obtaining human victims through war. As we have seen, one paradigm for this process of war, the acquisition of prisoners and escalating human sacrifice, was the myth of Huitzilo-pochtli's birth. But this myth alone does not account for the quantity of human sacrifice and the expansion of the Templo Mayor s role in this development. Johanna Broda's analysis of ideology and the Aztec state provides valuable insights into the interrelationship of the Templo Mayor, the increase in human sacrifice, and the powers and roles of peripheral city-states.63 We know that within the Basin of Mexico, the Aztec warrior and priestly nobility managed a high degree of centralization of agricultural schedules, technological developments, labor management, and ritual processes. But in all directions beyond the valley there was little continued success in peacefully controlling the internal organization of conquered or enemy city-states.64 The Aztec capital, while expanding its territory and tribute controls, was repeatedly shocked by rebellions that demanded complex and organized military and economic reprisals. This antagonism between the core area and the surrounding city-states created immense stresses within all the institutions of Tenochtitlan, which contributed to the astonishing increases in human sacrifice carried out at the Templo Mayor between 1440—1521. For not only did the political order appear vulnerable, but also the divine right and responsibility of rulers and warriors to conquer and subdue all peoples and enemies seemed unfulfilled. The anxiety the Aztecs already felt about their universal order (after all, cosmic life was an unending war) was intensified to the point of cosmic paranoia. In this situation, the ritual strategy to feed the gods became the major political instrument to subdue the enemy and control the expanding periphery. The Templo Mayor's role in this explosive process can be seen in at least three important events. First, during the reign of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina (1440—1469), the shrine of Huitzilopochtli received its first large reconstruction.65 As a means of ensuring quality of work- TEMPLO MAYOR 75 nianship and allegiance to the new temple, workers from a number of city-states under Aztec control were ordered to do the job. However, one independent community, Chalco, refused to participate and was declared in rebellion against the Aztecs. A ferocious war was launched and eventually the Chalcans were defeated. Their captured warriors were brought to the Templo Mayor and, along with the other prisoners of war, sacrificed at its rededication. This pattern of celebrating the expansion of the Great Temple with warfare and the sacrifice of enemy warriors was followed by subsequent Aztec kings who increased the sacrificial festivals as a means of controlling resistance and peripheral territories. Second, in 1487, Ahuitzotl celebrated a major renovation of the Templo Mayor by ordering great quantities of tribute brought into Tenochtitlan. Newly conquered city-states were ordered to send their tribute in the form of sacrificial victims who were delivered to the capital, ritually prepared and transformed into gods, and slain at the inauguration. It must be emphasized that these inaugurations were city-wide events and, in fact, extended well beyond the Mexica equivalent of city walls! All temples and schools were plastered and painted, and clusters of reeds and flowers were used to decorate streets and buildings. Meanwhile, the priest ordered sacrificial knives, ceramic incense burners, and devices of precious feathers, designed expressly for the occasion, to be made. The calpixque (stewards) for their part, collected tribute of food, animals, jewels, mantles, wood, and fuel.66 The responsibility for these preparations was also carried out by peoples from communities on the mainland, including Tlacopan, Acolhuacan, and Tlalhuacpan, who carried a series of divine images to the temples for the inauguration. Curiously, at some of these ceremonies of massive human sacrifice, the kings and lords from allied and enemy city-states were invited to the ceremonial center to witness the spectacular festival, as is seen in chapter 5. The ritual extravaganza was carried out with maximum theatrical tension, paraphernalia, and terror in order to amaze and intimidate the visiting dignitaries who returned to their kingdoms trembling with fear and convinced that cooperation and not re- 70 CITY OF SACRIFICE bellion was the best response to Aztec imperialism. Consider this description of the elegant ritual process by which one allied ruler and his gifts of sacrificial captives are incorporated into the ritual dedication of the Templo Mayor. After being lodged in the royal palace, Nezahualpilli delivered his captives to King Ahuitzotl and spoke to him with elegant phrases, at the same time offering his goodwill and desire to serve the Aztec ruler. Water was then brought for his hands . . . After he had washed, he was given the usual fare for royalty and a chocolate drink. Flowers and tobacco were given not only to him but also to his followers, greatlords and chieftains, who were lodgedin other chambers, according to their rank. With great care and courtesy, they were given everything they desired. The captives were turned over to the priest who would take care of them.67 Another imperial ritual of gathering the peripheries into the center took place during the reign of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin (1502-1520); this ruler ordered the construction of the Coateocalli, which held an image of Huitzilopochtli and all the images of gods worshiped in the imperial domain, especially those belonging to allied and enemy city-states. Before the dedication of the shrine, he ordered a war against a rebellious coastal city-state, Teuctepec. From this campaign, 2,300 warriors were brought to Tenochtitlan and, reflecting the two quotations that opened this chapter, they were sacrificed while the king initiated the ritual killing. In the Aztec case, the imago mundi replicated a violent cosmology that legitimated the institutional authority of the realm. The leaders of many allied and enemy towns were invited and forced to enter the capital to witness the sacrifices. Gods, images of gods, and the rulers they ruled, all gathered within the city for the ritual slaughter. All this suggests that the profound tensions between the capital and peripheral towns, and the political threats and cosmic insecurities that Aztec elites felt as a result, contributed in a major way to the increase of human sacrifice at the Templo Mayor. As the foregoing shows, the exemplary center had repeated difficulties in conquering rebel rulers and rival city-states and when they did, it was equally 1 • /V 1 . . 1 • .1 r-r-il i . 1 1 r 11* 1 TEMPLO MAYOR JJ run, this increment served to strengthen and weaken the authority of 'li/nochtitlan. While many city-states were securely integrated into the Aztec sphere, some were alienated to the direction of other kingdoms, and the capacity for rebellion increased. So, when the Spaniards came, Indian allies were not hard to find and, in fact, played vigorous roles in the conquest of Tenochtitlan. in cosmic darkness: the birth of the fifth sun This discussion of the influences of Aztec cosmology and unstable peripheries on the Aztec vision of sacrificial place and ritual killing in relation to the Templo Mayor enhances our understanding of the pervasiveness of mythic thought and its interaction with social history in Tenochtitlan. In retrospect, we have already learned that this pervasiveness and interaction were also specifically lodged in the action of human sacrifice as revealed in the relationship between the myth of Huitzilopochtli's birth and the sculptural image and location of the Coyolxauhqui stone, plus the evidence in text and archaeology of human sacrifice at the Templo Mayor. We see that the question of the increment in human sacrifice is partially answered through the discovery within the myth that Huitzilopochtli kills not just one goddess, but that he annihilates many deities'—his sacrificial aggression extends to the killing of almost all the divine, beings. This significant discovery appears to be Aztec-specific; that is, the mythic structure of massive sacrifices seems to be particularly Aztec. As a historian of religions, sensitive to MirceaEliade's emphasis on the overriding prestige of cosmogonic myth, however, I am encouraged to search out the texts further to see if any prior inkling or similar pattern appears in more ancient or more pervasive cosmogonic episodes in Mesoamer-ica. In fact, when we go in search of myths of origins, we find that the cosmogonic imperative for incremental massive sacrifice has an even greater primordiality of surprising proportions. Equally important, the movement of retrieval from the specific Aztec cosmogony of massive sacrifice to the more general and probably ancient Meso-american paradigm