Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

for technically speaking, there never were any “Aztecs.” No people ever called themselves that. It was a word that scholars began to use in the eighteenth century to describe the people who dominated central Mexico at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival.

Aztecs is a scholarly term for the náhuatl speaking people who dominated Tenochtitlán area

If I am speaking of the ethnic group that rose to power, I use the word they used, Mexica

(Me-SHEE-ka),

The first time each Aztec-language or Nahuatl (NA-wat) word is used, the approximate pronunciation is given in parentheses. Three rules will help readers speak most Nahuatl words relatively easily. First, the “tl” consonant is pronounced softly; in English, the closest equivalent is a simple “t” sound. Second, when “h” is followed by the letter “u,” the intent is to produce a “w” sound. (Both of these rules are illustrated in the word “Nahuatl.”) And finally, our “sh” sound is represented by the letter “x.” Since the “sh” sound is common in Nahuatl, that guideline is worth remembering. The people we often call the “Aztecs,” for example, called themselves the “Mexica,” pronounced Me-SHEE-ka, and the word “xochitl,” meaning flower, is thus SHO-cheet. For those who wish to expose themselves more thoroughly to this beautiful language, several excellent books are available.2

The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made. They thought of themselves as humble people who had made the best of a bad situation and who had shown bravery and thus reaped its rewards. They believed that the universe had imploded four times previously, and they were living under the fifth sun, thanks to the extraordinary courage of an ordinary

man.

Elders told the story to their grandchildren: “When all was in darkness, when the sun had not yet shone and the dawn had not yet broken, the gods gathered and spoke among themselves.” The divinities asked for a volunteer from the few humans and animals creeping about in the darkness. They needed someone to immolate himself and thus bring forth a new dawn. A man who was very full of himself stepped forward and said he would do it. “Who else?” the gods asked, but their question was met with silence. “None dared, no one else came forward.” The gods called on a quiet man who sat listening. His name was Nanahuatzin (Na-na-WA-tzeen). He had not thought of himself as a hero, but he accepted the task readily on the grounds that the gods had been good to him in the past. The two men were made ready for sacrifice, the proud hero receiving beautiful, precious accoutrements, but Nanahuatzin only paper trinkets, reeds, and pine needles. At last it was time. The hero went forward. “The flames flared up high, and he became terrified. He stopped in fear, turned about, went back … he tried again … but he could in no way dare to do it.” The gods turned to Nanahuatzin and stared at him. “He harden...

This book, rooted in the Nahuatl-language annals, offers five revelations about the Aztecs. First, although Aztec political life has been assumed to revolve around their religiously motivated belief in the necessity of

human sacrifice to keep the gods happy, the annals indicate that this notion was never paramount for them.

The Aztecs’ own histories, however, indicate that they understood clearly that political life revolved not around the gods or claims about the gods but around the realities of shifting power imbalances.

Like other dominant cultures, they wielded most of their violence at the margins of their political world, and this choice made possible the wealth that allowed a gloriously beautiful city to grow and flourish—one filled with citizens who had the leisure time and energy to write poetry, create aromatic chocolate drinks, and sometimes debate morality.

They became true scholars, even though the Spaniards did not recognize them as such. It is their efforts that now allow for the reconstruction of what their people once thought about. In short, the Aztecs were conquered, but they also saved themselves.

The Mexica did not believe that the god Quetzalcoatl walked among them, nor were they impressed by a vision of Mary or one of the saints. Moctezuma, the king, simply found himself in possession of less military power than the newcomers, and he recognized this. Part of the story lay in the hands of the people whom the Mexica had rendered enemies—among them a young girl whom the Spaniards called Malinche, whose people had been under fierce pressure from Moctezuma prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, and she translated for the newcomers.

As paramount rulers, the Spaniards would offer one advantage—they were even more powerful than the Mexica, which meant not only that they could defeat them but also that they could insist that all intervillage warfare cease in the regions they controlled. Many opted for that possibility and thus gave victory to the newcomers.

