Religion

The Templo Mayor: Architecture and Cosmology

The layout of a city often reflects what its people value most. The Templo Mayor (also known by its Nahuatl name, the Huey Teocalli) was located in the Sacred Precinct at the very center of Tenochtitlan. The city was divided into four quadrants around it, acting as an Axis Mundi (the navel of the world) where the heavens, earth, and underworld met.

By 1519, the structure was a massive 90-foot (30-meter) double stepped pyramid. It was built over seven major construction phases, with each new ruler building a larger layer over the old one to demonstrate their imperial power.

The pyramid featured two distinct twin shrines at the top, representing a delicate cosmic balance:

• South Shrine: Painted red to represent war and blood. It was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and symbolised Mount Coatepec.
• North Shrine: Painted blue to represent water and fertility. It was dedicated to Tlaloc and symbolised Mount Tonacatepetl.

This architectural duality represented Atl-tlachinolli ("burnt water"), the Aztec symbol for warfare. The temple was precisely aligned so the sun rose exactly between the two shrines during the equinoxes, linking the Emperor's power to the heavens. At the base of Huitzilopochtli's staircase lay the great Coyolxauhqui Stone, a massive circular monolith depicting the dismembered moon goddess.

Human Sacrifice: Rituals and Purpose

While modern audiences often view human sacrifice as pure brutality, to the Aztecs it was a vital, sacred duty. Human sacrifice had two main purposes: a theological need to repay the gods' blood debt and nourish the sun, and a political need to intimidate rival states. Subject leaders were often forced to watch mass sacrifices to witness the terrifying consequences of rebellion and the scale of Aztec power.

Unlike modern conflicts, the Aztecs often fought Xochiyaoyotl (Flower Wars). These were ritual battles fought against rivals like Tlaxcala specifically to capture live prisoners for sacrifice, rather than to kill the enemy on the battlefield.

When conducting a sacrifice at the Templo Mayor, priests followed a strict, step-by-step ritual procedure:

1. First, the victim (often a captured warrior) was led up the 114 steps to the top of the pyramid.
2. Then, four priests forcefully restrained the victim over a curved sacrificial stone called a téchcatl, which thrust their chest upwards.
3. Next, a fifth priest used a razor-sharp obsidian or flint knife to slice open the chest and extract the still-beating heart.
4. The heart was placed into an ornate stone vessel called a cuauhxicalli as an offering to the gods.
5. Finally, the lifeless body was pushed down the steep temple steps. It would land near the Coyolxauhqui Stone, brutally reenacting Huitzilopochtli’s mythical defeat of his sister. The victim's head was often removed and displayed on a massive wooden skull rack called a tzompantli.

Sacrifice was not always fatal; ordinary people and priests performed daily auto-sacrifice by piercing their tongues or earlobes with cactus spines to offer their own blood. On a grander scale, the New Fire Ceremony occurred every 52 years, where all fires were extinguished and a specific heart sacrifice was performed to ensure the sun would rise for another 52-year cycle.

Spanish accounts, such as those by Fray Diego Durán, claimed an astonishing 80,400 victims were sacrificed over four days during the Templo Mayor's rededication in 1487. While modern archaeological excavations (finding around 126 individuals at the temple site) confirm these sacrifices did occur, historians widely agree the Spanish significantly exaggerated the numbers to frame the Aztecs as barbaric and justify their conquest.