was a movement made by the Aztecs themselves! That is, the prologue that accompanies the text of Huitzilopochtli's birth in Sahagún's Book 3 tells us to move in the direction of prior cos- 78 CITY OF SACRIFICE city, sacrifice, and fire, which constitute the imago mundi, but also the indications of an apocalyptic view of the universe in which order, place, and stability cannot be achieved without the abundant sacrifice of the gods. This movement and discovery is suggested in the short but rich prologue to the sacred song of Huitzilopochdi's birth commented upon earlier in this chapter. Prior to the statement of Aztec reverence for the "beginning" of Huitzilopochtli, we are told that the entire chapter of Book 3 of the Florentine Codex is concerned not with Huitzilopochdi's beginning but with "how the gods had their beginnings."68 This statement about the creation of the gods is accompanied by the acknowledgment that "where the gods began is not well known." This ignorance of place, indicating either a non-Aztec or older tradition, is in sharp contrast to the specific place and proximity of Coatepec and Tula, which organized the mythic geography of Huitzilopochdi's birth. Reference is then made to the prestigious capital of Teotihuacan (Abode of the Gods) as the location of the primordial gathering of the gods in the cosmogonic darkness. As in the myth of Huitzilopochdi's birth, a gathering of gods takes place to bring forth "the sun," and this creation involves the destruction of all the gods. The text suggests the weight of this creative/destructive process was in the minds of the deities, for they "debated who would bear upon his back the burden of rule, who would be the sun." The scene is impressive in its cosmogonic opaqueness. In the darkness, the deities have gathered in the great ceremonial center to struggle together to create a new universe. Then the prologue to Huitzilopochdi's story ends with the remarkable statement that "all the gods died when the sun came into being. None remained who had not perished."69 The discovery made in the Huitzilopochtli myth appears once more—the massive killing of gods brings about, or is part of, the cosmogonic act of creation—only in this episode, it is not just the birth of one god that matters, it is the passage from darkness into the brilliant light of the universe and cosmological order that is accomplished. The larger universe within which Huitzilopochtli, Coyol-xauhqui, the Centzon Huitznahua, and the Fifth Age existed, is what is created in Teotihuacan. The gods gather to live at the center of the universe, and violence is unleashed, which has a creative result on earth. TEMPIO MAYOR 79 This short prologue tells us that even in the Aztec mind, aprimor-diality behind Tenochtitlan's primordiality was the authentic stage of origin. Fortunately, we have along and vivid account of this cosmogonic act in Book 7 of the Florentine Codex. The more detailed version of the cosmogonic prologue to Huitzilopochdi's birth tells us that for fifty-two years following the end of the four ages, the world was in darkness. "When no sun had shown and no dawn had broken," the gods gathered at Teotihuacan to create a new age. They asked, "Who will carry the burden? Who will take it upon himself to be the sun, to bring the dawn?" Following four days of penance and ritual, all the gods gathered around a divine hearth where a fire had been burning for the duration. Two gods, Nanauatzin (the Pimply One) and Tecu-ciztecad (Lord of Snails), prepared to create a new sun by hurling themselves into the fire. After they dressed themselves for the ceremonial suicide, Tecuciztecatl approached the fire several times but became frightened. Then Nanauatzin was ordered to try. The text begins, Onward thou, O Nanauatzin! Take heart! And Nanauatzin, daring all at once, determined-resolved-hardened his heart, and shut firmly his eyes. He had no fear; he did not stop short; he did not falter in fright; he did not turn back. All at once he quickly threw and cast himself into the fire; once and for all he went. Thereupon he burned; his body crackled and sizzled . . . Tecuciztecatl. . . cast himself upon the fire ... It is told that then flew up an eagle, [which] followed them. It threw itself suddenly into the flames,] it cast itself into them . . . Therefore its feathers are scorched looking and blackened. And afterwards followed an ocelot, when now the fire no longer burned high, . . . Thus he was only blackened—smutted-—in various places, and singed by the fire. . . . From this event it is said, they took . . . the custom whereby was called and named on who was valiant, a warrior. He was given the name quauhtlocelotl. [The word] quauhtli came first, it is told, because, [as] was said [the eagle] first entered the fire. And the oceloti followed thereafter.70 It is important that within this cosmogonic myth the story of the creation of warriors stands out as the primary act of creation. On the one hand, Nanauatzin's daring, hard heart and surrender to the fire is the paradigmatic attitude of the primal warrior. On the other hand, the result of self-sacrifice is the emergence of the eagle, who dives back into the fire, scorching himself and the jaguar, both of which become marked and darkened by the divine fire. When we remember that the 80 CITY OF SACRIFICE two great orders of warriors in Aztec society were the eagle andjaguar knights, it appears that the Aztecs drew directly from this tradition to legitimize the religious significance and power of their soldiers. The text continues, Then the gods sat waiting to see where Nanauatzin would come to rise— he who fell first into the fire—in order that he might shine as the sun; in order that dawn might break. When the gods had sat and been waiting for a long time, thereupon began the reddening (of the dawn;) in all directions, all around, the dawn and light extended, and so, they say, thereupon the gods fell upon their knees in order to await where he who had become the sun would become to rise. In all directions they looked everywhere they peered and kept turning about. Uncertain were those whom they asked. Some thought that it would be from the north that (the sun) would come to rise, and placed themselves to look there; some (did so) to the west; some placed themselves to look south. They expected that he might rise in all directions, because the light was everywhere. . . . And some placed themselves so that they could watch there to the east.71 This original confusion about the sun's place of emergence in the glowing dawn reveals the lack of clear orientation that existed in the cosmos prior to the appearance of the sun above the horizon. It is with the sun's clear appearance and passage that the universe becomes organized. The text continues, "Thus they say that those who looked there to the east were Quetzalcoatl: the name of the second was Ecatl: and Totec . . . and the red Tezcatlipoca. . . . And when the sun came to rise, when he burst forth, he appeared to be red; he kept swaying from side to side."72 This is the cosmic condition facing humans in the Fifth Age of the Aztecs. The sun is "swaying from side of side," unable to achieve stability, or find its place, or initiate a creative movement. Even at the mythic level, the level at which cosmological order was achieved, the sun has profound difficulty finding its place and orienting the world. This unstable and threatening situation demands still more exertion from the gods because the sun and moon "could only remai n ^cill and motionless," that is, they could not travel upward and across the sky. The gods then commit themselves to a course of action thai will have a profound influence on the Toltec and Aztec societies; they decide to sacrifice themselves to ensure the motion of the sun. "Ler thľ> be, that through us the sun may be revived. Let all of us die." Then TEMPLO MAYOR 8l Ecatl (the wind god) kills the remaining gods, but still the sun does not move. In his guise as Quetzalcoatl, Ecatl "arose and exerted himself fiercely and violently as he blew. At once he could move him, who thereupon went on his way."73 It is remarkable that upon finding the cosmogonic background for Huitzilopochtli's story, we arrive at the same pattern. Creation of the cosmos in Aztec and pre-Aztec Mesoamerica is directly tied to the sacrifice, not of one or a few deities, but to the increment in sacrifice that begins with one courageous warrior and spreads to annihilate all the gods who have gathered at the divine center of the world. The unstable cosmos that is created depends on massive ritual killing and an increment in divine death. The cosmic pattern of massive sacrifices to energize the sun is repeated in a subsequent episode in which terrestrial warfare and human sacrifice is created by the gods to ensure their nourishment. In one version, the god Mixcoatl (Cloud Serpent) creates five human beings and four hundred Chichimec warriors to stir up discord and warfare. When the masses of