In coastal and riverine areas of Mesoamerica, some people had established permanent villages even without access to significant, protein-rich plants because they could dedicate themselves throughout the seasons to the collection of different kinds of seafood. These people, who already had a tradition of sedentary living, may have been more interested than others in the benefits of farming. As early as 1500 bce, near the southern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, on what is called Mexico’s isthmus, the Olmecs began to collect in impressive towns, living primarily on the corn and beans they planted.10 They built large, sturdy buildings where they stored surplus food, and their population grew rapidly relative to other groups. They divided up the necessary labor, and the distinctions allowed some segments of the population to become more powerful than others. They developed a calendar, and talented artists grew adept at sculpture. Their carvings honored gods or chiefs or godly chiefs—we cannot know exactly which—by creating mammoth statues of their heads. Later in the course of their descendants’ history, other gifted individuals created a form of writing, scratching out symbols on tablets to represent words, such as the name of the Venus god, Ten Sky. Clearly these people took pride in all that they had accomplished and offered gratitude to their gods; their sculptures and inscriptions underscore the point.

They said it was the scene of their storied hero Nanahuatzin’s courageous self-immolation. Sometimes they told the tale in great detail, saying that when the first four imperfect worlds, each with its own sun and living creatures, had all been destroyed, and the earth was left in darkness, the gods met together at Teotihuacan. “The gods gathered and took counsel at Teotihuacan. They said to each other, ‘Who will carry the burden? Who will take it upon himself to see that there will be a sun, that there will be a dawn?’”15 They had great faith in one called Tecuciztecatl (tekw-seez-TEK-at) who volunteered, and they offered him the honor of a forked heron feather headdress for his sacrifice and other gifts; they chose Nanahuatzin for his very ordinariness. When midnight arrived and the moment had come, Tecuciztecatl found he could not do the deed. It was the ordinary Nanahuatzin who shut his eyes and threw himself into the flames “in order that the dawn might break.” He suffered, and in his bravery he became the sun. All the gods honored him; his face had become so bright that none could look upon it. Suddenly Tecuciztecatl, inspired by another’s bravery, found the courage he needed and threw himself in. And he became the moon. Then two ordinary animals, the jaguar and the eagle, modest but brave, threw themselves in likewise and thus proved themselves great warriors. Teotihuacan, the people believed, was the site of the beginning of everything.

It does not take much imagination to envision the kind of coercion that had to have taken place in Teotihuacan in order to maintain such a metropolis in a world without highways and railroad supply lines, or engines to aid construction projects. Add to this the fact that a major drought seems to have hit the area in this period, and the rebellion seems more like an event waiting to happen than a mystery in need of explanation.18

The migrants imbued their bows and arrows with magic and told stories about them. The stories were passed down through the generations until Shield Flower heard them in the form of entertaining tall tales about her ancestors: “They lived armed with the bow and arrow. It is said that they had bee sting arrows, fire arrows, arrows that followed people. It is even said that their arrows could seek things out. When the people went hunting, an arrow of theirs could go anywhere. If it was hunting something above, they would see it come back with an eagle. If the arrow saw nothing up above, why then it came downwards towards something else, maybe a puma or a jaguar or a snake or a deer or a quail or a rabbit. The people would follow along to see what their arrow had brought back to them!”20

So we must not envision the Apache of later centuries, who came galloping into farming villages on their painted ponies. Among the migrants’ most famous war leaders was a man who went by the name of Xolotl (SHO-lot), according to the legends. He could never have appeared on horseback at the brow of a hill like Genghis Khan, the famed Mongolian. And yet, Xolotl was, in essence, a sort of Genghis Khan on foot. Wherever he went, he had the same bravado and aura of victory, though he maintained it on his own, in his own person, without the aid of a trusty steed. His nickname meant “Little servant boy,” an ironic moniker intended to underscore his deadly power.21

The complex calendar system, on the other hand, had made its way to nearly every village in central Mexico, and a particular version had taken root there. Every child kept track of the basic elements of the system, although only learned priests ventured into the realm of more esoteric branches of the science. There were two ongoing cycles of time. One was a solar calendar, which consisted of eighteen months of twenty days each, plus five blank or unnamed, frightening days at the end, for a total of 365 days. The other was a purely ceremonial calendar containing thirteen months of twenty days each, for a total of 260 days. The two streams of time ran parallel, so on any day, one knew where one was both in relation to the sun and ceremonially. On a much simpler level, one could argue, we do something similar. We know what day of the year it is, which relates to our position in connection with the sun, and at the same time, we run a totally arbitrary, continuous seven-day series of Nordic gods’ names, so we know it is Wednesday or Thursday as well.

