Skin flaying, human-skin suits, organs torn from bodies; that was just a day in the life
of the Aztecs.
It was bloody and gruesome, but we’re sure you’ll soon agree, these are some fantastic
tales.
Let’s start with the human skin suit.
The star of the story is Huitzilopochtli, who you won’t be surprised to hear was a
God of War.
One of the myths is that Huitzilopochtli was fighting against eternal darkness, so if the
Aztecs didn’t want the sun to go down forever, they had to get some sacrificing done.
He also led his people to the great city of Tenochtitlan, something that left a long trail
of blood.
This story of migration can be found in ancient manuscripts, but as to what really happened
and what is made up, scholars might say the stories contained some truth and some fiction.
The Aztecs set off looking for new land on which to settle on, guided by Huitzilopochtli.
At some point in the journey, Huitzilopochtli told his sister, Malinalxoch, she was no longer
wanted on the voyage.
He told the people she was an evil sorceress who could make people eat scorpions and snakes.
Huitzilopochtli said this was just not ok.
He was a war God, not a sorcerer.
So, off she went.
She wasn’t going to stay away for long, though.
Huitzilopochtli took his people to a place called Chapultepec, which would become a sacred
site for the Aztecs.
When they first got there, Huitzilopochtli said to his followers, settle down, but get
ready, a battle isn’t far away.
Lo and behold, Malinalxoch came back, but now she had her son in tow.
He was Copil, a mighty sorcerer himself.
He vowed to get rid of Huitzilopochtli, but that didn’t go too well for him.
He was caught, and his heart was torn out.
Huitzilopochtli told his people to go dump it in a nearby lagoon.
They moved on again, but the problem was that the people already in the great valley didn’t
want them there.
Times were tough indeed.
Then they came across the city of Culhuacan.
Huitzilopochtli, always planning ahead, said a kind of peace agreement should be made.
He told the king of Culhuacan, Achitometl, that he’d marry his daughter.
This was no small thing.
After all, Huitzilopochtli was a powerful God…He was also a bit conniving.
Once he and the daughter were at the temple presumably to tie the knot, Huitzilopochtli
instead flayed her.
This wasn’t anything to do with being jilted at the altar or to merely upset the king.
You see, once the skin was flayed, Huitzilopochtli demanded that the skinsuit be worn by one
of the priests.
According to scholars, this meant that she actually became one of the Aztec gods, the
goddess of fertility.
What was dead was born again.
Fair enough, but poor old King Achitometl turned up at the temple a bit later, thinking
he would watch his daughter marry a God.
What he found instead was some old priest wearing the skin of his daughter.
Suffice to say, he was rather disturbed.
It’s said that he only just caught a glimpse of the macabre sight as he lit some incense.
He ran after that back to his own people and declared war on the Aztecs.
A battle ensued, and for a while, it looked as though the Aztecs were going to lose it.
Then one night, while sleeping, one of the leading Aztec elders had a dream, and in it,
Huitzilopochtli spoke to him.
He said, “In the morning rise up and seek a cactus standing among the reeds.
On it will be perched an eagle, pecking at a cactus fruit.”
Remember that dead son, Copil?
The cactus had grown from his heart thrown into the lagoon.
Huitzilopochtli said this is now your place, this is your city.
This is where you’ll stay and it’s where you’ll do battle with any intruders.
It became Tenochtitlan.
The next day, the elder led his people to the lagoon, and just as the God had promised,
an eagle was pecking at the cactus.
The eagle even acknowledged with a kind of head bump that they had arrived at their holy
place.
No none was going to mess with them now.
Not for a while anyway.
A certain Spaniard named Hernán Cortés put an end to their empire many years later.
But we’re not done with Huitzilopochtli just yet.
This was some tough God, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly.
You could also say he went overboard now and again.
How he came to be is one hell of a story.
His mother, the Goddess, the creator, and destroyer, wore a skirt of snakes and a necklace
containing human skulls, hearts, and hands.
She also gave birth to the moon and the stars.
For that reason, as well as her fashion sense, she was one hell of a woman.
As the legend goes, one day she was just going about her business sweeping the floor of a
temple when a ball of feathers floated over to her.
How it managed it we don’t know, but the feathery ball landed on her and made her pregnant.
The thing was, she already had 400 sons and one daughter.
That daughter, Coyolxāuhqui, didn’t take too fondly to seeing her mother pregnant again.
Coyolxāuhqui, being the leader of the band of brothers, told them that their mother had
dishonored them by getting pregnant.
Coyolxāuhqui and the brothers hatched a plan to kill their mother.
It was then that Huitzilopochtli, just an embryo in his mother’s womb, heard about
the plan.
As the brothers and sister walked towards their unsuspecting mother, Huitzilopochtli
suddenly flew out of her like a man on a mission.
He was fully formed and more than ready for battle.
The brothers scattered, but Huitzilopochtli got hold of his sister.
This is what happened next, according to the old texts:
“He pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then quickly struck off her head.
It stopped there at the edge of Coatepetl.
And her body came falling below; it fell breaking to pieces; in various places her arms, her
legs, her body each fell.”
Some sources we found said he killed every last brother, although we can’t be sure
if some of them survived.
Another legend has it that Huitzilopochtli threw Coyolxauhqui's head into the sky.
It stayed there and became the moon.
The dead brothers were also cast aloft, and they became some of the stars.
This is a violent tale, but apparently, Huitzilopochtli did that so his mother could be reminded of
her once large family every time she looked into the night sky.
As you know, the Aztecs did quite a bit of sacrificing for their Gods.
It’s not surprising when the foundational stories are that brutal.
When human sacrifices were made at the Great Temple, the unfortunate folks would have their
hearts ripped out while they were alive.