warriors pass their time hunting and drinking, the god sends the five individuals to slaughter them. In this account, war among human beings is created to ensure sacrificial victims for the gods.74 PATTERNS OP HUMAN SACRIFICE This was done so those lords might secretly enter the city of Tenochti-tlan together and to give them certain instructions so they would not be recognized. . . Their customary garments were changed in favor of those of the Aztecs and, in order to disguise them further, they were made to hold flowers, branches, and rushes, as though they were men who were coming to adorn the temple and the royal house. ... All the lords from the provinces and all the enemies were watching from within bowers that had been built for this occasion. Prisoners from the lines began to mount the steps (of the Great Temple) and the four lords, assisted by the priest who held the wretches about to die by their feet and hands, began to kill.75 As is well documented in the ethno-historical and archaeological sources, the Templo Mayor was the scene of elaborate human sacrifices, which increased to incredible numbers during the last eighty years of Aztec rule.76 The previous quote describes the efforts made to 84 CITY OF SACRIFICE loaded with skulls. In Tlacaxipehualizdi, the Feast of the Flaying of Men, the captor was decorated, for instance, with chalk and bird down and was given gifts. Then, together with his relatives, he celebrated a ritual meal consisting of "a bowl of stew of dried maize called dacatlaolli... on each went a piece of the flesh of the captive." While this pattern of ritual preparation, ascent and descent of the temple, heart sacrifice of enemy warriors, dismemberment and occasional flaying of the victim, and (sometimes) ritual cannibalism was usually followed, it is important to emphasize the diversity of sacrificial festivals that involved variations and combinations of these elements. For example, during the feast of Tlacaxipehualizdi, a prisoner of war "who came here from lands about us" was taken by a priest called the "Bear Man" and tied up to a huge, round sacrificial stone (temalacatl) placed horizontally on the ground. The captive was provided with a pine club and a feathered staff to protect himself against the attacks of four warriors armed with clubs of wood and obsidian blades. When he was defeated, he was removed from the stone and short temple base, his heart was taken out, and he was flayed. Offering a captive for sacrifice brought warriors an elevation in social prestige and a promise of reward in the next world. However, not only warriors offered sacrifices. Groups of peasants, hunters, mid-wives, merchants, and artisans would buy slaves and after ritually bathing them, ritually transform them into teteo ixiptla (living images of gods) and offer them to temples to be sacrificed. Another distinctive festival was called Toxcatl, dedicated to the ferocious god Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror). Elaborate efforts were made to find the perfect deity impersonator for this festival. The captive warrior had to have a flawless body, musical talents, and rhetorical skills. For a year prior to his sacrifice, he lived a privileged existence in the capital. He had eight servants, who ensured that he was splendidly arrayed and bejeweled, and four wives were given to him during the last twenty days of his life. Just before the end of the sacrificial festival, we are told that he arrived at a "small temple called Tlacochcalco . . . he ascended by himself, he went up of his own free will, to where he was to die. As he was taken up a step, as he passed one step, there he broke, he shattered his flute, his whistle" and was then swiftly TEMPLO MAYOR 85 month of Atlcahualo, involved the paying of debts to Tlaloc, the rain god. On this day, children (called "human paper streamers") with two cowlicks in their hair and favorable day signs were dressed in such colors as dark green, black striped with chili red, light blue, some set with pearls, and were sacrificed in seven different locations. The flowing and falling of the children's tears ensured rain.78 In addition to these theatrical ritual killings, everyone in the Aztec world participated in some form of self-sacrifice, or bloodletting. Bloodletting was either an offering or penitential rite involving the pricking of earlobes with maguey thorns or, in more severe circumstances, the drawing of strings through holes cut in the tongues, ears, genitals, and other fleshy parts of the body. Often, blood was placed on slips of paper and offered to the gods.79 The claim that this ceremonial system was developed to feed the gods is true;80 however, my interpretation of the two cosmogonic episodes at Coatepec and Teotihuacan affirms that human sacrifice and incremental human sacrifice were acts of cosmic creation that functioned not only as a feeding ritual, but also as a ritual recreating Aztec dominance and power established in their sacred history. The Aztecs were re-establishing a mythic structure in order to legitimize the authority of their institutions to rule. And this was achieved, not by rational rhetoric, but by the public performance of ritual extremities, the descent of the knives, the explosions of blood, the rapid and total transformation of dancing, struggling, virile bodies into pieces and parts of divine images raised to the sun, displayed at the top of temple steps, cast down the stairways, and paraded through the streets. The myths reviewed here show that the "flowers/songs" dimensions of Aztec religion are overwhelmed, at the height of these rituals, by the "blood/cut" dimensions. The vision that was created showed that sacralized male military aggression against the forces from the periphery created a new world-—the world of Huitzilopochtli, or the cult of the Fifth Sun. THE HEART OF THE ACTION All this suggests that the tension between the capital and peripheral towns, and the political threats and cosmic insecurities that A*f<*<- 86 CITY OP SACRIFICE changes in Aztec religion between 1449, when Moctezuma I conies to the throne, and 1521, manifested prominently in increments of human, sacrifice at the Templo Mayor, require further discussion here. One fact the excavation and ethno-historical analysis proves is that pervasive changes were taking place throughout Aztec society during the period of the rapid expansion and rebuilding of the Templo Mayor. Friedrich Katz, in his excellent general history of the Aztec state, reveals how the royal counselor, Tlacaelel, set in motion a number of innovations to ensure Aztec dominance in the face of the intense rebellions and threatening agricultural crises that periodically plagued the capital.81 This flexibility and increment in the religious rituals of the Aztecs can be partly understood with reference to K c ■ Rappaporťs work on the capacity of the sacred to assist a society in adapting to new social circumstances without weakening the cherished cultural conceptions of a people. We have long known, says Rappaport, that sanctity supports and conserves the social order. Traditionally, scholars have viewed adaptations and innovations as signs of secular advances and the break with conventional theologies and ideologies. Rappaport, however, uses Hockett and Ascher's formulation of "Romer s rule" to argue a different approach. This formulation "proposes that the initial effect of an evolutionary change is conservative in that it makes it possible for a previously existing way of li. to persist in the face of changed conditions." Rappaport argues tb the sacred can actually enhance the flexibility in social structure and symbolic organization to persist in the face of innovation and chan^ : In other words, the threatening aspects of changed conditions can somewhat neutralized by incorporation into sacred tradition. Tlii-ability to combine flexibility and rigidity derives from the fact that some elements of the sacred are not restricted in their meaning to specific social goals or institutions. Rappaport states, They can, therefore, not only sanctify any institution while being bound by none but can also sanctify changes in institutions. Continuity can be maintained while allowing change to take place, for the association of particular institutions or conventions with ultimate sacred postulates is a matter of interpretation, and that which must be interpreted can also be reinterpreted without being challenged. So, gods may remain unchanged while the conventions they sanctify are transformed through reintcrpre-tation in response to changing conditions.82 TEMPIO MAYOR 87 Rappaport shows that sacred concepts communicate much more than information about temple activity. They convey information about the political arrangements and the regulation of society, and they imbue these arrangements with an aura of the sacred. Sanctity is infused in all systems and subsystems of society in order to maintain the fundamental order of social life. Sanctity allows the persistence