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Public ritual practices could involve food, storytelling, and dance, as well as ceremonial warfare, the Mesoamerican ballgame, and human sacrifice. [5] The cosmology of Aztec religion divides the world into thirteen heavens and nine earthly layers or netherworlds. [6]
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 ...
Sacrifice was a common theme in the Aztec culture. In the Aztec "Legend of the Five Suns", all the gods sacrificed themselves so that mankind could live.Some years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a body of the Franciscans confronted the remaining Aztec priesthood and demanded, under threat of death, that they desist from this traditional practice.
Bernardino de Sahagún dedicates the second book of the Florentine Codex to describing the various ceremonies of the Aztecs. The twenty-sixth chapter of this book provides details about the ceremonies of Tecuilhuitontli, focusing on the festival in Huixtocihuatl's honor. [2] Salt-makers would honor the deity with dances that lasted for ten days ...
During the Spanish Conquest, Christianity was imposed on the Nahua people, which prohibited many traditions and celebrations linked to Aztec gods, including Netotiliztli. Netotiliztli survived because the Nahua shifted the dance's meaning from a spiritual tradition of celebration and worship, to a dance solely for pleasure.
Panquetzaliztli (November 9 to November 28) was the Aztec month dedicated to Huitzilopochtli. People decorated their homes and trees with paper flags; there were ritual races, processions, dances, songs, prayers, and finally human sacrifices. This was one of the more important Aztec festivals, and the people prepared for the whole month.
The scale of Aztec human sacrifice has provoked many scholars to consider what may have been the driving factor behind this aspect of Aztec religion. In the 1970s, Michael Harner and Marvin Harris argued that the motivation behind human sacrifice among the Aztecs was the cannibalization of the sacrificial victims , depicted for example in Codex ...
This category and its subcategories contain articles relating to the belief systems of the Aztec/Nahua cultures of the Postclassic period in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, incorporating aspects such as mythology, religion, ritualised ceremonies and observances.