Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/166

 colleges and schools of singing and dancing and all the exercises the town of Mexico had." (Fray Diego Durán)

The new ideology proposed changing the spirit cult, by the material cult. They maintained that the heart sacrifice was not spiritual, that people had to be sacrificed physically and with their pulsating heart feed the "Fifth Sun" that was threating their existence, according to the ancient prophecies. But the expansion was not only religious and philosophical, defeated peoples were subjected to heavy tax burdens, as never before happened in the Anahuac. The Tlacaelel changes gave the bases of Aztec power and paradoxically also signified their ruin upon the Europeans arrival.

''"With the aztecs victorious, Tlacaelel took several measures that transformed the thinking and the life of his people. Tlacaelel never wanted to be king. He preferred to act only as an adviser, first to Itzcóatl and then Moctezuma Ilhuicamina and Axayacatl... The happy Tlacaelel conjunction and these two extraordinary monarchs, Itzcóatl and Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, certainly were the beginning and consolidation of the ancient mexicas. The Tlacaelel figure, as noted the by the famous scientist, apparently of German origin, Henrico Martinez, at the beginning of the 17TH century, that was “to whom the aztecs owed almost all of their empire glory”, requires much more attention than the almost non-existent, thus far granted." (Miguel Leon Portilla. 1961)''

Tlacaelel replaced the millennial religious pair of Tlaloc—Quetzalcoatl, the later replaced by Huitzilopochtli, aztec god of war and the material. He replaced the spiritual sacrifice for the material captives sacrifice. In a time of cultural decadency, with the absence of the great masters, the prophecies of the Quetzalcoatl return and the threat that every 52 years would end the Fifth Sun; the Mexica "re—functionalized the system by changing the philosophical and religious premises in favor of material development, warrior, fanatical and of neighboring people exploitation. In other words, the mexicas changed the spiritual meaning of life, by a material sense. The materialistic ideology, warrior mystical became at the same time his greatest achievement and also