of traditional forms in the face of "structural threats and environmental fluctuations." From this perspective, the time-honored tradition (human sacrifice) underwent a significant innovation (large-scale human sacrifice in relation to conquered warriors) in order to maintain Aztec dominance in the face of threats (rebellions) and fluctuations (droughts). The increment in human sacrifice is an example of Romer's rule and not the expression of protein deficiency or merely a response to environmental pressures, as others have suggested. It was a religious strategy carried out to conserve the entire cosmogonic structure of the Aztec city-state. There is a remarkable parallelism between these events and the mythic structure of Huitzilopochtli's song, where enemy warriors from distant and rebellious communities were slain with unceasing aggression at the sacred mountain. One important difference is that, within the myth, these killings intensified the power of the temple on the mountain and served as the origin of Huitzilopochtli's cult. In history, the increment of ritual killing served to both strengthen and weaken the authority of Tenochtitlan. Many city-states were securely integrated by terror into the Aztec sphere; however, some were alienated into the direction of other kingdoms and the capacity of rebellion increased. Nowhere is this pattern of social fission clearer than in the alliance-building process that Cortés directed as he traveled through the outskirts of the empire and met both vicious resistance and vital support from communities both loyal and disloyal to Moctezuma s capital. All the more reason then for the Aztecs to sacrifice those Spanish warriors at the Templo Mayor during their "rebellion" against the capital. In the eyes of the eagle and jaguar knights, the Spaniards were the threatening personification of the four hundred children who had come out of the darkness, marching from the periphery of the cosmos to destroy the deity, the temple, and the empire. CHAPTER 3 The New Fire Ceremony and the Binding of the Years Tenochtitlan's Fearful Symmetry In the autobiographical work My Life and Hard Times, James Thurber describes a struggle he underwent while attempting to pass his undergraduate course in botany. Thurber tells that he never succeeded in passing botany because in spite of his instructor's guidance, insistence, and even emotional outbursts he (Thurber) "never once saw a cell through a microscope." Even though all the other students saw the mechanics of flower cells through the microscope, Thurber didn't and proclaimed, "It takes away from the beauty anyway"—a comment that drove his teacher into a fury. He was supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells, but Thurber didn't, exclaiming, "I see what looks like a lot of milk." The instructor claimed this was the result of not having adjusted the microscope properly, so the instructor adjusted the microscope. Thurber states, "And I would look again and see milk ... a nebulous milky substance—a phenomenon of maladjustment." This crisis of perspective reached a high pitch during his second year in lab. The teacher claimed grimly, "We'll try it, with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. As god is my witness, I'll arrange this glass so that you see the cells or I'll give up teaching." Then one day, Thurber thought he saw what the teacher so much wanted him to see. He writes, With only one microscopic adjustment known to man did I see anything but blackness or the familiar lacteal opacity, and that time I saw to my pleasure and amazement, a variegated constellation of flecks, specks and THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY 89 dots. These I hastily drew. The instructor noticing my activity came back from an adjoining desk, a smile on his lips and his eyebrows high in hope. He looked at my cell drawing. "What's that?" he demanded, with a hint of a squeal in his voice. "That's what I saw," I said. "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't," he screamed losing control of his temper instantly, and he bent over and squinted into the microscope. His head snapped up. "That's your eye!" he shouted. "You've fixed the lens so that it reflects! You've drawn your eye."1 The New Fire Ceremony, held only once every fifty-two years, illustrated the symbolic and ritual dynamics between the ceremonial center of the capital and the expansive ceremonial landscape of the empire. Four high priests bring fifty-two pieces of wood to be burned in the sacred fire. Notice on the right side of the temple a woman enclosed within a granary and families huddled together wearing masks. (Codex Borbonicus. After LauretteSéjourné, Elpensamiento náhuatl cifradopor los calendarios [Mexico, 1981], courtesy of Siglo Veintiuno Editores, S.A.) CITY OF SACRIFICE I begin this chapter with a story from an American humorist to illustrate a problem in the interdisciplinary attempts some of us are making to gain a clearer view of how "stargazing," or the practice ofv astronomy, and the sacralized character of this practice influenced the construction and experience of sacred space in the Aztec world. It is; the problem of perspective, or rather perspective in the plural, and how perspectives can be in contact with one another.2 One of the most creative developments in the study of religious cosmology and sacred space, especially in Mesoamerican cultures, is the new discipline of archaeoastronomy. Some key insights of this new discipline have emerged out of a series of international meetings, especially the Oxford Conferences on Archaeoastronomy and several meetings in Mexico City. The leading spokesman for this new interdisciplinary orientation is Anthony Aveni, who defines archaeoastronomy in straightforward terms when he states that "archaeoastronomy is the study of the practice and use of astronomy among the ancient cultures of the world based upon all forms of evidence, written and unwritten."3 Through the cooperative work of archaeo-astronomers from Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States, archaeoastronomy has expanded from the study of "astronomical orientations of alignments at prehistoric sites in the British Isles and Central Europe" to the interpretation of multiple methods of indigenous "time reckoning" and the ways in which astronomy influenced architectural orientations, ritual performance, warfare, and social ordering in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and North American native cultures.4 In a way, seeing is what archaeoastronomy is largely about: seeing stars, seeing how the ancients saw stars, seeing alignments between human order and celestial patterns, and seeing to it, in the case of rulers, that alignments between celestial events and human society were created and maintained. In our different attempts to see with a native eye, or see how the natives saw things, or, in the case of ideological arguments, see how some natives wanted other natives to see things their way, we are often in the position of either Thurber or his teacher. We work hard trying to get others to see things according to the received ideas of how things ought to be done, or we "fix the lens THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY gi In the teacher's case, in some teachers' cases, the gesture of persuasion becomes the gesture of coercion to have younger North American, Mexican, or European scholars see what they are supposed to see—the mechanics of flowers or, in the case of astronomy, the mechanics of stars, or mathematics, or symbolism. At the other extreme, we act like Thurber (who lost an eye when he was ten after his brother shot him with an arrow while they were playing William Tell) and only see, in fact, insist on seeing, reflections of our own eye, perspective, or discipline. In this case, "we reduce the difficult richness of the necessities before us."5 A simple example in the history of archaeoastronomy will illustrate part of the problem. In the fall of 1984,1 had the opportunity to study with the archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni while he was working in the Mesoamerican Archive in Boulder, Colorado. During our eight-week jointly taught seminar on the history of religions and archaeoastronomy, Aveni (who is not like Thurber's teacher) made several presentations on the history of scholarship about Stonehenge. He pointed out the parallel between cultural fashions and the Stonehenge fashion—how popular intellectual fads determined the way people understood Stonehenge for certain decades. He noted that when the fashion was observatories, computers, or eclipses, Stonehenge became an observatory, a computer, an eclipse marker. The point was, as Aveni quotes Jacquetta Hawkes, "Each generation gets the Stonehenge it deserves." The best illustration of this was the day Aveni brought to class the Thurberesque ad about the Stonehenge watch you could purchase through the mail that was made up of little stones on the dial