Almost all the wanderers believed they came from the northwest, from Chicomoztoc, “the place of the Seven Caves.” Some groups said their specific origin was called “Aztlan,” a word of uncertain meaning, but it was probably meant to be “Place of the White Heron.” Where was Aztlan? We don’t know, and we never will. It was likely a mythical name, used to mask the fact that the ancestors had migrated multiple times. The newcomers spoke Nahuatl, which belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of indigenous languages. These languages stretch from that of the Utes (originally in today’s Utah) down to Nahuatl. In between these areas, other peoples, such as the Hopi, also speak a Uto-Aztecan language. Thousands of years ago, along this linguistic route, people in neighboring villages would have been able to understand each other, yet a Ute would not have been able to understand a Nahua. It is very possible, even probable, that some of the migrating populations originated as far away as Utah and that others originated in northern Mexico. No single person ever traveled the entire path. No one in Shield Flower’s day could or would have carried memories of a childhood in Aztlan; it was a communal memory of a home or homes abandoned long ago that they carried with them.26

The Chichimec barbarians bossed the others around, but it was not exactly the Chichimecs’ fault that they exhibited such rough, uncouth behavior. One of the more malicious gods had tricked them: he left a foundling for them to find and take pity on and raise as their own. They adopted him, having no way of knowing that the creature’s sole purpose was to make trouble for them. In a bawdy tale designed to catch the audience’s attention, the 1540s storyteller described the ensuing crisis: When Huemac became a young man, he gave orders that the Nonohualca tend to his home. Then the Nonohualca said to him, “So be it, my lord. May we do what you desire.” The Nonohualca came to tend to his home. And then he demanded women of them. He said to the Nonohualca, “You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide.” The Nonohualca said to him, “So be it. Let us first seek where we can get one whose buttocks are four spans wide.” Then they brought four women who had not yet known sexual pleasure. But as to size, they were not enough. He said to the Nonohualca, “They are not of the size I want. Their buttocks are not four spans wide. I want them really big.” The Nonohualca left in great anger.28

Admittedly, their island was available only because no one else wanted it. People of the central basin had long lived by farming corn and beans, but the swampy conditions of the central lake area ruled out full dependence on agriculture. Not that the Mexica gave up the project entirely; they had observed that on the southern shore of the lake, their rivals the Xochimilca (whose warriors’ ears the Mexica had, in the distant past, cut off) did very well by constructing chinampas.

However, modern scholars now acknowledge that the reality was quite different. Some prisoners of war (usually men) were indeed sacrificed, and some household servants had in truth indentured themselves or been sold by their chief as a punishment. But there were also many other enslaved people. As in the ancient Mediterranean world, the households of wealthy and powerful men contained numerous female slaves taken in war. Some were princesses, and might be treated almost like wives, depending on the circumstances. Others were more ordinary, and Itzcoatl’s mother was one of these.11

The men of Tenochtitlan left their island with some frequency and set forth as a united group, armed and dangerous. They danced before they left and they danced when they returned, wearing gorgeous head-dresses that transformed them into frightening beasts—eagles, jaguars, serpents and coyotes. Their shields, decorated with iridescent feathers, also bore the images of such creatures, but they could introduce an element of ironic distance from their animal alter-egos as well, showing not a coyote, for instance, but rather a man dancing as an upright coyote.13 These eager warriors readily allied with others to bring down those who tried to lord it over them or who had resources they desperately needed. Xochimilco and even the once-dominant Culhuacan were reduced to subsidiary status. Huitzilihuitl began, in short, to put the new town of Tenochtitlan on the map, and from there it grew into a small city. Huitzilihuitl’s list of conquests was long in the telling around the evening fires.

The Nahuas were so accustomed to the phenomenon that they did not see it as a problem. They saw it as a net positive, and, in fact, they were not entirely wrong. Whatever our modern sensibilities may tell us, polygyny does have many benefits. It offers obvious pleasures to the senior male with multiple wives, and even the wives in such situations often say that it is a help to them as they age to bring younger women into the household, as many hands make light work. Nahua wives certainly never sought or expected romantic love from a husband; it did not surprise them when men were fickle, nor did anyone in their world blame the women. Furthermore, polygyny generally eliminates any possibility of a king dying without an heir, and it creates a veritable clan of young men who pride themselves on their relationships to each other and who will stand together in times of crisis.

That may have been more likely, but it could equally as easily have been a poetic device; in Mesoamerican storytelling tradition, crucial moments of transition often revolved around caves, whence a new form or force emerged from darkness.

huey tlatoani, or high chief,

High chief

The kings of Tenochtitlan (of the Mexica people), Texcoco (of the Acolhua people), and Tlacopan (of the Tepanec people) now ruled the valley as an unofficial triumvirate.