The bloodied figure would then be thrown down the temple steps until it stopped at an image
of Coyolxauhqui.
This was a kind of reenactment of the old tale.
The Aztecs made sacrifices to appease the Gods, to win in battle, to try and ensure
their crops didn’t die.
What else could they blame for all the things that could go wrong?
Well, when it didn’t rain, or it flooded, who could be to blame but the rain God?
He was Tlaloc.
No rain meant no food, so sacrificing a human or two didn’t seem like such a bad thing
to the Aztecs.
Even Aztec creation myths were brutal.
As the story goes, the world has been destroyed five times.
It was during the third time, called the Third Sun, that a God named Tezcatlipoca
stole Tlaloc’s wife, Xochiquetzal, a beautiful God of love.
This of course enraged Tlaloc.
It became the reason for the end of the Third Sun.
Instead of using his powers to give the world rain, Tlaloc covered the Earth with fire.
After that, the Gods had to get busy and make a new world.
You have to wonder now, how did they get things going again?
Well, the Aztecs had quite a few takes on the creation of the universe, and none of
them were very scientific.
One such creation theory involved a God named Nanahuatzin.
He was said to be a humble God and also a very ugly God.
The Aztecs wrote that his face was full of sores.
With that in mind, if someone had to take one for the team it was going to be Nanahuatzin.
In order to create a new sun, one of the Gods had to throw themselves into the flames, thereby
powering the sun.
Nanahuatzin said, ok, fine, I’ll do it.
He sacrificed himself, but there still wasn’t enough power.
So, the other Gods ripped out their hearts, and along with their blood, they threw them
into the great fire.
This powered the universe.
Now you can see more clearly why the Aztecs had a thing for tearing out hearts.
The blood that pumped through a human body they thought pumped through the universe itself,
or what they saw as a universe.
There was in general a lot of blood and guts, and it seems the Aztecs weren’t squeamish
at all.
Take for instance a story involving the God, Xipe Totec.
He was a God of Spring, so he represented growth, and the much-needed new crops every
year.
But remember the Aztecs related the human body to matters of the Earth.
That’s why they called the Spring, the new growth, like a new skin of the world.
You know what’s coming, we imagine.
When Xipe Totec was depicted by the Aztecs, he was always seen wearing human skin on his
body.
He was around during a period called Tlacaxipehualiztli.
This came second in the main rituals of the Aztec year, and it stood for the “Flaying
of Men”.
Not only would human sacrifices mean people were having their hearts torn out, but their
skin was also removed.
The skins were then dyed a golden color and worn by priests.
The suits were called teocuitlaquemitl, which meant “golden clothes.”
Other victims were merely shot with arrows, their blood being allowed to drip while the
people sang a song in honor of Xipe Totec.
The blood represented the falling rain, and so when they made these sacrifices, they believed
they were due a rainfall.
If that’s not brutal enough for you, remember the rain God Tlaloc?
It was believed that when young folks were sacrificed to him, the more they cried meant
the more the rain would fall.
So, if the Aztecs really wanted a heavy shower during a particularly dry period, it was better
to make the sacrificial lambs cry more.
Speaking of young folks, they were sometimes used to honor the Gods, but some of you might
have passed on the offer had you been around in those days.
When the Aztecs wanted to honor the God Tezcatlipoca, they would pick out a male boy.
For an entire year, he would wear only the finest clothes and jewelry.
He was treated like a God and had eight servants in attendance all day, every day.
If people saw him, and we mean anyone, they looked upon him as a great deity.
Life could not be better…for that year.
Twenty days prior to the year ending, he would be married to four young women, and they would
stay with him in his bed.
This represented a fertility period.
For the last few days, there was singing and dancing and general merry-making, but then
the big day arrived.
The boy was led to the top of the temple steps, where the flutes that had been playing were
broken over his body.
And, you guessed it, his heart was removed.
This might sound obscene to you, but one historian wrote, “Sacrificial victims mounted the
bloody steps of the pyramid with dignity and pride.”
After being sacrificed, their bodies were eaten by some select diners.
Tezcatlipoca was one the most important Gods.
He stood for a lot of good things in life, but he also stood for a lot of bad things.
After all, the Aztecs knew that there was good and evil.
There were hard times and easy times, there was light and dark, pain and the absence of
pain.
Tezcatlipoca represented these two sides of the coin.
One legend we like that features him is when he came down to Earth as a warrior in disguise.
He arrived at a town, but the locals didn’t much take to him and plotted an attack.
Tezcatlipoca saw right through that, of course, and being a trickster, he came up with a really
sneaky way to get his own back on the people.
He started singing a song, and it was a great tune, so great that everyone couldn’t resist
dancing to it.
But this wasn’t some 5-minute number, the song just kept on going because Tezcatlipoca
had the power to sing for eternity if need be.
Those people just kept on boogeying until they got dangerously close to the edge of
a cliff.
One by one, they all fell off, still humming the tune.
Sometimes he’d come back to Earth as a skeleton.
He’d roam around during the night and when people saw him they’d see a pile of bones
but with a beating heart inside.
He’d then tell them this: “If you can tear out my beating heart, I
will make sure you live the rest of your life with riches.”
We’re not sure if anyone actually managed to pull out his heart, but being the trickster
he was, we imagine it wasn’t an easy feat.
Still, Tezcatlipoca was also the patron of the damned, orphans and slaves, so maybe he
changed a few lives for the better.
We think you’ve probably had your fill of bloody tales for now, so we’ll leave it
there.
Now you need to watch “Most Brutal Human Sacrifice Techniques Throughout History.”
Or, have a look at a different kind of horror “Walled up Alive - Worst Punishment in the
History of Mankind.”