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With the Spanish conquest, there was a great effort to convert Aztecs to Catholicism. Through fear, threat of capital punishment, and boarding schools for young Aztecs, the Spanish tried to enforce worship of the Christian God. The Spanish attempted to gut the Aztec religion by abolishing human sacrifice and worship of the war gods.
The Aztec empire's state-sanctioned religion meanwhile had to fulfill the spiritual obligations of the upper classes while maintaining their control over the lower classes and conquered populations. This was executed in grand public religious ceremonies, sponsorship of the most popular cults, and a relative degree of religious freedom.
The Aztecs and the Maya shared many religious elements before the Spanish conquest, but reacted very differently to the same form of Spanish Catholicism. 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 ...
An invaluable source of information about many aspects of Aztec religious thought, political and social structure, as well as the history of the Spanish conquest from the Mexica viewpoint is the Florentine Codex.
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.
Aztec history, culture and religion Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (tr. by A. P. Maudsley, 1928, repr. 1965) Portal Aztec Mythology (in Spanish) "A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon"
The spirals featured on the Tenochtitlan calmecac were designed to look like snails and symbolised the unity intrinsic to the Aztec religion. [3] After Spanish invaders destroyed the capital's calmecac, their artwork misrepresented the spirals as much smaller. When archaeologist Raúl Barrera uncovered seven of the rooftop spirals during the ...
Of supreme importance is the Florentine Codex, a project directed by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who drew on indigenous informants' knowledge of Aztec religion, social structure, natural history, and includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint. [25]