In 1519, Hernán Cortes went to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and two years later lay in ruins the capital of the Aztec Empire - the majestic TENOCHTILAN with all its sanctuaries, temples and statues of the gods.
Ten years later, in 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to a young Indian named Juan Diego and miraculously imprinted her shining appearance on his cape. From that moment on, the conversion of the Indians to the Christian faith began, and it was crowned with success.
However, the fear of the gods broken and buried in the ground did not die - Indian blood regularly passed it on from generation to generation. And when in 1964 the Mexican authorities decided to raise from the ravine a 200-ton statue of Tlaloc, the Indian god of Rain, to install it at the entrance to the capital's Museum of Anthropology, they unexpectedly encountered resistance from the local population.
It is known that on this day a terrible downpour gushed from heaven - an unprecedented phenomenon for that time of the year …
The death of a mighty and seemingly indestructible empire hastened one coincidence, tragic for the Aztecs. The year 1519 after the birth of Christ was in the Aztec chronology. The first year of the Reed, the beginning of a new 52-year cycle, when, in accordance with the predictions, Quetzalcoatl, or the Feathered Serpent, was to return to Mexico, the god of light and fertility, the most beloved and most joyful of all Indian gods. His appearance was expected from the side of the ocean - therefore, when the bearded Spaniards landed on the shore, they were mistaken for the messengers of God.
Promotional video:
The Aztec emperor Motekusoma was the longest in the tragic delusion about foreigners. It was he who personally introduced Cortez and his soldiers to Tenochtitlan as noble and dear guests. What the Spaniards saw there looked like a fantastic dream. The Aztec city stood in the middle of a huge lake. Its temples and pyramids were built on the island, and most of the dwelling houses made of light reed literally floated on the water - the "foundation" they served as a kind of rafts of moisture-loving vegetation, turf and willow bushes. The city was connected to the "mainland" by three narrow floating dams, each several miles long.
In the center of Tenochtitlan, the Great Temple towered in the form of a 45-meter double-headed pyramid. As a sign of special honor, Motekusoma invited Cortez to go upstairs. The famous conquistador, as you know, did not suffer from special impressionability, but what he saw made him shudder. A staircase, black with caked blood, led to two shrines. One of them belonged to Witzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war, the other to the rain god Tlaloc. Both deities constantly "demanded" human sacrifice. It was here, on stone altars, with special flint knives the priests cut through the chest of the victims, pulling out the trembling, still living hearts, and presenting them as a gift to the stone idol. It is not known what struck Cortez more: endless rows of skulls around the sanctuaries or piles of gold in the emperor's palace. It is clear, however, that he increasingly saw the Devil in the guise of bloodthirsty pagans.
Having called on God to their side, the Spaniards, where by cunning and cunning, where by courage and force of arms, forced the Aztec army to surrender many times over in number.
Cortez got his way. With the exception of a few exhibits in the Museum of Anthropology and the "timid" excavations hiding behind the Cathedral, there is practically nothing in Mexico City that resembles the Aztecs. Having destroyed Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards, as if taking revenge from the inertia of nature itself, drained the lake. (The climate of the Valley of Mexico City has changed dramatically. As a result, the largest metropolis on the planet today suffers from acute water shortages and suffocates from smog).
Having won the war with the Aztecs, the Spaniards did not suspect that the main battle - the battle with the Indian gods - they still lost. How could they know that all the gods they hated - and Tlaloc, and Quetzalcoatl, and the water goddess Chalchiuhtlike - were not Aztec deities at all. They safely "lived" on Mexican soil for almost three millennia, and only in the last two centuries before the invasion of the Spaniards were they "usurped" by the Aztecs.
Awareness of the depth of Mexican culture came relatively recently, in the 40s of the twentieth century, when, during excavations in the town of San Lorenzo, workers suddenly saw a huge stone eye looking at them in the ground! This eye belonged to the appropriate size for the Head. The multi-toned basalt Heads (more than a dozen of them were found in different places) were striking not so much by their dimensions as by their strange, alien expression on their faces. The most ancient civilization discovered in this way began to be called Olmec.
The explicit negroid, or rather, Polynesian features of the discovered Heads gave rise to the assumption of the overseas origin of the Olmecs. But later it became apparent that the faces of the Heads were stylized.