that cast shadows according to the time of day. APPROACHING HEAVENLY REGIMES Aveni's observations about Stonehenge led me to ask, "Does each generation get the Tenochtitlan it deserves, the Jerusalem it deserves, the Banaras it deserves, the Copan it deserves, or the Palenque it deserves?" My work with Aveni also led me to ponder, "To what extent does archaeoastronomy contain an approach that enriches our understanding about the relationship of astronomy to a religious creativity?"6 The exploration of these questions depends in part on what p2 CITY OP SACRIFICE lection of unrelated investigations, each emanating from different disciplines."7 In a more focused way, one beneficial result of archaeoastronomy has been the new detail and depth of focus in celestial observations of recurrent patterns, which were crucial to the indigenous formation of world visions and the continual renewal of society and the cosmos through rituals and ceremony. For example, consider how archaeoastronomy can give increased substance to the claim of the urban ecologist Paul Wheatley about one of the fundamental characteristics of cosmo-magical thinking in the ancient world. In writing about the mode of thought that helped organize the social worlds in the seven areas of primary urban generation, Wheatley noted, "This mode of thought presupposes an intimate parallelism between the mathematically expressible regimes of the heavens and the biologically determined rhythms of life on earth, (as manifested conjointly in the succession of the seasons and the annual cycles of plant regeneration) . . . "8 (italics mine) Archaeoastronomy, more than any other discipline I know, provides new tools for deciphering how the "mathematically expressible regimes of the heavens" were perceived, conceived, and applied to the earthly social order by various sky watchers of the ancient world. It also helps scholars discern the celestial sequences that guided the cosmo-magical formulas, ceremonial actions, and social order. These new attempts at understanding how things interrelate, how religion plays a central role in these interrelationships, and how disciplines need to relate seem crucial in Mesoamerican studies, especially in light of Kent Flannery's claim that "Mesoamerican archaeology has absolutely no coherent and consistent theoretical framework by means of which ritual or religious data can be analyzed and interpreted."9 Flannery, along with a handful of Mesoamerican specialists, has been exploring ways to construct the outlines of such a framework for the interpretation of formative and classical religious patterns. This framework is contextual in character and "ties religion to social organization, politics, and subsistence rather than leaving it on the ephemeral plane of mental activity."10 Still, according to Flannery, when it comes to religion, most of us are "guessing" and, as Flannery states, anyone's guesses are as good as anyone else's.11 THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY 93 [■rotn Alignment to Symmetry The reason for having many guesses is not only because each is as good as the next, but also because there are so many levels, angles, alignments, and points of view to guess about and from which to guess. As the poet Ovid noted, there are many heavens, the heaven of the astronomer, the heaven of the historian, the heaven of the priest, the heaven of the lover, and the heaven of the myth maker. If real interdisciplinary work is to intensify, at least a recognition of the abundance of the phenomena, the power of religion, and the inter-relatedness of the components is necessary. But the discovery of inter-relatedness has sometimes been thwarted by the ways in which scholars use the notion of alignment to explore everything from sight lines to pilgrimages to alliances. For example, I have long been bothered by the use of maps in books, for instance, that claim to trace the routes of processions, pilgrimages, war campaigns, and the like. We are presented with a series of alignments, usually dark, straight lines on the page, which show direct passages from town to mountain, city to battlefield, society to pilgrimage shrine. But actually try and travel these pathways and you'll find anything but straight alignments between these nodes of social action and meaning. The human experience of movement through the ceremonial, military, or agricultural landscape involves the human in turns, arcs, curves, hills and valleys, climbs and descents, and all the while exposes the traveler, through geography or a landscape of meaning, to a multiplicity of sights, sounds, symbols, challenges, social units, and diversities. No one moves in alignments, straight lines, or simple directions, whether marching, walking in procession, or thinking! On a different plane, the search for inter-relatedness, or what Alfredo Lopez Austin calls a "Mesoamerican world vision" in his watershed study The Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology, is and will always be especially difficult in Mesoamerican studies.12 Regardless of how long one studies, how expert in native and colonial languages one becomes, how new archaeological discoveries excite us, or breakthroughs in pictorial interpretation uncover new details and cognates, one obstacle that will always remain is the impact of colonialism on the pre-Columbian evidence and the difficulty of knowing what Mesoamerican peoples were up to, or P4 CITY OP SACRIFICE thought they were up to, in their rites, myths, and stargazing between five and seven hundred years ago.13 What Inga Clendinnen calls the problem of finding out—whether finding out the world vision, the general model, or the patterns of actions—will be with us, in various manifestations, for the duration. Deeply aware of the impact of colonialism on the indigenous record, she asks (while describing the thick Spanish gloss and competing visions of Mesoamerican peoples, the destruction of indigenous records, and the need for new questions), how are we to be able to "discover anything of the views and experience of a people whose voices were hushed to a murmur more than 400 years ago?"14 The need, or as she says, "the trick is to strip away the cocoon of Spanish interpretation to uncover sequences of Indian actions, and then try to discern the pattern in those actions, as a way of inferring the shared understanding which sustains them." One example of this difficulty, which teases us with such a high potential for providing access to the Aztec vision of place and symmetry, albeit in limited form, is the New Fire Ceremony that renewed the entire society and cosmos in a ritual conflagration every fifty-two years. If ever a massive ritual performance could give us access to the Aztec gestalt, or what Stanley Tambiah calls a "node of cultural structuring," it would be this spectacular ceremony. The problem of the difficulty of knowing is created, in part, when the surviving information is so limited. We know more about a number of the monthly rituals of limited importance than we do about the ritual of the cosmic fire! In Sahagun's crucial Book 7 of the Florentine Codex, for example, we have a paltry four columns of text and much of it out of sequence, and other documents are even less yielding with information. Alfredo Lopez Austin, who investigated Sahagun's method of gathering information in each of the twelve books of the Florentine Codex, calls Book 7 a "personal failure" by the Franciscan priest. Sahagun's preface to this book is full of his own biases and prejudices against native cosmology, intelligence, and language. He calls them "vulgar" in their thinking, language, style, and intelligence without realizing that he missed a crucial opportunity to gain access to their cosmovision. Lopez Austin responds, If he attacks the Indians for their low level of understanding, they must have felt the same way about his intelligence when confronted with ques- THB NEW FIRE CEREMONY 05 tions they considered ingenuous in their lack of knowledge. If Sahagun had understood something about the clash of ideas, perhaps his book wouldbe one of the best sources on the cosmic vision of the Nahuas, discussing the upper to lower floors, the course of the stars through them, the supporting trees—information that is seldom available from other sources.15 In my view, what was also lost was invaluable information about the imperial rite of cosmic renewal that would tell more about the "total" cosmic and social world than any other rite, building, moment, or idea in the Nahua imagination. Even so, with the help of new alliances between disciplines and new questions and applications of models, it may be possible to gain an enlarged understanding of how this ceremony worked to bind together not only the years, but all the spaces and peoples of the Aztec empire. I am not sure that Aveni's hopes for the interdisciplinary advances stimulated by archaeoastron-omy have yet been met, and only time will tell if scientists, social scientists, and