“This was no Rome,” one historian has commented succinctly, meaning that the Mexica had no interest in acculturating those they conquered, no desire to teach them their language, or to draw them into their capital or military hierarchy.40

If a town had fought strenuously against the Mexica with any significant degree of success, and yet ultimately lost, then its fate was even worse. The Huaxtecs (WASH-tecs) to the northeast, for example, fought back like wild animals; their reputation for it became fixed in local lore, together with their sad destiny. “The soldiers from all the allied provinces took many captives, both men and women, for they and the Mexica entered the city, burned the temple, sacked and robbed the place. They killed old and young, boys and girls, annihilating without mercy everyone they could, with great cruelty and with the determination to remove all traces of the Huaxtec people from the face of the earth.”43 Their story was to serve as a lesson to other potentially recalcitrant altepetls. And so it did.

Horrendous misconceptions have grown around the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. In novels, movies, and even some of the older history books, hundreds of people at a time were made to climb the narrow steps of the pyramids to the top, where their hearts were cut out and their bodies hurled downward, while the people screamed in near ecstasy below. In reality, it seems to have been a gravely quiet, spellbinding experience for the onlookers, much as we suspect it was in other old worlds, like that of the ancient Celts.47 The people who watched had fasted and stood holding sacred flowers. In the early decades of Tenochtitlan’s life, when the altepetl was still gathering strength, only a few people would have been sacrificed on the monthly religious festival days, and they were always treated as a holy of holies before they died. After a sacrifice, the warrior who had captured and presented the victim kept the remains (the hair and ceremonial regalia) in a special reed chest in a place of honor in his home for as long as he lived.

Most of the victims were men, classic prisoners of war. Not all were, however. In one annual festival, for instance, a young girl taken in war was brought from a local temple to the home of her captor. She dipped her hand in blue paint and left her print on the lintel of his door, a holy mark that would last for years and remind people of the gift she gave of her life. Then she was taken back to the temple to face the cutting stone. It was an ancient tradition among native peoples not to give way before one’s enemies: such stoicism brought great honor. Sometimes those who were to die could get through their part without letting their enemies see them sob; sometimes they could not. “Some, in truth, wept,” one man remembered later.48

The Mexica, like all their Nahua neighbors, believed they owed everything to the gods. “They are the ones who taught us everything,” their priests would later explain to the Spanish. “Before them, we kiss the ground, we bleed. We pay our debts to the gods, offer incense, make sacrifices…. We live by the grace of the gods.”49 Each group of Nahuas had carried sacred bundles devoted to its own deity in the long marches from Aztlan; in the case of the Mexica, it was the relics of Huitzilopochtli that they had protected year after year, until they were finally able to bury them beneath a permanent temple. Other altepetls had carried relics of the rain god Tlaloc or his water-world consort, Jade-Skirted Woman. Others honored Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent, the god of wind, who was at home both on earth and in the sky, a crosser of boundaries, special protector of priests. Some were most dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, a mischievous god who led humankind in a dance by assisting chiefs and warriors to bring change through conflict. Cihuacoatl, Woman-Snake, was known by many other names as well, but she was always sacred to midwives; she often bore a shield and spear, for she helped birthing mothers seize a new spirit from the cosmos. There were many gods and goddesses each of whom appeared with a range of possible traits; today, we do not always understand their characteristics as well as we would like to, for the Nahuas did not write freely of them in the colonial era...

The gods asked human beings to appreciate what had been given to them and to make sacrifices, mostly by bleeding themselves, but sometimes even by giving the ultimate gift, that of human life. If human beings refused to do this, the fragile world might come to an end. Other, prior worlds had ended in disaster; the Nahuas never forgot that they were living under Nanahuatzin’s Fifth Sun. In more ancient days one of their own children was probably offered up. This seems to have happened around the world in the earliest eras, before writing existed to document the practice in any permanent way. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Hiel the Bethelite begins to rebuild the city of Jericho by burying his eldest son beneath the gate. Likewise, in English lore, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in speaking of Merlin, says that he had to talk his way out of becoming a foundation sacrifice for a king’s tower.51 The notion of a youth dying for his people was hardly unique to the Nahuas.

They knew this, as they sent their sons to practice the arts of war and learned to construct maces with bits of jutting obsidian glass embedded in them. In the midst of words of love addressed to their “little doves,” mothers taught their children that the world was a dangerous place. “On earth we live, we travel, along a mountain peak. Over here is an abyss, over there is an abyss. If you go this way, or that way, you will fall in. Only in the middle do we go, do we live.”54

The majority of the people were of the macehualli class, the macehualtin, and in their families, one husband lived with one wife, whose cloak had been tied to his in a formal ceremony. Sometimes a household was multigenerational or contained several siblings, but even there, each woman had her own hearth in her own adobe apartment facing onto the common courtyard. A woman raised her own children, teaching them to help her in the labor that everyone recognized was essential. In a world without day care, restaurants, vacuum cleaners, or stores, who would have dared to think that childcare, cooking, sweeping, and making clothes were inessential activities?

