The Mexica, like the Spanish, lived and breathed death, throughout their often brief lives. The bloody and frequent practice of human sacrifice is already well-documented but it might be helpful to pause a moment or two to reflect on how profoundly this constant presence of death and state and priest sanctioned murder would impact the people living in that culture. The sacrifices were always public and I would imagine attendance to be mandatory. Perhaps it was inculcated in the children that to be sacrificed was a great honour and not to be feared or dreaded. Tell that to the prisoner of war or the no longer wanted slave being dragged up the steep temple stairs.
The priestly caste was very strict and legalistic and they were even more austere than their Roman Catholic counterparts. They were by rule celibate and had to abstain from alcohol. They were, like the nobility, held to a higher moral code than commoners and punishments for failure or violations were for them even stricter than for others. They remained obsessed with the notion that the gods continually sacrificed themselves to keep the cosmic order going and believed that they demanded of them human sacrifice in compensation.
This is the reality that every Aztec was born into, was raised in, and grew up believing. Every single Mexica lived their entire lives with this sword hanging over their heads: that they too might end their lives as human sacrifice. they were all, in effect, food for their gods.
I would imagine that this constant reality of death kept the Mexica very focussed on their daily earthly existence. It might also help to consider that they did not live with our modern and postmodern experience of self-actualization. These people were not individualists. Their life was the tribe and the tribe was their life. They were but parts of the machine. Each had their role to play, whether slave or serf, or soldier, artisan, merchant, noble or priest and each lived to faithfully carry out their duty to the collective. Try to imagine a human aunt, bee or termite colony. Each member was a function, then they were human beings.
If the Mexica were chronically traumatized, as I believe the Spanish might have been, then they were collectively traumatized. They acted out in custom, ritual and social and cultural expectation the trauma that they lived with, that they survived with from centuries-old legacies of death, war and wholesale killing.
Their festivals and celebrations would have been touched and coloured by death and trauma, yet celebrate they must, for how else could they cope with this shadow, this huge burden of death, sadness and uncertainty that was their inheritance by birth? You simply laugh or smile in the face of death and carry on.
This has been my own experience of trauma. No, I did not have to survive the collective and historic horror of human sacrifice. But I did live through the holocaust of AIDS while supporting and caring for AIDS sufferers during their final days. Meanwhile, other people in my life were dying from cancer, drug overdoses, suicide and homicide. Such is the life of those who are called to Christian street ministry. Then my mother died, followed a year later by three people passing away from different causes in the same week.
When I saw my mother lying on her hospital bed, moments after her soul had departed I looked at her silently, smiled, kissed her on the forehead and left her in the privacy of her passing. It was a smile of acceptance. No tears, no wailing, simply a silent acceptance of the inevitability of death.
I have looked death in the face and smiled. Like my Aztec brothers and sisters. This does nothing to heal the trauma, it is simply a way of coping and carrying on, for carry on we must.
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