humanists within this movement will be able to learn from one another the disciplinary practices that will in fact lead to an effective interdisciplinary methodology. At this stage, I can only claim to draw upon several of the insights andleads of archaeoastron-omy to explore a fresh way of understanding the Aztec ordering of sacred space as expressed through several major rituals that were guided by celestial events. Specifically, I will (i) replace the notion of alignment,16 still influential in archaeoastronomy, with the notion of ritual symmetry,17 and (2) compare the ritual uses of space within the New Fire Ceremony as reported in various sources with the ritual use of space in the description of the equinox sunrise at Templo Mayor. By symmetry I mean the ways in which component parts of a ritual and its symbolic landscape were organized and interrelated around a major ceremonial axis. This will often involve natural and symbolic mountains (pyramids), astronomical events, ritual killing, and the rulers. With respect to these spaces and events, I want to suggest that the ceremonial order of Aztec life, what has been called the "Aztec arrangement,"18 was a vigorous interplay between a locative view of the world, in which all things are sacred if they are in their place, and an apocalyptic view of the world, in which the sacred dissolves when things have no place or are out of place. The Aztecs observed stars, measured them, and calculated them into their social and agricultural g6 CITY OF SACRIFICE cycles. This orientation toward a complex ordering system was periodically threatened by an assertion that the sun was unreliable, unstable, and wobbled at its original creation. Furthermore, I want to suggest that the Aztecs believed that their power and authority depended on their capacity to integrate certain major elements of their world, including kingship, astronomy, human sacrifice, trade and tribute, and royal and commoner sacred places, into a total and authoritarian symmetry. In its tantalizing opaqueness, the New Fire Ceremony suggests that the Aztecs took a series of social and celestial alignments organized by the new fire that appeared in the hills, plains, temples, and forests of the night and, in the terms of William Blake, they dared to frame them into a fearful symmetry. THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY On an evening in the middle of November in 1507, a procession of fire priests with a captive warrior "arranged in order and wearing the garb of the gods," including Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, walked slowly out of the city of Tenochtitlan toward the ceremonial center on the Hill of the Star. These were deity impersonators and the text uses the term teonenemi, or "they walk like gods."19 During the days prior to this auspicious night, the populace of the Aztec world, "everywhere in the country round," participated together in the ritual extinction of fires, the casting of statues of gods and hearthstones into the water, and the clean sweeping of houses, patios, and walkways; "Rubbish was thrown out and none lay in any of the houses." In Book 7 of the Florentine Codex, entitled "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the Binding of the Years," we are told that in anticipation of this fearful night, women were closed up in granaries to avoid their transformation into fierce beasts who would eat men, pregnant women put on masks of maguey leaves, and children were punched and nudged awake to avoid being turned into mice while asleep. For on this one night in the calendar round of 18,980 nights, the Aztec fire priests celebrated "when the night was divided in half," the New Fire Ceremony that ensured the rebirth of the sun and the movement of the cosmos for another fifty-two years. This rebirth was achieved symbolically through the heart sacrifice of a brave warrior specifically chosen by the king. We are told that when the procession arrived "in the deep night" at the Hill of the Star, the populace throughout the THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY 97 Basin of Mexico climbed onto their roofs and terraces and "with unwavering attention and necks craned toward the hill became filled with dread that the sun would be destroyed forever. All would be ended, there would evermore be night. Nevermore would the sun come forth. Night would prevail forever, and the demons of darkness would descend, to eat men."20 It was feared that cosmic jaws would snap at human beings in a never-ending night. As the ceremony proceeded, the priests watched the sky carefully for the movement of a star group known as Tianquiztli, or Marketplace, the cluster we call the Pleiades. As it made a meridian transit, signaling that the movement of the heavens had not ceased, a small fire was started with a ma-malhuaztli, or fire drill, on the outstretched chest of a warrior. The text reads, When a little [fire] fell, then speedily [the priest] slashed open the breast with a flint knife, seized the heart, and thrust it into the fire. Thus he fed, he served it to the fire. And the body of [the captive] all came to end in the flames ... In the open chest a new fire was drawn . . . and when it came forth . . . and blazed, then it flared and burst into flames . . . and people could see it from everywhere.21 The populace cut their ears, even the ears of children in cradles, the text tells us, "and spattered their blood repeatedly toward the fire."22 They also cut the ears of children confined to cradles and splattered the blood toward the fire. "Then it was said, everyone performed a penance."23 The new fire was then taken down the mountain and in a choreographed sequence was distributed throughout the empire. First, it was carried to the pyramid temple of Huitzilopochtli in the center of the city of Tenochtitlan, where it was placed in the fire holder of the statue of the god. It was then transported down the temple steps: before doing anything further, they brought and took it direct to the priests' house, the place named Mexico. Later, this was dispersed, and fires were started everywhere in each priests' house and each calpulli; whereupon it went everywhere to each of the young men's houses. At that time all of the common folk came to the flame, hurled themselves at it, and blistered themselves as fire was taken.24 Then messengers, runners, and fire priests who had come from everywhere took the fire back to the cities and towns. Motolinia wrote g8 CITY OP SACRIFICE about this dispersal, "waiting Indians from many towns carried the new fire to their temples. They did this after asking permission from the great chief of Mexico, their pontiff."25 The sacred fire was then distributed, saturating Aztec social space according to a prescribed plan. Consider this description of saturation by fire of the neighboring and far away communities. This same all the village fire priests did. That is, they carried the fire and made it hasten. Much did they goad (the runners) and make them hurry, so that they might speedily bring it to their homes. They hurried to give it to one another and take it from one another; in this way they went alternating with one another. Without delay, with ease, in a short time they caused it to come and made it flare up. In a short time everywhere fires burst forth and flared up quickly. Also there they first carried and brought it direct to their temples, their priests, houses and each of the calpullis. Later it was divided and spread among all everywhere in each neighborhood and in the houses.26 As the fire spread rapidly throughout the capital and then the surrounding and distant towns where it moved from temple to schools to neighborhoods, "the common folk, after blistering themselves with the fire, placed it in their homes, and all were quieted in their hearts." A Skillful Symmetry These passages, which have only a few variants in sixteenth-century accounts, are rich in implication but short in detail. We see references to and relationships between astronomy, calendars, ritual theaters, human sacrifice, and even child rearing. It is helpful to look briefly at the entire Book 7 and especially the sections leading up to the description of the New Fire. These pages make it clear that the Nahua informants attempted to describe what they considered to be some of the most important, momentous, and sacred cosmic events in their world. They tried to describe the powerful forces in their celestial world, including the sun, "the soaring eagle, the turquoise prince," the cycles of time, the meaning of sunrise, eclipses, the phases of the moon, the birth of stars, the nature of Venus, the winds of the four directions, the Lord of Tlalocan, and the nature of hail, snow, and clouds, all of which led up to the short chapters on the greatest ritual of regeneration. The supreme moment of the New Fire Ceremony is indicated in the phrases referring to its relationship to the several THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY