Bernal Diaz describes his first impression of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City:
And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico [i.e. Tenochtitlán], we were astounded. These great towns and cues [i.e., temples] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before...
At the heart of this enchanted city of some 300,000 people was a great temple, the Templo Mayor, surmounted by twin shrines to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, and Tlaloc, god of rain and agriculture. Diaz tells us the statues of the deities were encrusted with pearls, precious stones and gold, and that the walls of the shrine(s) "were so caked with blood and the floor so bathed in it that the stench was worse than that of any slaughter-house in Spain."
In front of the bloody pyramid, the scene of an estimated 20,000 yearly human sacrifices, rose the Huey Tzompantli, the Skull Wall or Skull Banner. This held the flayed, decapitated heads of the Aztecs' sacrificial victims. These were strung up between beams, rank on rank, in a kind of grisly abacus about the length of a basketball court. This was flanked at either end by a circular skull tower, approximately 6 meters in width and height.
Andres de Tapia, who served under Cortes, saw the Tzompantli and its accompanying skull towers. He loosely calculated the structures to hold 136,000 heads, and we can imagine him walking about the temple precinct, with its gardens, ornamental ponds, brilliantly feathered birds and a towering wall of human skulls. He must have had time on his hands to do the math.
Historians and anthropologists were in the habit of dismissing all of this as Conquistador propaganda, used to justify their bloodthirsty, colonial oppression and destruction of the Aztec culture. Then, uncomfortably, in 2015 and 2020 archeologists discovered the remains of the skull towers. Diaz, Tapia et al weren't lying.
You see, gentle readers, all religions are not the same, especially when one is a human sacrificing, cannibalist, demonic death cult.
God bless,
LSP