Where the Olmecs came from remains unclear. The more new objects of the Olmec culture were discovered, the more mysterious this civilization became. The main works of Olmec art that have come down to us were not giant Heads, but miniature figurines made of jade, jadeite and serpentine, depicting strange asexual people with their heads extended upward, flattened. They often held sad babies in their arms with a jaguar mask instead of a face. However, there were also realistic sculptures made with such a virtuoso skill in stone processing, which could not even be approached by other peoples of the New World.
The Olmec civilization existed for about a thousand years: its traces are cut off in the 4th century BC, when the centers of future Mexican civilizations - Teotihuacan and Monte Alban - were still in their infancy. It was the Olmecs who invented and introduced the famous 260-day calendar, which is present in all Indian cultures. As the main deity, the Olmecs considered, obviously, the jaguar-man - a werewolf who embodies the power and ruthlessness of the forces of the earth and night. Perhaps they also created in their imagination Quetzalcoatl - the Feathered Serpent - an outlandish hybrid of a bird of paradise (quetzal) and a snake (couatl), a symbol of the unattainable combination of eternal wisdom with beauty and radiance.
From the Olmecs there was not a single house, not a single temple, not a piece of clothing, not a book - nothing but ceramics and stone that did not succumb to time and a murderous climate. However, the history of the entire Mexican culture would hardly be what it is today, if more than three millennia ago, mysterious people began to carve their figures and bas-reliefs out of stone in the depths of the jungle.
The ancient civilizations of Mexico only seem to be independent, but in fact are interconnected by imperceptible, sometimes underground streams. And Teotihuacan, and Monte Alban, and the Toltec culture, and even the isolated Mayan culture are associated with the life-giving Olmec "spring", although they are separated from it by an abyss of almost five hundred years.
By the time the first pyramids appeared, the pantheon of Indian gods was practically "completed", and the Feathered Serpent occupied one of the leading places in it. It was he who, as the Indians believed, invented the calendar for them, it was he who, once turned into an ant, stole a grain of maize from underground storerooms and gave it to people.
However, it cannot be said that each pyramid was built in honor of a particular god. The functional purpose of the ancient Mexican pyramids is still unclear. It is clear that, unlike the Egyptian ones, they are not burial structures. They were not used for sacrifices either, as the Aztecs later did at the top of their Great Temple.
Most of the Indian pyramids are built on the principle of "nesting dolls", but this is not the original plan of the architect, but the result of later superstructures and "facing": the smallest and most ancient pyramid is inside, and what it is can be recognized only by destroying all subsequent ones.
The pyramids have always been present in the life of Mexico, both in the time of Cortez and later - but they were silently present: they were hills overgrown with grass and bushes.
Subsequent excavations of Teotihuacan showed that for its time it was one of the largest cities on the planet, which during its heyday (mid-1st millennium) had thousands of houses, hundreds of temples, hundreds of workshops and about 200 thousand inhabitants! Teotihuacan was cosmopolitan: the Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca lived in the western quarters, the Mayans from Yucatan lived in the eastern quarters, each people with its own customs, with its own deities. However, the main buildings of Teotihuacan were dedicated to the gods common to all: the sun god, the moon goddess and Quetzalcoatl.
The catastrophe happened around 700 AD. The great city was deserted, its houses and temples were subjected to destruction and fires, but no one knows the reasons for the death of Teotihuacan. Whether they were barbarians who came from the north, or the inhabitants themselves rebelled against their gods, unable to protect them from drought and hunger, in any case, people left the city.
What happened? The pyramids are meaningfully silent …
Tribes of nomadic hunters marched to the weakened, lost power cities from the northern American deserts. They were called "chichimeks" (literally - "people of canine origin"), however, this name was not offensive. Some of these tribes, amazed at the grandeur of the culture they encountered, tried to embrace its achievements. These included the Toltecs - perhaps the last of the Indian peoples who sincerely tried to recreate the life-affirming meaning of ancient civilizations. But they were bad at it. Honoring above all the gods of Quetzalcoatl, they did not follow his peace-loving "principles": the temple of the Feathered Serpent was propped up by five-meter Toltec warriors who had a terrifying appearance. For the first time, the sinister Chak-Mool began to appear in the sanctuaries - a stone idol designed to burn human hearts …
At the beginning of the second millennium, the Toltec cities also fell into decay. Perhaps they could not resist the onslaught of the new "Chichimecs" - one way or another, but by the arrival of the Aztecs, the Toltecs themselves had already become a legend.
