Grid of the Gods (38 page)

35
Popol Vuh
, trans. Tedlock, p. 97.

36
Ibid., p. 101.

37
Genesis 8:20-21a.

38
Popol Vuh
, trans. Tedlock, p., 134.

39
Popol Vuh
, trans. Tedlock
,
p. 136, emphasis added.

8

H
UMANITY IN
P
ERPETUAL
D
EBT:

T
HE
A
NOMALY OF
A
ZTECS AND
A
NSELM:
A S
PECULATIVE
T
HEOLOGY
, E
CONOMICS, AND
P
HYSICS
OF
S
ACRIFICE

“…in fine, leaving Christ out of view (as if nothing had ever been known of him),
it proves, by absolute reasons, the impossibility that any man should be saved without him.”
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1081)
¹

T
here is a dissonance — a discord, an unresolved suspension without a cadence, an unending stretto in a cacophonous fugue that reaches no conclusion - in this otherwise heavenly music of the spheres, and it is bloody sacrifice or, in the case of Meso-America and elsewhere, bloody
human
sacrifice. Why this practice should have arisen at some locations and within some cultures on the Grid remains a mystery, although, as we saw in the previous chapter, there are clues.

Perhaps no human culture has been so identified with the practice, however, than that of the Aztecs. It intrudes itself as a moral ugliness and incongruity into a society and culture in which — as with the Mayans — it seems out of place, an inexplicably bloody ugliness. Hancock and Faiia capture this terrible anomaly as best as anyone, in very evocative words:

Travelers in Central America who have attempted to explore its monuments and its past have come away haunted by the intuition of a great and terrible mystery. A dark sorrow overhangs the whole land like a pall, and what is known of its history is filled with inexplicable contradictions.

    On the one hand there is tantalizing evidence of lofty spiritual ideas, of a deep philosophical tradition, and of astonishing artistic, scientific and cultural achievements. On the other hand we know that repulsive acts of psychopathic evil have become
institutionalized in the Valley of Mexico by the beginning of the sixteenth century and that every year, amidst scenes of nightmarish cruelty, the Aztec empire offered up more than 100,000 people as human sacrifices. Two wrongs do not make a right, and the Spanish Conquistadores who arrived in February 1519 were pirates and cold-blooded killers. Nevertheless, their intervention, motivated exclusively by material greed, did have the happy side- effect of brining the demonic sacrificial rituals of the Aztecs to an end…

    Their accounts reveal the dark side of a schizophrenic culture, addicted to murder, which also, with apparently quit staggering hypocrisy, claimed to venerate ancient teachings concerning the immortality of the human soul — teachings that urged initiates to seek wisdom and to be ‘virtuous, humble, peace-loving… and compassionate’ towards others.
²

However, as we shall see, it was less the confrontation of one culture that
practiced
sacrifice with a culture that did
not
, but rather, the confrontation of two cultures, each with massive conceptual
parallels
where sacrifice was concerned, and in that confrontation, comes a further anomaly, for not only do both cultures conceive of sacrifice in almost exactly the same way, they even conceive of it to fulfill a similar purpose.

A. The Aztecs and Human Sacrifice:
1. The Original Teaching of Quetzlcoatl

The Aztec’s principal god was the god Quetzlcoatl who, like the Mayan’s Kukulcan, and the Incas’ Viracocha, was a white-skinned, blue-eyed, bearded “civilizer god” who taught the Aztecs the basics of civilization. Like the Mayans’ Sovereign Plumed Serpent, Quetzlcoatl was a feathered serpent. Ruling the Mexica in a past Golden Age when he taught the arts of civilization, he also stipulated, clearly and unequivocally, that living things were never to be harmed and, more importantly, that humans were never to be sacrificed. The only things to be sacrificed were various plants, fruits, and flowers of a particular season.
³
If one were to place this conception within the
cultural framework of the Old Testament, Quetzlcoatl would be the Old Testament’s Cain — who offered God only sacrifices of plants — to its Abel, who offered the “more acceptable” sacrifices of animals.

We are looking, in other words, in all likelihood, at a common metaphor, a symbolic motif, that is not unique to one specific religion — in this case, that of the ancient Hebrews — but at a much more widespread idea, for in both cases, the earliest type of sacrifice is hardly bloody, but is later replaced by one which is. Indeed, as far as the Aztecs were concerned, their civilization — like the Egyptians’ views of
their
civilization an ocean away — was a legacy received whole cloth from Quetzlcoatl.
⁴

As if to reinforce this idea of common motifs spread over the planet and dispersed among distinct cultures, one can also observe a number of peculiar parallels between Quetzlcoatlt and, of all people, the Egyptian god Osiris. Like Osiris, Quetzlcoatl was buried in a sarcophagus, whence he was resurrected to ascend into heaven to become a star.
⁵

But how, with such commonality, did the Aztecs derive the practice of human sacrifice? Laurette Sejourne, drawing on the vast legacy of Aztec culture left behind, concluded in 1956 that the whole apparatus and practice of human sacrifice was a badly understood metaphor, a metaphor of a ritual of initiation that had been taken literally by the Aztecs. Thus, for the “cutting out of the heart,” a metaphor for the soul’s “cutting out” from the body at death,, the “flailing of the heart” was a metaphor for spiritual detachment from the physical body and senses, and so on. All of these metaphors for spiritual processes were, argued Sejourne, massively misunderstood by the Aztecs, and became part of the ritual of sacrifice.

