The eagle, made of red volcanic rock, has no feet and no tail. But its head is huge, its eyes are huge, flashing aggressively from its plumage, and its tongue sticks out from its half-open beak. The indentation that the Aztec stonemason carved out of the bird’s back is also huge, a cavity the size of a soup bowl. But the cavity contained no food, no scents or spices. It contained a twitching, bleeding heart. The heart that the high priest of the Aztec Empire had torn from the cut-open chest cavity of a prisoner of war in the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, in honor of the god Huitzilopochtli.
The ethnogenesis of the people who called themselves Mexica and were called Aztecs by the Spaniards who destroyed their state can be imagined as an extended pagan procession of saints. The priests of the Mexica, who came from far away in the north, carried the image of their god on poles in front of the stream of migrants until they reached an island in Lake Texcoco, where an eagle sat on a prickly pear cactus and ate a snake. There they founded their capital. This is the story of the myth, which arose long after the settlement and left only the motif of migration out of necessity of the real events. In the thirteenth century, the drought that destroyed the ancient culture of the Anasazi in northwest America reached its peak. Tenochtitlan was founded a short time later.
Metropolis in the lake: computer simulation of the Aztec capital TenochtitlanThomas Kole
In the exhibition that the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is dedicated to the empire and wealth of the Mexica, their founding and creation myth is laid out on text panels and video monitors. The list of gods who ruled the sky, Hades and the earthly world of the people of Tenochtitlan was longer than that of the Greeks, Romans and Germanic tribes combined, ranging from Acolmiztli, a god of the underworld, to Yacatecuhtli, the patron god of traveling merchants. At the center, however, was Huitzilopochtli, the “hummingbird of the south”, who had created the moon and the stars by dismembering his sister Coyolxauhqui and attaching his four hundred brothers to the firmament as night lights. In the divided world of the Mexica, he was the lord of the sun and war, while Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead, and his wife Mictlancihuatl guarded the underworld. And he thirsted for blood.
But the curators of the Paris exhibition have put the visual aspect before the explanations. And so, after being greeted by the heart eagle, the visitor on the ground floor of the Quai Branly stands in front of a gallery of gods. There is Tlaloc, the rain god, as a basalt bust with fangs and a ribbon crown; the wind god Ehecatl with a duck’s beak and the body of a youth; the earth goddess Coatlicue with empty eye sockets and a drilled-out chest to accommodate precious stones; and the sun god Tonatiuh – also the recipient of countless human sacrifices – as a seated statue with a plumed back. An old prejudice in art history sees the Aztecs’ image production as remaining in the two-dimensionality of stone reliefs, calendar tablets and pictograms. Here it is brilliantly refuted.
Chess piece of the sky: statue of the rain god TlalocClaude Germain/Quai Branly Museum
Since 1978, excavations have been taking place on the site of the Templo Mayor in the center of Mexico City, right next to the city’s Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. The Spanish conquerors under Cortés demolished the terraced temples after the destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521 and built on their rubble, but did not further investigate the soil. This allowed countless ritual graves and sacred objects to survive the centuries. To date, more than seven thousand objects have been recovered, of which a good three hundred have come to Paris, supplemented by about half as many from the Quai Branly’s holdings: jewelry made of bronze, gold and jade, knives made of obsidian and flint, clay vessels, masks, skulls studded with blades, animal and human bones.
At the foot of the pyramid dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc, archaeologists found forty-four children’s skeletons in a sumptuously decorated tomb. They point to a traumatic event in Tenochtitlan’s history, the famine of 1454, which followed years of drought and plagues of locusts.
Until then, the Aztec polis had largely contented itself with waging war on the small kingdoms around Lake Texcoco together with its sister city Tlatelolco and making them pay tribute. However, the mass deaths from starvation made the rulers of Tenochtitlan aware of the precarious supply situation in their empire. Under Moctezuma I, who ruled until 1469, a determined policy of expansion began.
Sacred rites: the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue (left) and sacrificing priests in an Aztec codex from the early 16th centuryQuai Branly Museum
By the end of the fifteenth century, the Mexica had brought almost the entire land mass between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific under their control. As they proceeded in a systematic and ruthless manner, they soon had their hands full stabilizing their rule. The bourgeois and aristocratic metropolis of Tenochtitlan froze into a military state, and the social reforms that Moctezuma had introduced were reversed by a successor of the same name. When Hernán Cortés landed on the coast with just over six hundred men, the Spanish had no trouble filling their ranks with tens of thousands of native fighters, so hated was the Aztec regime.
The idea that the Mexica priests tortured small children with daggers in order to wet the statue of the rain god with their tears, and that they ripped out the hearts of prisoners of war in order to feed blood to Huitzilopochtli or the creator god Quetzalcoatl, is disgusting. But human sacrifices also took place in Babylon and Carthage, and one of the key scenes in Greek mythology involves the slaughter of the king’s daughter Iphigenia on the altar of the hunting goddess Artemis. The peculiarity of the Aztec sacrificial rite is that bloodshed was not an exception. It was a system. The gods had to be drenched in blood because they had created the earth specifically to feed them.
Reptile with wings: The god Quetzalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”) as a sculpture made of volcanic rockHughes Dubois/Quai Branly Museum
The archaeologists point out that they have only found 500 sacrificial burials on the grounds of the Templo Mayor and another thousand elsewhere in the city. But the selection of exhibits in the Quai Branly shows very clearly that this is only the tip of the mountain of deaths: obsidian blades, skulls, skeletons of people and animals everywhere, as well as the colorful pictograms with their angular streams of blood shooting from the hearts of the sacrificed into the mouths of the gods. The rulers of heaven and the underworld had to satiate themselves with human bodies so that the Mexica universe remained in balance. “The earth feeds us, then it eats us,” says a proverb of the indigenous inhabitants of the Mexican highlands that still goes today.
The Mexica took it very seriously. With the same blades they used to kill prisoners and slaves, they also sacrificed their own blood, which spurted from tongues, penises and cut ears onto the stone images of the gods. One of these, perhaps the most impressive in the exhibition, shows the creator god Quetzalcoatl, the “feathered serpent” who has been worshipped in Central America for thousands of years and was known to the Maya as Kukulcan. His head protrudes from the mouth of a rattlesnake while his arms and legs enclose his feathers. The cavity in his chest is empty. This is where the gemstone that represented the god’s heart once sat. It no longer shines. But in the Musée du Quai Branly we can see its reflection.
Mexico. The dons and the dieux au Templo Mayor. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, until October 6th. The French catalog costs 38 euros.