Being, as they say, “without clan and tribe,” the Aztecs hired themselves to serve the Kolhua, the descendants of the Toltecs. They allowed them to live in the neighborhood - on scorched volcanic lands inhabited by snakes alone, which the Aztecs, to the amazement of the kolhua, learned to cook and eat. The courage of the Aztecs, their endurance and ability to fight were highly appreciated by kolhua. In turn, the Aztecs took the classical Indian pantheon as their own and gradually engaged in further myth-making, which at first went in the canonical course. According to them, the world was ruled by four Tezcatlipocas in accordance with the four cardinal points. Each Tezcatlipoca also had its own color. The main one - Black Tezcatlipoca - ruled over the birth and death of people, knew everything about everyone and inspired the Aztecs with sacred horror. His earthly incarnation was the jaguar. He was opposed by White Tezcatlipoca - the Feathered Serpent, the god of goodness and light, the protector and benefactor of people. Red Tezcatlipoca was the god of Spring, and finally, Blue Tezcatlipoca was none other than the sinister Witzilopochtli, the warlike sun god, whose instructions the Aztecs followed unquestioningly.
Having mastered and "modified" the Indian gods, the Aztecs began to be heavily burdened by their "unsuccessful" pedigree. Subsequently, with the help of archaeological fraud (the Aztecs diligently unearthed the cities of the Toltecs and collected the objects of art found there) they managed to convince everyone around them, and above all themselves, that they are direct descendants of the builders of the ancient pyramids. They really believed that on the family tree of Indian cultures they occupy the upper levels, although in reality they were only an ugly twisted side branch.
The formation period of the Aztecs was short enough. Their code of conduct was developed in the process of contacts with Kolhua and other Indian peoples, and the main role in this, apparently, was played by the imperative orders of the god Witzilopochtli. These orders, announced, of course, by the high priest, were so inhuman, and the practice of their execution so monstrous that there is no need to even explain how peoples with a much deeper history and culture came under the rule of the Aztecs.
Getting acquainted with the terrible details of the first bloody "exploits" of the Aztecs, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the primitive, in essence, the people were ruled by a pathological maniac. His sadistic, perverse fantasies, framed as the orders of Witzilopochtly, became rituals, and the subsequent military and political successes of the Aztecs reinforced these rituals, making them mandatory for all generations.
The fact is that human sacrifice, nevertheless, has always been considered by the priests as an extreme means of influencing higher powers. Among the Aztecs, the ritual killing of people served as a "stimulus" to natural, unchanging natural phenomena - for example, the rising of the sun and its regular movement across the sky.
Every year, at a certain time, the Aztec priests put on their shoulders the skin removed the day before from the killed victims, and wore it without removing it for 20 days.
This wild ritual symbolized among the Aztecs … the welcome of spring and the renewal of nature! Tens of thousands of people became victims of Aztec ritual murders every year!
At the same time, the Aztecs really had high knowledge - at least in astronomy and construction. The Aztecs left behind a lot of illustrated books (they had no written language), jewelry, products made of stone and ceramics - however, all their art was of some depressive nature: terrible masks, faces and skulls distorted by grimaces, skulls, skulls …
The blood of tens of thousands of victims could not remain unaffected. Emperor Motekusoma foresaw an impending disaster. In the last years of his reign, bad omens followed one another. But most of all, the emperor was frightened by the bird caught by the fishermen. She had a small mirror on her forehead, and in it Motekusoma saw armed men riding reindeer!
There was an era of the 5th Sun - the last Sun according to the beliefs of the Aztecs. It was supposed to end with the death of the world, and the Aztecs calmly prepared to meet death. With fear and hope, they awaited the return of Quetzalcoatl, but the Feathered Serpent, apparently, left the Aztecs forever, giving them undivided power to the insane Witzilopochtli, who demanded more and more blood. In an effort to make more and more sacrifices, the Aztecs could no longer stop. And then Cortez landed on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Conquista was impetuous …
© Andrey Nechaev