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The Aztecs believed that Huitzilopochtli needed daily nourishment (tlaxcaltiliztli) in the form of human blood and hearts and that they, as “people of the sun,” were required to provide Huitzilopochtli with his sustenance. [18] When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli, the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone. [19]
Tlacaelel recast or strengthened the concept of the Aztecs as a chosen people, elevated the tribal god/hero Huitzilopochtli to top of the pantheon of gods, [5] and increased militarism. [6] In tandem with this, Tlacaelel is said to have increased the level and prevalence of human sacrifice , particularly during a period of natural disasters ...
The Aztecs abandoned their rites and merged their own religious beliefs with Catholicism, whereas the relatively autonomous Maya kept their religion as the core of their beliefs and incorporated varying degrees of Catholicism. [6] The Aztec village religion was supervised by friars, mainly Franciscan. Prestige and honor in the village were ...
Cuahuitlicac was Coatlicue's son and Huitzilopochtli's brother. Cuahuitlicac warned the unborn Huitzilopochtli that Coatlicue's other 400 children were planning to kill her to prevent the birth of Huitzilopochtli. Cuahuitlicac is a god of the northern stars as part of the Centzonmimixcoa. Centzonhuitznāhuah, the 400 gods of the southern stars.
The Aztecs would often adopt gods from different cultures and allow them to be worshiped as part of their pantheon. For example, the fertility god, Xipe Totec, was originally a god of the Yopi (the Nahuatl name of the Tlapanec people), but became an integrated part of the Aztec belief system.
The Aztecs were conquered by Spain in 1521 after a long siege of the capital, Tenochtitlan, where much of the population died from hunger and smallpox. Cortés, with 508 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala , and eventually other Aztec tributary states.
The rest of the gods present: Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Nochpalliicue, Yapallicue and Xochiquetzal sacrifice themselves in Teotihuacan to make the Sun move across the sky, starting the contemporary era. [7] Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli is also viewed as one of the four gods who kept the sky up and was associated with the cardinal direction East. [8]
The Aztecs [a] (/ ˈ æ z t ɛ k s / AZ-teks) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries.