Aztec Civilization: A History From Beginning to End by Henry Freeman

Author:Henry Freeman [Freeman, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2016-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

Their Philosophy: its Impact on Social Life and How it Served the Kings

To better understand the Aztec, a good place to start is to consider what shaped their thinking. To the Aztec, their rulers were not considered gods. Although the notion of sacredness even appeared in the first principles of hunter-gatherer logic, the Aztec empire coordinated important calendar festivals and ceremonies to time and sacred places. According to Clive L. N. Ruggles in "Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth," evidence supports that Aztec perceptions were reinforced both by the way that temples were positioned in the landscape and by deliberate solar alignments built into the temples.

One observation that has been made about the Aztec people adds to our initial attempts at understanding the Aztecs. There was no conflict between science and religion, and scientific and religious worldviews mutually reinforced each other. James Maffe, in "Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion," argued that the Aztecs' religiosity no more precluded their philosophy than did the religiosity of St. Augustine or Spinoza or Kant or Ockham, to name a few. They did have a metaphysics. As Frances F. Berdan wrote in "Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory," it is difficult to disentangle religion, science and the arts in the Aztec world. We're not going to attempt to do that here. We will point out the interconnectedness of their take on the supernatural and natural, the visible and meditated, the legends that oriented them and how their kings reinforced their relevance by perpetuating the interrelated web they wove within the cycles of life, both earthly and otherwise.

We'll start with their Legend of the Four Suns and proceed to how many souls each individual has. Then, we'll discuss how history has suggested that not only did their views get shaped over time depending on the ruler, but that there were alternatives being considered in advanced higher learning centers that were not mainstream and reveal that the fundamental questions of truth and reality were asked and not always dispersed by dictated responses.

There are various versions of the legend. The Legend of the Four Suns revealed to the Aztecs that in order to maintain the existence of the cosmos, religious rituals were central. This legend told of four ages that had been dominated by four different suns, corresponding to the four directions. Ometeotl, the Supreme Creator, a god that was both male and female, created the abstract forces of the four directions and the four gods: Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and Xipe Totec, who in turn created the world. The human race and the world met with catastrophe and ended each time. The Aztecs lived in the age of the Fifth Sun, the "Olin Tonatiuh" (Sun Movement). Two gods, Nanahuatzin and Tecuciztecatl, were chosen to self-sacrifice, and Nanahuatzin jumped in and rose in the east as Tonatiuh, the sun god. The other emerged as the moon.

Theirs was an anthropomorphic world, and the sacrifice of the two gods meant that there was a cosmic responsibility to sacrifice to continue the new age.

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