Consecration of the Enlarged Templo Mayor
The Aztecs rededicated the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan in 1487, and the ceremony is reported to have lasted four days. The temple was the centre of the world in Mexica cosmology: a stepped pyramid with two shrines on top, one to Tlaloc the rain god and one to Huitzilopochtli, the war and sun god, representing the mountain of sustenance and the hill where the god was born fighting. It was enlarged seven times, each new structure built over the last, which is why the excavations reach down through successive shells. The rededication under Ahuitzotl was the culmination of an expansion programme, and the chronicles give figures for the sacrifices that run from 4,000 to 80,400 people over four days. The higher numbers are arithmetically impossible and are best read as a statement of scale by writers, Mexica and Spanish, who each had reasons to inflate them. That there were mass sacrifices is not in doubt; the skull rack excavated in the 1990s and 2010s held thousands. The theology behind it held that the sun required human hearts to keep moving and that the debt was owed by everyone, and the wars fought to obtain captives were structured around it. The temple was demolished after 1521 and its stone used for the cathedral. It was rediscovered in 1978 by electricity workers laying cable, who hit a carved disc of the dismembered moon goddess, and the excavation removed a block of colonial Mexico City to reach it. The Mexica themselves had rewritten their history under Itzcoatl fifty years earlier, burning the older books and composing a version in which they were always the chosen people of Huitzilopochtli. What the temple says about them is therefore partly what they wanted said.
- Year: 1487 CE
- Category: Cultural
