2.3—The Aztec (12 min video)

Transcript

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All right. Well, today we can talk about something fun and upbeat and positive, the Aztecs. I just lied to you. The Aztecs are kind of like the rest of our Mesoamerican cultures. They were also dark. They also worshiped death. They also were heavy into human sacrifice. They were one of the evils and the darknesses that the Spanish had to encounter when they came over here. Now the Aztecs lived right in the middle of Mexico. In fact, if you look at our map here, and you look at Mexico City, that is where the Aztecs were essentially located, where they built their central ruling empire.

And the Aztecs didn’t call themselves Aztecs, they called themselves the Mexicas, which is where we get Mexico from. And Mexica, in the Aztec language and in the Aztec worldview simply meant the people, the real people or the first people. In other words, if you were an Aztec, you were somebody who was important and more important than anybody else. So if you weren’t an Aztec, you were the not real people. You were the second, third or fifth people or the not important people. And so that’s kind of the first clue as to where our study of the Aztecs is actually going to take us. Our second clue is the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. It was this incredible city that probably had, at its peak, 200,000 people living in it. I know if you look at modern cities, they actually have millions and millions of people living in them. You sometimes think, well, 200,000 really isn’t that many. But for the ancient world, where people were largely spread out because they largely farmed the land, 200,000 people in a single city was impressive. Not only that, but the city was founded in the year 1325 AD. So it really wasn’t that old of a city when the Spanish came here in the 1500s. And it was a city that had been founded and made bigger than any European city that the European settlers that came from could actually claim any kind of allegiance to.

And so this was an impressive place. Not only that, but the city was built on a swampy lake, right there in the center of Mexico. The Aztecs were able to take a few islands, and then they were able to take things like dirt and soil and various other trash supplies, dump them into the swamp, and actually create more land.

Another thing the Aztecs did that was kind of brilliant and also kind of gross, you’ll see why it’s gross in a moment, was they built these beautiful gardens. They called them chinampas. And these chinampas gardens, you can see the word right here, how it actually shows you how to spell this word. And these were garden plots that kind of floated out there in that swampy area. And they were so well fertilized that they would produce two crops of anything you planted in them in a single year. So that’s how 200,000 people were able to live in the middle of a swamp. They had all this food coming from these chinampas gardens. What I haven’t told you yet is the gross part. The way the chinampas were fertilized and what made them so able to produce so much food is that they used human waste or specifically they used feces or what we poop out of our bodies to actually fertilize these garden plots.

So you might want to think twice about eating any of the cucumbers or the tomatoes that came from chinampas. Anyway, what’s interesting about that is it kind of reminds us of how the people of Shinar, the people who built the Tower of Babel, how they actually produced it.

If you remember, if you look at the King James Bible, it says that they used bricks instead of stone, and they used slime instead of mortar to actually create the Tower of Babel.

And so right here, in the city of the Aztecs, we have a city that’s not made out of slime, but made out of something that is at least as gross, if not worse off for us to imagine.

Anyway, the whole culture of the Aztecs was based on slavery and based on death and human sacrifice, like all the other Mesoamerican cultures. In fact, if you lived in the Aztec civilization, if you could read or if you were educated or were free, that meant that you were roughly in the top 5% of the population.

The other 95% of people who lived in the Aztec Empire were not trained how to read, were not taught stories or a history, and were certainly not valued.

They They were either low class or they were slaves. So the Aztec Empire was not a great place to live in unless you were on the top and you built your happiness based upon the suffering of others.

So in other words, it wasn’t a great place to live. But the whole culture, as I mentioned, was based upon sacrifice. In fact, the Aztecs drew people to sacrifice to the gods from all of the civilizations and all of the cultures that they had conquered that were around their empire.

And so every year, they would demand that so many boys or so many girls be sent to the capital to be sacrificed and given over to the gods.

As a result, the Spanish, when they came to the Aztec Empire and they saw the remains of these human sacrifices, the Spanish reported that there were thick layers of blood on the temple that had actually turned black from years and years of sacrifice and never a moment of cleaning off the lifeblood of some victim.

As a result, some reports say that the blood was so thick that it was sometimes six inches thick. That’s how many people the Aztecs actually sacrificed to their gods in a way to try and defeat death. Not only that, but the Aztecs had something that they called the Flowery Wars, which of course might bring you to the whole idea, oh, here’s the upbeat point of the lecture. Sorry, not really. The flowery wars were not a nice little princess movie. The flowery wars was an event that happened every single year. And all of those cultures, all those civilizations around the Aztecs, they were instructed to send their best warriors to compete in the flowery wars.