No one, it seems, for the indigenous sources leave no record of disrespect, or even of veiled misogyny. Women’s roles were complementary to those of men, and everyone understood this to be so; the house, the four-walled calli was symbolic of the universe itself.56

These people were Nahuas, too, having arrived about the same time as the Mexica—they even shared some of the same myths and stories—and they weren’t going to give the latter an inch if they could help it. Early on, the Mexica did launch several attacks against them, but it became clear that they were going to become mired in a stalemate. It was likely as a result of this that the Mexica initiated what they called the “Flower Wars,” a kind of Olympic games played every few years, in which the winners, rather than earning a crown of laurels, saved themselves from death. It is unclear whether these games unfolded on a ball court or a battlefield, but probably the latter. The system worked well to keep young warriors on their toes even in times when there was no current war.

The world at large could assume that Tlaxcala was being left alone to serve as an enemy in the ceremonial Flower Wars. No one needed to discuss the fact that bringing down the large polity would have been far too destructive of Mexica resources, if it was even possible. Leaving Tlaxcala as a free enemy with a recognized role was a clever strategy. The leaders could not have foreseen that one day in the future it would cost them dear, when a new enemy, stronger than they, would land on their shores and find allies ready-made.57

One of the greatest

The Mexica had come a long way, the speakers reminded their listeners, from the tragic last days of Shield Flower. They had been hunted wanderers—quite literally, at one point, after the war with Culhuacan—but under Huitzilihuitl, Chimalpopoca, Itzcoatl, and Moctezuma they had strategized and fought and jockeyed for position with such success that the surrounding people who once abused them now feared them, and hunger stalked them only intermittently. Sometimes, it was true, it felt as though they were still just barely hanging on, that there was still a threat at every turn.

But not most of the time. Most of the time, they were feeling quite successful; their stories were laden with their sense of themselves as underdogs-made-good.

No one had ever handed them anything. They had been realists and strategists, and they were determined that they would continue to be. Each year, they knew, there would be more to add to their tale. All Nahua peoples were proud of the enduring life of their altepetl, the water-mountain, the community that outlived all individuals. Like Shield Flower, though, the Mexica exhibited an added panache in their pride. They weren’t merely poised between the days that were gone and the days yet to come: they beckoned to the future.

They were there only to entertain him, or so they said. In reality, they had carefully chosen their song with a political agenda in mind.

The piece was called “the Chalca Woman’s Song,” and

However, Nahuatl-language sources produced beyond the purview of the Spaniards suggest that many men sometimes chose to have sex with other men. There was a range of sexual possibilities during one’s time on earth, understood to be part of the joy of living, and it certainly was not unheard of for men to go to bed together in the celebrations connected with religious ceremonies, and presumably at other times as well.

Their hosts offered them food, and they feasted. The tamales boasted decorative designs on top, such as a seashell outlined with red beans.

Guests could choose between turkey, venison, rabbit, lobster, or frog stewed with chilis of various kinds. On the side, there were winged ants with savory herbs, spicy tomato sauces, fried onions and squash, fish eggs, and toasted corn. There were all kinds of fruits, tortillas with honey, and little cakes made of amaranth seed. Indeed, a former servant once counted two thousand different dishes made for the Mexica king and then passed on to be sampled by his councilors, servants, and entertainers. At the very end of the meal always came chocolate—crushed cacao beans steeped in hot water and flavored with honey and various kinds of dried flowers, such as vanilla pods or roses.

It was because of the gardens—the gardens overflowing from ordinary people’s flat rooftops, as well as the gardens of the tlatoani. There, Mexico’s most gorgeous flowers—many with names never perfectly translated into European tongues—blossomed amid trees whose fascinating shapes could make them appear enchanted. In large, finely wrought wooden cages, the brightest birds from the jungles in the east and south fluttered and sang—quetzal birds and parrots, flamingos and tufted ducks, parakeets and pheasants—too many kinds to count. As the birds flew quickly in and out of the foliage, the colors of their wings glinted in the evening light, like flashes of magic, the result of some spell, just like in the stories people told back in Chalco.