If this be the case, then it was a metaphor massively misunderstood by the Mayans and Incas as well. Moreover, Sejourne is not entirely correct, for the Aztec’s own statements indicate that if there was misunderstanding involved, then it was not original to
them
, but rather
, a misunderstanding deliberately inculcated as an old order was overturned, and a new one ushered in to replace it.
Once again, the
chronological progression was from sacrifices of plants and flowers and grains, the original order of the civilizing god Quetzlcoatl, and a later order of bloody human sacrifices.

Curiously, their practice of sacrifice also has something to do with the Flood, for just as we saw in the previous chapter, Noah made bloody sacrifice after the Flood. The Flood, in Aztec cosmology, is in turn connected to their doctrine of the Five Suns, or if one prefer, the Five World Ages. Each of these ages is a “sun” and is ended by various catastrophes, and each requires the re- establishment of life and of humanity.
⁶

The first sun ended with all life literally consuming itself. This was followed by the destruction of the sun itself.
⁷
The second sun age ended in a destruction by
wind
, when all life and even the sun itself was destroyed by a massive wind.
⁸
The third sun age was ended in a rain of fire.
⁹
The fourth sun age ended with the Flood,
¹⁰
ushering in this, the final and fifth sun age.

At this juncture, according to the Aztec creation and history, the
Codex Chimalpopoca
, the Sun refused to move for four days:

Then the gods say, “Why doesn’t he move?” Then they send the blade falcon, who goes and tells the sun that it has come to question him. It tells him, “The gods are saying, ‘Ask him why he doesn’t move.’”

    Then the sun said, “Why? Because I’m asking for their blood their color, their precious substance.”

    …

    Then all the gods get together: Titlacahuan, Nuitzilopochtli, and the women Xochiquetzal, Yapalliicue, Nochpalliicue.
And there in Teotihucan they all died a scarificial death.
So then the sun went into the sky.
¹¹

In other words, the
celestial machinery was so broken it had stopped, and could only be restarted by the sacrifice of the gods themselves — notably at Teotihuacan.
In so far as the Aztec’s cosmology was concerned,
sacrifice
was intimately connected to the
physics
. But again, why?

2. Curious Statements, The Human Payment, and Two Elites
a. Unusual Ritual Parallels

As one reads more deeply into the
Codex Chimalpopoca
, the mystery only deepens. For example, shortly before the account of the fall of Tollan, the Aztecs’ version of Tula, Thule, or the land across the sea from whence they came, there is an account of the dedication of a temple of the King Ce Acatl in a ritual of blood sacrifice that, to some, will sound very familiar:

Now, Ce Acatl’s uncles, who are of the four hundred Mixcoa, absolutely hated his father, and they killed him.

    And when they had killed him, they went and put him in the sand.

    Then the king vulture says to him, “They’ve killed your father. It’s over yonder that he lies, that they’ve buried him.”

    So he went and dug him up and put him in his temple, Mixcoatepetl.

    Now, his uncles, the ones who killed his father, are called Apanecatly, Zolton, and Cuilton, and they say, “How will he dedicate his temple? If there’s only a rabbit, if there’s only a snake, we would be angry. A jaguar, an eagle, a world would be good.” And so they told him this.

    Ce Acatl said — he told them — “Alright. It shall be.”

    Then he called the jaguar, the eagle, and the wolf. He said to them, “Come, uncles. They say I must use you to dedicate my temple. But you will not die. Rather you will eat the ones I use to dedicate my temple — they’re those uncles of mine.” And so it was without any real purpose that ropes were tied around their necks.

    …

    Then his uncles are furious, and off they go, Apanecatl in the lead, climbing quickly.

    But Ca Acatly rose up and broke his head with a burnished pot, and he came tumbling down.

   
Then he seizes Zolton and Cuilton. Then the animals blow (on the fire). Then they sacrifice them.

    … And after they’ve tortured them, they cut open their breasts.
¹²

If one did not know better, one might think one was reading the rituals of the first three degrees of Freemasonry, for we find no less than these common elements between them:

1)  a king, in the Masonic ritual, Hiram Abiff, king of Tyre, who is building the Temple, and in the Aztec version Ce Acatl;

2)  his “three attendants,” in the Masonic ritual, Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum, and in the Aztec version Apanecatl, Zolton, and Cuilton;

3)  a temple, which in
both
cases, is “dedicated” by human sacrifice, in the Masonic ritual, by the murder of King Hiram by his three attendants, and in the Aztec case, just the reverse, by the king’s murder of his three attendants;
and,

4)  torture, followed by the cutting open of the breast, which recalls the Masonic ritual once again, where the point of a compass is pressed to the left nipple of the candidate for initiation.

The ritual of the Blue Lodge of Masonry is of unquestioned antiquity, but what are its echoes doing here, in the Valley of Mexico, in the Aztec culture, and in connection with sacrifice? This, and the strange resemblance of Quetzlcoatl (and Kukulcan and Viracocha) to Osiris, removes such correspondences from the realm of coincidence and places them in to the category of evidence that we are looking at the remains of a common cultural inheritance, differently construed by the legacy cultures it left behind.

b. Giants and Cannibalism