chapter 35 ....................................................................................................... AZTECS ....................................................................................................... MICHAEL E . SMITH 1 I NTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. Beginning with the first steps of Hernando Cortés on the Mexican mainland in ad 1519, outsiders have been both fascinated and repelled by the religious practices of the Aztecs. Elaborate monthly pageants brought thousands of people to the streets chanting and dancing to throbbing drums amidst the dense aromatic smoke of incense. Many of these ceremonies culminated in dramatic theatrical re-enactments of myths in which human victims had their hearts cut out at the top of pyramids. Early European writers about Aztec culture, especially the Spanish mendicant friars, were obsessed with native religion, and the number of pages they devoted to the topic in their books dwarfed their sections on economic or political topics. Fascination and revulsion with Aztec human sacrifice and other rituals continues today in both the scholarly literature and popular media. Despite an extensive and rich body of historical documentation, key questions about Aztec religion and ritual have proven dif ficult or impossible for historians to answer. Perhaps the most publicly prominent of these is the extent of human sacrifice. Recently some ‘experts’ have proclaimed on television that they have proof that literally tens of thousands of victims were sacrificed at a single Aztec ceremony, while other ‘experts’ claim that human sacrifice was a myth invented by the conquering Spaniards and that the Aztecs were instead peaceful crystal-gazers. The results of archaeological excavations and the analysis of museum collections of ritual objects are only now starting to contribute to knowledge about Aztec ritual. There has been a dominant tradition of scholarship on Aztec religion that largely ignored archaeology and ancient objects. That tradition began in the eighteenth century and was extended and codified in the seminal works of Eduard Seler (1990–8) in the late nineteenth century. Although Seler himself was interested in the material remains of Aztec ceremonies (see Figures 35.3 and 35.4 below), his followers generally limited themselves to historical sources. The dominant approach to Aztec religion is an example of what Lars Fogelin (2007) calls a ‘structural approach’ in that it focuses on symbolism and structure, relying primarily on written sources. The material culture that abounds in the ritual and mythological scenes in the codices was interpreted in isolation from the objects known from excavations and museum collections. © 2011