The Spanish Pioneers

Excerpt: ...by pledging and keeping up unceasing and awful self-deprivation and self-mutilation. Human lives were offered not only to one or two principal idols of each community, but each town had also many minor fetiches to which such sacrifices Pg 154 were made on stated occasions. So fixed was the custom of sacrifice, and so proper was it deemed, that when Cortez came to Cempohuál the natives could think of no other way to welcome him with sufficient honor, and in perfect cordiality proposed to offer up human sacrifices to him. It is hardly necessary to add that Cortez sternly declined this pledge of hospitality. These rites were mostly performed on the teocallis, or sacrificial mounds, of which there were one or more in every Indian town. These were huge artificial mounds of earth, built in the shape of truncated pyramids, and faced all over with stone. They were from fifty to two hundred feet high, and sometimes many hundreds of feet square at the base. Upon the flat top of the pyramid stood a small tower,-the dingy chapel which enclosed the idol. The grotesque face of the stone deity looked down upon a cylindrical stone which had a bowl-like cavity in the top,-the altar, or sacrificial stone. This was generally carved also, and sometimes with remarkable skill and detail. The famous so-called Aztec Calendar Stone in the National Museum of Mexico, which once gave rise to so many wild speculations, is merely one of these sacrificial altars, dating from before Columbus. It is a wonderful piece of Indian stone-carving. The idol, the inner walls of the temple, the floor, the altar, were always wet with the most precious fluid on earth. In the bowl human hearts smouldered. Black-robed wizards, their faces painted Pg 155 black with white rings about eyes and mouth, their hair matted with blood, their faces raw from constant self-torture, forever flitted to and fro, keeping watch by night and day, ready always for the victims whom that...