Did You Know

Above is a scene of a sacrifice at Templo Mayor.

This was no place of peace and prayer.  This temple was a place where thousands of captives and other victims were brutally sacrificed.  The Great Temple was built to honor the savage God of battle,
Huitzilopochtli, and to keep him happy the Aztecs slaughtered many in his honor.  When the Spanish
conquered the Aztecs in the 1500's they were surprised and appalled at the enemy they faced.  Here is
what a Spanish conquistador had to say:

  "...and with some knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies and the flesh they ate in chilmole."

    At one sacrifice over 10 000 women, children and other captives died this way.  Every year, hundreds of thousands of people died on the sacrificial altar.  It is said that the blood ran down the steps like
rivers and formed massive clots at the bottom of the temple.

Did you know how this ancient site was discovered? It was discovered by accident. In the 1970's, while workers were digging the new subway, they came across the ruins.  Now the ruins are on display at the Museo in Mexico City. The Mexican Government recognizes the cultural value of the ancient temple.

Did you know that this structure's exact location has a very important meaning?  The temple was situated at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical plains, of the upper and lower plains, and of the four directions of the universe.  Just as it was the center of the Aztecs' life and worship, it was also the center of the world, so to speak.   The Great Temple was carefully planned astrologically, similar to the star-aligned Egyptian pyramids.