Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/28

 12 delighted in human sacrifice; and at their altars, hundreds, if not thousands, of hopeless war-captives and innocent children were annually devoted to slaughter in the belief that, unless the gods were nourished and rejuvenated with the blood of human beings, they would droop into senility and perish, with the result that the world would be wrapped in darkness and the human race become extinct. The festivals in connection with the cults of the numerous Aztec gods were many, and involved the practice of an imposing and bewildering ritual, the climax to which was only too often an orgy of cannibalism, which was rendered none the less abhorrent in that it was surrounded by the circumstances of a degree of civilisation by no means despicable.

A great deal of speculation has been indulged in regarding the belief of the Nahua in a Supreme Being, a "god behind the gods." There is some slight ground for the belief that shortly before the Spanish invasion of Mexico the cultured classes of the various Nahua States commenced a movement towards Monotheism, or the worship of a single god. Behind this movement, states a chronicler of most doubtful veracity, was Nezahualcoyotl, King of Tezcuco; but concerning this theological novelty and its sponsors, our data is so slender and dubious of origin, that it cannot be pronounced upon with any degree of certainty. As with the deities of other people, those of the Mexicans were alluded to by their priests as "endless," "omnipotent," "invincible," "the Maker and Moulder of all," and "the One God, complete in Perfection and Unity." It was natural that the priesthoods of the several great deities of Mexico should have regarded their especial god as the god par excellence, and thus exalt him above the other members of the Mexican pantheon.

When a race forsakes a nomadic existence and begins to rely upon agricultural labour as a means of subsistence, it inevitably creates in its own conscience a class of divine beings whom it regards as the source and origin of the crops and produce it raises. These deities of grain and the