Following the Sun by John Hanson Mitchell Page B

jaguar man, or werejaguar. The Olmecs were followed in the third century A.D. by the great civilization of the Maya, the most refined of these groups and often compared to the civilization of fifth-century Athens. Although the Chacs, or rain gods, were important for the Maya, it was the celestial deities, the sun, the moon, and especially the planet Venus, who formed the trinity of their religion. The regular appearance and disappearance of these heavenly bodies became an organizing principle and critical element of their spiritual life. In fact the Maya were almost obsessed with time and celestial events. Their complex calendars and almanacs and their measurements of time were thoroughly integrated with their religious practices and the movements of the sun, moon, and planets. They worked out one of the most accurate calendars that has ever been known and were able to measure and calculate time past precisely, as far back as four hundred million years.
    Each night, according to the Mayan cosmology, the sun descended into the deathly underworld, where he also reigned. Here he took the form of a dark jaguar god and when he came up each dawn he carried with him the lingering insignias of death, a pale weakened figure. It was this aspect of the sun’s daily journey that eventually emerged as one of the dominant metaphors of the two cultures that followed.
    By A.D. 900 the civilization of the Classic Maya was in decline and the more warlike, aggressive Toltecs began to take over the Valley of Mexico to the north, where the city of Teotihuacán was located. Here before the arrival of the Toltecs was a vast cultural center with over 100,000 residents, complete with apartments, artisan workshops, markets, and temples. The ritual center consisted of a surround of temples that could hold up to 40,000 people during their festivals. The central edifice was the great Pyramid of the Sun, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. It was located at the end of the aptly named Avenue of the Dead.
    Although decidedly different from the Maya, the Toltecs appear to have taken on some of their cultural attributes, possibly having learned of them from the Mayan elite who may have fled the ceremonial cities to the south. For example, they adopted the Mayan solar deity, only now, under the Toltec system, when the sun came up each day, he rose as a skeletal figure, gaunt, ill-nourished from his night journey, and clearly in need of sustenance. That sustenance turned out to be human flesh.
    Last in this sad history was the arrival from the north of the Aztecs in 1325, an even more warlike people than the Toltecs who built the city of Tenochtitlán on an island in Lake Texcoco, the site of present-day Mexico City. They eventually gained dominion over most of the native tribes and chiefdoms in the region.
    The Aztecs believed that they were living in a period of time overruled by the Fifth Sun, Tonatiuh. There had been four other sun eras before, each of which had perished, destroyed by either wild animals, wind, fire, or flood. The Fifth Sun would perish too, the Aztec priests had prophesied, under the violence of an earthquake, but he could be sustained by continued sacrifice, which required in turn almost continual warfare to obtain victims. These were usually enemies captured in battles or gained as tributes from vassal states, which is why the Aztecs never fully conquered many of the surrounding states. They needed a steady supply of ritual sacrifice victims and the elite concluded, wisely, that if they used their own people for sacrifice they could risk an uprising or a massive walkout, as perhaps had happened with the Maya.
    All the Aztec gods had to be fed with human sacrifice, but the sun and his associate, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, were the hungriest gods of all and lived on blood. Victims selected to feed the sun were frog-marched or dragged up the terraced steps to the very heights of the ceremonial temples; below in the plaza