"Once in a great while appears a book that combines the drama and immediacy of fiction with a deep knowledge and understanding of an exotic place and time — a book that excites and expands the imagination. In the last three decades, readers have been enthralled by Mika Waltari's splendid The Egyptian, Mary Renault's The King Must Die and James Clavell's Shogun. Now comes Azteca!"
I've read Clavell's Shogun trilogy and now Jennings' Azteca, both of which were phenomenally researched and crafted with creative ethnology, so now I must go for Waltari's The Egyptian and Renault's The King Must Die, neither of which I'd ever heard of until picking up this book. When great literature is compared with other literary pieces and called similarly brilliant, the reader must listen to the erudite muse of print and ... read on!
The monograph
And so begins the narrative of a quarrier's son, Mixtli, who was granted an ironic education, became a courier, a renowned warrior, a nobleman, an outcast, a wanderer, and a tradesman, but who ultimately died ignominiously at the hands of the "Christian" invaders who denied Mixtli his own Aztec spirituality and his own authenticity as the last keeper of ancient Aztec records. The narrative begins with him as an old gnarled and twisted man captured by the Conquistadores who want to hear and record a history of the Aztec people they have conquered and are decimating ... and who deny that Mixtli could possibly be telling the truth as Aztecs have no honor, no morals, and are on a ethnic hierarchy far below they themselves who are bringing Christianity to this uncivilized nation ... albeit in a violent bloodbath of deceit, treachery, and mercenary zeal that allows for no spiritual clemency or humanitarian act.
As a babe, his mother daily bathed his face in scalding hot lime water, as was the custom, to discourage the emergence of a beard throughout his adult life.
Mixtli tells of growing up and that lying, "speaking spittle and phlegm," was a grievous sin and punished by lower lip piercing of a thorn to curb such untoward behavior. He told of flags and tapestries made of fine feathers minus their quills — egrets for white, macaws and cardinals and parakeets for various reds, jays and herons for blue, toucans and tanagers for yellows. The colors and iridescence fluttered lively even in the softest breezes. But Mixtli intoned that the know-how for weaving these glorious flags died in the tumultuous years following the arrival of the Conquistadores and the passing of their virulent diseases (which he later related was ultimately what massacred the nation and not really the Conquistadores themselves).
He recalls wars and the need for wars even in peace time to feed the gods and keep them content. In times of peace when pestilence or a drought struck, the gods were thought to be angry and a war between alliances was arranged — not to kill on the battlefield but to take prisoners for sacrifice on temple altars. Warriors who died on the battlefield or as a temple sacrifice had a Flowery Death, that is, a death honorable to one's self and satisfying to the gods. To most effectively please the gods, alliances during the peace-time "wars" would sacrifice their captives on the same day and same hour. The god-nourishing blood of thousands of captives being sacrifices on the same day was thought to gorge the gods and make them replete so they would release their starvation caused by many (perhaps even as many as 20 or 30) warless years.
Using the term "flowers" to describe highly evocative situations was a literary motif of the Aztec. For instance, to give someone a "flower garland" was to kill them in sacrifice to the gods, "to destroy with flowers" was to seek retribution which almost certainly involved death, to have a "war of flowers" was to have a war among alliances for the purpose of taking prisoner-sacrifices to offer to the gods, and more benignly from a male's perspective, "to caress someone with flowers" was to seduce a woman.
Mixtli related that virginity of unmarried girls was required, and girls who went "astraddle the road" (prostituting) were deplored. However, some Aztec girls knew ways of proving their "virginity" on their wedding night. Pigeons fed with dark red seed of some flowers lay red-yolked eggs, so young virgins-to-be would secret an egg inside of them and would "prove" their virginity by the undetectable egg. The egg was used in conjunction with an astringent of buckthorn that would pucker the orifice to adolescent tightness. The Christian Conquistadore scribes were repulsed, insulted yet fascinated by the telling of Mixtli's tales of sexuality and war. The stories were duly documented but, though a baptized Christian of many years and his tales were of his culture or before his days as a Christian, Mixtli was thought to be repulsive to even speak such tales of blood, war and sexual appetites of himself, his people or his culture.