And even the Aztecs themselves, some of them would send warriors to compete in the flowery wars. And in the flowery wars, one of two things would happen to you. Either you would die, which actually might be the nicest thing in this case, or you would be taken a prisoner. And once you were taken as a captive prisoner, you were brought back to that swampy lake capital of Tenochtitlan, and you were put kind of in the middle of a great coliseum.

And you had a stone pedestal to stand upon, and you were given a little drink that made it so you couldn’t really feel things as easily. And you were given a club that was designed for you to use as a weapon to fight against four opponents. Just one difference. Your opponents and their clubs had sharp obsidian stones sticking out from all sides of the club. And that’s what they would use to try and bring you down and hurt you severely. Your club was not armed with obsidian. It wasn’t armed with another stone or something less than obsidian that would still actually cause damage. Your club, unfortunately, was only armed with feathers. And so, therefore, this was kind of a rigged contest. You weren’t meant to survive this. Well, during the course of you being on the platform with your feathery club as a captive, and all of these four other guys around you trying to break your legs with their obsidian-armed clubs, eventually you would go down.

And they wouldn’t kill you right away. Once they had incapacitated you, they actually brought you down to the ground, they would and then take you to the altar, and there they would finish you off.

They would actually kill you. Now what’s really interesting about the Aztecs, or what’s really dark about the Aztecs and their way of trying to defeat death, is the Aztecs so worshipped death that the person who did finally take your life was called your spiritual father.

In other words, the Aztec culture and our study of it shows the complete opposite of the way that things should be. That’s because instead of life being the ultimate goal and death being the final enemy, death was the ultimate goal. Death was the ultimate honor if you were an Aztec. Now in the midst of this dark, dark reality that was the Aztec kingdom and the Aztec empire, there’s an interesting story. And take a look at this picture here. This strange god that you’re looking at who looks kind of like a serpent and looks kind of like maybe a big feathery chicken. His name, which we’ll put up here on the screen right now, is Quetzalcoatl. And Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent god, as they called him. And Quetzalcoatl’s story is very interesting. It’s one of the few stories the Aztecs passed on. They didn’t, like the Olmec, they didn’t really tell many stories. Like the Mayans, they didn’t record their history, ’cause they didn’t see those things as important. But this story, for some reason, they saw as needing to be passed on. And the story went like this. Quetzalcoatl had come in a boat with these strange white cloth objects, something we would probably call sails. And he had come from the direction of where the sun rises. So he’d come from the east. He had landed in the Aztec kingdom. And he was strange because his skin was lighter than the skin of any of the Aztecs. He was strange because he wore a beard, unlike most of the Aztecs. He was strange because he wore long, brownish robes, and he had this strange red mark on his robes and on his ship. It was two red lines intersecting. In other words, it was a red cross. And so the Aztecs noted what he looked like, and then they also noted what he told them to do. He told them to stop sacrificing people, because there had already been a final sacrifice made. In fact, the God himself had done this. The God who had made the sun, the God who had made the soil beneath the Aztecs’ feet, the God who had made the stars and made all the things that they loved and worshipped, he was the one who actually sacrificed himself.

Not only that, but he also taught them that they should practice things like fasting and feasting, depending on what time of year it was, and that they should also practice things like confessing their sins to one another.

Now, who this person may have been, we’ll talk about in a later lesson. But what we can imagine, this person was probably one of those early Christian missionaries, who by some miracle wound up on the shores of North America centuries before Columbus ever even was able to come here.

So over time, the Aztecs begin to refer to this Quetzalcoatl as the Morning Star. They refer to him as the greatest of all the gods. But their story goes on. They say that there was an evil god, an evil man who came from a different direction, who worshipped the old ways of death and the old ways of sacrificing people.

His name was Tezcatlipoca, which you can write down here by looking at how the word is actually spelled. But Tezcatlipoca was able to defeat and depose Quetzalcoatl, and so Quetzalcoatl fled back to the east, but he vowed that he would return once again.

And after he had left, the Aztecs began to write down stories and began to hypothesize about when he might actually return. In fact, they even had an exact time for when he would return. Of course, what’s strange and what’s sad is that by the time the Spanish came back, they still worshipped Quetzalcoatl, but they no longer worshipped him as the god who had told them that a final sacrifice had been made.

They worshipped Him as the God to whom they had to sacrifice to. We’ll take a look at that in our final lecture for this week’s lesson.