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Totec, the flayed deity, a priest
impersonating the god donned
the flayed skin of a sacrificed
captive. As the skin tightened
and tore away, the impersonator
emerged like a fresh shoot growing
from the rotting husk of a seed,
representing growth and renewal.
Other Aztec sacrifices honor the
importance of corn, their staple
food. Every year, a young girl
representing Chicomecoatl, the
maize goddess, was sacrificed at
harvest time. She was decapitated,
her blood poured over a statue of
the goddess, and her skin worn
by a priest.
Conquest and absorption
When Spanish invader Hernán
Cortés and his conquistadors
landed in Mexico in 1519, the
Aztecs are believed to have
mistaken him for the returning
god Quetzalcoatl, partly because
Cortés’ hat resembled the god’s
distinctive headgear. They sent
the Spaniard corn cakes soaked in
human blood, but their offering
failed to appease the “god,” and
the Aztec civilization, just four
centuries old when Cortés landed,
was destroyed by the Spanish.
In contrast, the Mayan culture did
not suffer the same annihilation,
possibly because the Mayans were
more widely dispersed. In southern
Mexico, even today the Tzotzil
people, descendants of the
Mayans, retain many elements of
the old culture and religion,
including the 260-day calendar.
The Tzotzil religion is a blend of
Catholicism and traditional Mayan
beliefs. The people’s homeland,
in the highlands of Chiapas in
southern Mexico, is dotted with
wooden crosses. These do not just
reference the Christian crucifix,
but are thought to be channels
of communication with Yajval
Balamil, the lord of the earth, a
powerful god who must be placated
before any work can be done on
the land. In their adaptation of the
ancient beliefs, the Tzotzil people
associate the sun with the
Christian God and the moon with
the Virgin Mary, and also worship
carvings of Christian saints. ■PRIMAL BELIEFS
Tzotzil souls
The Tzotzil religion blends
Catholicism with some
non-Christian beliefs. The
Tzotzil people maintain that
everyone has two souls, a
wayjel and a ch’ulel. The
ch’ulel is an inner soul that
is situated in the heart and
blood. It is placed in the
unborn embryo by the gods.
At death, this soul travels to
Katibak, the land of the dead
at the center of the earth. It
stays in Katibak for as long as
the deceased person had lived;
but it lives its life in reverse,
gradually returning to infancy,
until it can be assigned to a
new baby of the opposite sex.
The second soul, the
wayjel, is an animal spirit
companion that is shared
with a wild animal, or chanul,
and kept in an enclosure by
the ancestral Tzotzil gods.
The human and the animal
spirit have a shared fate—so
whatever befalls the human
is replicated in the animal
spirit and vice-versa. The
animal spirits include jaguars,
ocelots, coyotes, squirrels,
and opossums.This Aztec stone sun calendar
places a depiction of the sun
within a ring of glyphs representing
measures of time, reflecting the
Aztec preoccupation with the sun.At this feast [to Xipe Totec]
they killed all the prisoners,
men, women, and children.
Bernadino de Sahagún,
General History of the
Things of New Spain