pp cycles of temporal renewal of the calendar. It was the time when "the years were piled up," when they had been "added one to another and brought together." This rarest of moments when "one by one the four-year signs had each reigned thirteen years and when fifty-two years had passed," the once-in-a-lifetime (for most people) ceremony called the toximmolpili, the Binding of the Years, took place in which "once again the years were newly laid hold of."27 It is a crucial change, when the Aztecs grasped the cycles of time that animated their existence, that draws my attention and causes me to seek new methods of interpretation. It is possible to gain an enlarged understanding of how this ceremony worked to bind together, not only the years, but the spaces, peoples, and central ideas of their religious imagination, because running through the data are two threads, partly hidden, that not only tie the description together but also provide clues to the underlying social and symbolic purpose of the ritual. These threads are the flow of Moctezuma's authority through all aspects of the ritual and the design of center/periphery dynamics in the saturation of space with sacred fire. Surprisingly, there are at least two axis mundis in the New Fire Ceremony, the Templo Mayor and the Hill of the Star. The presence of these threads is more evident when we retrace just the physical actions of the description. The drama begins with Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan, even though he is not mentioned at the beginning of this account. But elsewhere in Book 7, we are told that months before the New Fire Ceremony, Moctezuma ordered that "indeed everywhere should be sought a captive whose name contained the word 'xiuitl,' "2S meaning turquoise, year, fire, grass, or comet—a symbolic name connoting precious time. A thorough search for a "well-born" captive was carried out in Moctezuma's reign and the right man, whose name was Xiuhtlamin, was found confined in Tlatelolco. It is a shame that more is not known of this captive and the process of identifying him for the great sacrifice. Once he is prepared as an ixiptla, or image of the god, and the day of the ceremony arrives, the ceremony begins when a procession of deity impersonators moves along a prescribed passageway, presumably seen and heard by masses of people along an extensive route before arriving at the Hill of the Star. In Motolinia, we are told that Moctezuma "had special devotion and reverence for the shrine" and the deity on the Sacred Hill. Fortunately, we have a painted image of what may be the ceremo- 100 CITY OF SACRIFICE nial center on the Hill of the Star in the Codex Borbonicus. In fact, the building in which the New Fire is depicted is the largest building in the entire manuscript, which reflects, if not its size, its prestige as a ceremonial center. There has been extensive discussion as to whether this image depicts the building on the top of the mountain or one of the chief temples in Tenochtitlan or Colhuacan to which the New Fire was brought before being distributed throughout the empire.29 Whether it is the building on the mountain or not, the physical structure gives us a sense of the cosmo-magical meaning of the grand drama taking place. Christopher Couch, in his study of the manuscript, The Festival Cycle of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, writes, The temple rests on a low platform of four steps. The jambs and lintel are painted black with a Maltese cross design left white in the center of each. The same design is seen on a building in the Codex Mendoza which appears as the name glyph for an official, glossed "itlilancalqui." Seler and Paso y Troncoso identify the building as a tlillan or Tlillancalco, "place of or house of darkness."30 In the middle of the temple is a huge blue brazier in which the new fire is roaring. In the Codex Borbonicus, there is pictorial evidence that this temple is the one on the mountain in the form of the nearby place glyph for Huixachtlan, "place in which abounds the huisache tree" (a kind of mimosa). But the place glyph has an important difference that refers to the sacred power of the objects involved. The usual image of the tree on the hill has been replaced with a mamalhuaztli, a fire drill used to ignite fires. The image consists of two parts, the horizontal stick called teo-cuahuitl, or "divine wood," and the vertical pole of strong wood that works to start the fire. The place sign is associated with the sacred event of the New Fire Ceremony. Assembled in the ceremonial center, the group of priests and lords, sharing a heightened sense of expectation and fear, seek another procession—the procession of the stars through the meridian.31 Sa-hagún reports the crucial moment of observation: They reached the summit at mid-night, or almost, where stood a great pyramid built for that ceremony. Having reached there, they looked at the Pleiades to see if they were at the zenith, and if they were not, they waited until they were. And when they saw that they (the Pleiades) had THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY 101 now passed the zenith, they knew that the movements of the heavens had not ceased and that the end of the world was not then, but that they would have another 52 years, assured that the world would not come to an end.32 Once the procession of stars is recognized, the heart sacrifice is carried out, the new fire is lit, "and all his body was consumed in the fire," amid universal rejoicing and bleeding. Multitudes of people were gathered on the mountains around the Basin of Mexico (Tex-coco, Xochimilco, and Quauhtitlan), "waiting to see the new fire, which was a signal that the world would continue. And when the priest made the fire, with great ceremony, upon the pyramid on the mountain, then it was seen from all the surrounding mountains. Those who were there watching then raised a cry which rose to the heavens with joy that the world was not ending."33 In the imagery of the Codex Borbonicus, this central action takes a slightly different form. We see four elaborately arrayed fire priests who have walked in a procession to the temple placing four bundles of tied wood into the fire. These bundles of wood, which are to be burned up in preparation for the birth of the new cycle, represent the four groups of thirteen years, or the fifty-two-year cycle. Along the side, seven deity impersonators, each carrying tied bundles of wood, walk in procession toward the temple opening. Then, in what I see as the most meaningful social and symbolic gesture, priests take the New Fire down the Hill and "before doing anything else" take it back along the causeway into the heart of the city to Huitzilopochtli's shrine at the Templo Mayor. Following this symbolic communication to the Sun and War god, a communication that gives his temple new light and new life, priests and runners dispense the fire through the city from temple to temple, school to school, to "each calpulli," as people hurl themselves on the fire to blister themselves with its sacred power. Then runners who have "come from all directions," not just the four cardinal directions, to Templo Mayor take the fire back to the towns and cities of the periphery. It is as though the fire is creating or following a circuit of energy that results at the end of the ceremony in the saturation of social and geographical space with the New Fire. This filling with fire is accomplished in a series of relay marathons where runners are set up and waiting to carry it to all the villages, towns, temples, and neighborhoods in the empire. In Motolinia, we 102 CITY OP SACRIFICE are told that the fire was taken back to the temples only "after asking permission from the great chief of Mexico."34 The ceremony does not end here. For just as we have seen a series of ritual actions and places symbolizing the end of cosmic and social order (the breaking of hearthstones, the destruction of god statues, the sweeping of houses, the end of sleep, the extinction of fires, the burning of years, the temple or "house of darkness"), we now see a series of actions symbolizing the renewal of cosmic and social order. Then, at this time, all renewed their household goods, the men's array, and the women's array, the mats—the mats of large, fat reeds—and the seats. All was new which was spread about, as well as the heart stones and the pestles. Also, at this time (the men) were newly dressed and wrapped in capes. A woman (such as she) dressed newly in their skirts and shifts.35 Amid rejoicing and emotional relief the people cried out as though an apocalypse had been averted, "For thus it is ended: thus sickness and famine have left us." Birds were decapitated, incense offered to the four directions, amaranth seed cakes covered with honey were eaten just before a short fast. New human sacrifices were carried out, and a quick census was taken as to who had given birth during the critical night of the New Fire. Names with the symbolic