He told of the 5, not 4, directions of the compass — east, north, west and south, represented by the colors red, black, white and blue respectively. But green was the color to mark the center of where a person was at as well as all the space above as far as the sky and all the space below as far as the Mictlan underworld. Green, therefore, was a very important color for the Aztec, as for instance, only a child of a noble lineage could have a name reflecting a name with green in it, e.g. Jadestone Doll.
Mixtli spoke of Aztec medicine taken to the battlefield — salted honey or a healing salve of beeswax mixed with egg yolks, the juice of both adder bark and barbasco root as infection fighters. Soldiers, allies and enemies, too seriously injured in battle were knifed to death and all soldiers, friend or foe, were burned communally but each with a chip of jadestone in hand or mouth to honor their blood shed in battle and as symbols for their acceptance in the afterworld.
Just a cultural aside, the Conquistadores were culturally confused by the crosses found in the Aztec empire. To them, the crosses referenced a Christian burial, but to the Aztec the cross was a wayfarer symbol not for "reverence" but for "gladness" as it marked the presence of clear fresh water nearby.
Azteca as narrated my Mixtli tells of a nation at the height of its culture but in the depths of sacrificial depravity. He tells of the comings of the Conquistadores in the middle of his life, the deaths of all his family and friends, even his second wife who is dying of the disease "Being Eaten by the Gods" (leprosy). Finally, he tells of the overthrow of the Reverend Speaker (king) Montecuzoma and how Cortes, Alvarado and Narvaez lost the entire treasure of the dead king when they fled an uprising of the angry Mexicatl. And thus was lost the treasure now referenced as "the lost treasure of the Aztecs".
So Mixtli "kisses the earth" (swears or pledges honor) that he, as the last Rememberer of the Aztecs, has told his life tale with care and honor so that his history may be known to the conquerors, and yet he knows that before they strike him the last Rememberer down in cold-blood that the great Aztec history will similarly be chopped apart ... as the history of the Mexicatl / Aztecs is now in the hands of those who have no memories but are the usurpers of the nation.
AR (Accelerated Reading) score: 74 points, a very high score
The monograph
And so begins the narrative of a quarrier's son, Mixtli, who was granted an ironic education, became a courier, a renowned warrior, a nobleman, an outcast, a wanderer, and a tradesman, but who ultimately died ignominiously at the hands of the "Christian" invaders who denied Mixtli his own Aztec spirituality and his own authenticity as the last keeper of ancient Aztec records. The narrative begins with him as an old gnarled and twisted man captured by the Conquistadores who want to hear and record a history of the Aztec people they have conquered and are decimating ... and who deny that Mixtli could possibly be telling the truth as Aztecs have no honor, no morals, and are on a ethnic hierarchy far below they themselves who are bringing Christianity to this uncivilized nation ... albeit in a violent bloodbath of deceit, treachery, and mercenary zeal that allows for no spiritual clemency or humanitarian act.
Mixtli, born with the Mexicatl dark spot like a bruise in the small of his back, begins his narrative by relating his abrupt entrance into the world in the Conquistadore year 1466, whereupon he was immediately plunged into a welcoming cold jar of water after which his severed navel string was wrapped around a little wooden war shield and given to the first Mexicatl warrior passing and who
was commissioned to plant the object somewhere on the next battlefield to better the boy's fate, destiny, fortune.As a babe, his mother daily bathed his face in scalding hot lime water, as was the custom, to discourage the emergence of a beard throughout his adult life.
Mixtli tells of growing up and that lying, "speaking spittle and phlegm," was a grievous sin and punished by lower lip piercing of a thorn to curb such untoward behavior. He told of flags and tapestries made of fine feathers minus their quills — egrets for white, macaws and cardinals and parakeets for various reds, jays and herons for blue, toucans and tanagers for yellows. The colors and iridescence fluttered lively even in the softest breezes. But Mixtli intoned that the know-how for weaving these glorious flags died in the tumultuous years following the arrival of the Conquistadores and the passing of their virulent diseases (which he later related was ultimately what massacred the nation and not really the Conquistadores themselves).
He recalls wars and the need for wars even in peace time to feed the gods and keep them content. In times of peace when pestilence or a drought struck, the gods were thought to be angry and a war between alliances was arranged — not to kill on the battlefield but to take prisoners for sacrifice on temple altars. Warriors who died on the battlefield or as a temple sacrifice had a Flowery Death, that is, a death honorable to one's self and satisfying to the gods. To most effectively please the gods, alliances during the peace-time "wars" would sacrifice their captives on the same day and same hour. The god-nourishing blood of thousands of captives being sacrifices on the same day was thought to gorge the gods and make them replete so they would release their starvation caused by many (perhaps even as many as 20 or 30) warless years.
Using the term "flowers" to describe highly evocative situations was a literary motif of the Aztec. For instance, to give someone a "flower garland" was to kill them in sacrifice to the gods, "to destroy with flowers" was to seek retribution which almost certainly involved death, to have a "war of flowers" was to have a war among alliances for the purpose of taking prisoner-sacrifices to offer to the gods, and more benignly from a male's perspective, "to caress someone with flowers" was to seduce a woman.
Mixtli related that virginity of unmarried girls was required, and girls who went "astraddle the road" (prostituting) were deplored. However, some Aztec girls knew ways of proving their "virginity" on their wedding night. Pigeons fed with dark red seed of some flowers lay red-yolked eggs, so young virgins-to-be would secret an egg inside of them and would "prove" their virginity by the undetectable egg. The egg was used in conjunction with an astringent of buckthorn that would pucker the orifice to adolescent tightness. The Christian Conquistadore scribes were repulsed, insulted yet fascinated by the telling of Mixtli's tales of sexuality and war. The stories were duly documented but, though a baptized Christian of many years and his tales were of his culture or before his days as a Christian, Mixtli was thought to be repulsive to even speak such tales of blood, war and sexual appetites of himself, his people or his culture.
He told of the 5, not 4, directions of the compass — east, north, west and south, represented by the colors red, black, white and blue respectively. But green was the color to mark the center of where a person was at as well as all the space above as far as the sky and all the space below as far as the Mictlan underworld. Green, therefore, was a very important color for the Aztec, as for instance, only a child of a noble lineage could have a name reflecting a name with green in it, e.g. Jadestone Doll.
Mixtli spoke of Aztec medicine taken to the battlefield — salted honey or a healing salve of beeswax mixed with egg yolks, the juice of both adder bark and barbasco root as infection fighters. Soldiers, allies and enemies, too seriously injured in battle were knifed to death and all soldiers, friend or foe, were burned communally but each with a chip of jadestone in hand or mouth to honor their blood shed in battle and as symbols for their acceptance in the afterworld.
Just a cultural aside, the Conquistadores were culturally confused by the crosses found in the Aztec empire. To them, the crosses referenced a Christian burial, but to the Aztec the cross was a wayfarer symbol not for "reverence" but for "gladness" as it marked the presence of clear fresh water nearby.
Azteca as narrated my Mixtli tells of a nation at the height of its culture but in the depths of sacrificial depravity. He tells of the comings of the Conquistadores in the middle of his life, the deaths of all his family and friends, even his second wife who is dying of the disease "Being Eaten by the Gods" (leprosy). Finally, he tells of the overthrow of the Reverend Speaker (king) Montecuzoma and how Cortes, Alvarado and Narvaez lost the entire treasure of the dead king when they fled an uprising of the angry Mexicatl. And thus was lost the treasure now referenced as "the lost treasure of the Aztecs".
AR (Accelerated Reading) score: 74 points, a very high score