titles of Molpilli, Xuihtlalpil, Xiuhtzitzqui, Xiuhtli, Texiuh, Xiuh-tlatlac, Xiuhnenetl, andXiuhcue, carrying the meaning of new time, were given to the newly born. Clearly, the apocalypse of the house of darkness had been avoided and a New Age had begun. By focusing on the minor details of Moctezuma's role and the movements of the New Fire to and away from the Templo Mayor to the capital and then to the general populace, I see a skillful symmetry reflecting the Aztec commitment to interconnections—the dialectical interrelationships of royal authority, sacred space, and celestial action. By symmetry I mean the orderly arrangement of symbolic component parts around a major axis. This symmetry consists of six elements: (i) the fire, (2) the cosmic mountain (in this ceremony there are two, the Hill of the Star and the Templo Mayor, (3) astronomical events, (4) human sacrifice, (5) sacred kingship, and (6) the circuit of fire throughout the empire. I see the center, or central zone, of this symmetry to be the interplay between the king's flow of authority and the axis of Aztec society, the Templo Mayor and the capital. This interplay constitutes what the University of Chicago scholar THE NEW FIRE CEBEMONY IO3 of social thought Edward Shils calls a "central zone," by which he means "the point or points in a society where its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions to create an arena in which events that most vitally affect its members' lives take place."36 What is taking place in the New Fire Ceremony is the integration of one of the leading ideas (Moctezumais tlatoani, ruler, of the world) with the leading institutions (symbolized by human sacrifice), and the Templo Mayor (the first home of the new fire) with the cosmic renewal integrated by an astronomical event. And stargazing is the practice that ties these elements together. But what is impressive to me is that whether the temple in the Codex Borbonicus is Mexica or not, it is the capital city that is first lit up completely like a sun on earth or a heaven on earth?1 As we have seen in other rituals, the capital city is the axis of the ceremonial landscape and it serves here as the centripetal and centrifugal center to which and from which the New Fire is distributed. THE FIRE GOD AT THE CENTER Op THE UNIVERSE In this grand ceremony, it is fire that remakes the capital into a central zone. The New Fire inhabits the central zone of houses, temples, schools, and the horizontal and vertical center of the entire cosmos. As one early commentator remarked about native beliefs, "They also believe the same of the rivers, lakes and springs, since to all they offer wax and incense, and what they most venerate and almost all hold to be a god, is fire."38 Fire seems to have been the oldest, or one of the oldest, gods of center place in Mesoamerican cosmology. As a prodigious sign of this centrality, the fire god had one of the most extensive series of names, which includes Xiuhtecuhtli (Lord of the Fire), Huehueteotl (Aged God), Ixcozauhqui (He Whose Face Is Yellow), Nahui Acatl (Four Cane, which is one of his calendrical names), Nauhyotecuhtli (Lord of the Group of Four), Chicunauhyotecuhtli (Lord of the Group of Nine), Xipil (Noble of the Fire), Tocenta (Our Single Father), Huehue llama (Ancient Man, Ancient Woman), and Teyacancatzin Totecuyo (Our Lord the Venerable One Who Guides the Rest). Even though this list is incomplete, we can see this god as lord or center of the sacred number (groups) four (the cosmic directions) and nine (the nine levels of the underworld), lord of fire, the unique parent who is male and female, and the guide of the gods. The Lord of the Fire had this prestige in every home where he dwelt on or near the hearthstones (including the ones thrown out at the end of the 104 CITY OF SACRIFICE fifty-two-year cycle). The god had the powers of fire to transform through cooking, and he was the central zone of domestic arts and nurturance as he assisted in the growth of children,39 changed water into steam, limestone into lime, cold into heat, raw food into cookal food, and on the grand cosmic level, his power as fire was changed into the celestial sun! In his remarkable "The Masked God of Fire," which is a methodological tour de force of iconographic analysis,40 Alfredo Lopez Austin explores the cosmological connection between fire and the th ive general regions of the universe, the upperworld (Ilhuicatl), the earthly level (Tlalticpac), and the underworld (Mictlan). He nine« that the fire god was believed to dwell in all three regions of the world connecting them at the center, the axis mundi, of the domestic and divine hearth. "His palace is central; it is on the axis mundi!'41 One s\ in bol of this connectedness through fire is the fire drill, the shaft and divine wood of the symbol we saw in the Codex Borbonicus. Thron Ji the use of the fire drill, the fire descends from the sky to the earth 1\ center and permeates the earthly landscape through the sun's travels and ritual actions, which spread him through society. In my view, this is the chief purpose of the New Fire Ceremony; to connect the celestial regimes of the Pleiades with the earthly regime of the i n\ through a circuit of spreading fire that leads back to the central sh 11 ik-and outward through the world to the horizon. Lopez Austin's comments on the relationship of fire to the underworld may also have a bearing on the symbolism of darkness and 1 ight that is acted out in the New Fire Ceremony. Xiuhtecuhtli, in his f i >i m as Lord of the Group of Nine, lived in the underworld and participated in the cycle of the journey to Mictlan. Xiuhtecuhtli participated in the rebirth of certain divinities and was symbolically present in a number of ceremonies involving the journey to the underworld and rebirth. In more than one case we have images of the god of fire represented in Mictlan, as dead, in invigorating repose, and in a position which does not differ from that which he has in the upper levels; it agrees with the functions of dominion which he may exercise in the lower world, where not only does he gain strength, but also offers the power of his flames, of his transforming force, to the beings who will return again to the surface.42 In this instance, the fire god is the center of regeneration, lying in wait in the underworld. This journey to the underworld, which was also a THE NEW FIRE CEREMONY 105 house of darkness, may be what is symbolized in the period of darkness, the extinguishing of fire (which Durán says lasts four days), the breaking of hearthstones, which could be an act of insult to the god or the end of his existence in the previous calendar round.43 LOCATIVE ARRANGEMENTS The symmetry of the New Fire Ceremony is related to what Jonathan Z. Smith, in his book Map Is Not Territory: Essays in the History of Religions, calls a locative view of the world, which consists of "a map of the world that guarantees meaning and value through structures of conjunction and conformity."44 This locative view, which has been discerned in the seven traditional societies of primary urban generation in which everything has value and even sacrality when it is in its place, is an imperial view of the world designed to ensure social and symbolic control on the part of the king and the capital. It is informed by a cosmological conviction consisting of five facets that dominated human society in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerican, and Peru for over two thousand years: (i) there is a cosmic order that permeates every level of reality; (2) this cosmic order is the divine society of the gods; (3) the structure and dynamics of this society can be discerned in the movement and patterned juxtaposition of the heavenly bodies; (4) human society should be a microcosm of the divine society; and (5) the chief responsibility of priests and kings is to attune human order to the divine order. In the New Fire Ceremony, at least in 1507 in Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma II is carrying out his chief responsibility by attuning human order to the divine order through the discernment of an astronomical event and the communication of his authority by fire in a sequential process. There are numerous illustrations of the locative emphasis of the Aztec religion, including many that link astronomical events and processes to ritual offerings, dances, and sacrifices carried out in the city and its ceremonial centers. Consider these two narrative fragments relating the precise time of day to dances and other bodily movements, decorations, roles, and the relationship of ritual to luxury and gender relations. In the festival known as Huey Tozoztli, or Great Vigil, in which children and women were sacrificed in the service of agricultural regeneration (this is discussed in more detail in chapter 7), we witness a ritual micromanagement of human action, 108 CITY OP SACRIFICE gion, to be discussed in detail in chapter 4, appears in the detailed