Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/219

Rh expression of hatred or contempt, or the supply of necessary food. The custom was closely associated with their religious observance; the eating of the flesh by the people, after the blood and quivering hearts of the victims had been offered to the deity, partook of the character of a sacrament as well as of a banquet. Prescott, in his "Conquest of Mexico," tells us, in his picturesque language, of the awful sacrifices to the war-god Huitzilopotchli, to whom hecatombs of human beings were usually sacrificed; and of the more epicurean and delicate Tezcatlepoca, who required but one victim, but insisted that that one must be "distinguished for his personal beauty, and without a blemish on his body."

"The most loathsome part of the story," Prescott goes on to say, "the manner in which the body of the sacrificed captive was disposed of, remains yet to be told. It was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who, as we shall see hereafter, conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life."

This shows that the custom of cannibalism in Mexico must be laid to the charge of religious feeling. The step is an easy and natural one that would lead a people who followed a strictly anthropomorphic worship to the consumption of the sacrifice which they were led to believe was acceptable to the gods. Prescott notes the same thing: "One detestable feature of the Aztec superstition, however, sunk it far below the Christian. This was its cannibalism, though in truth the Mexicans were not cannibals in the coarsest acceptance of the term. They did not feed on human flesh merely to satisfy a brutish appetite, but in obedience to their religion. Their repasts were made of the victims whose blood had been poured out at the altar of sacrifice. This is a distinction worthy of notice."

But with Aztecs, as with other peoples, the appalling appetite only grew by what it fed on, and a morbid and overmastering craving for this awful diet prompted them to frequent cannibal feasts, in which desire alone, and no religious ceremony, was the cause. Men having once tasted human flesh, like the man-eating tiger, always hanker after it with a strange and morbid pertinacity that seems almost unconquerable, as is shown in the case of Feejee, where the traditional and immemorial custom was habitually practiced (and is continued to this day in remoter parts) long after the introduction of pigs.

In the Feejee and other Polynesian islands, where there are no indigenous animals, cannibalism may be allowed, perhaps, some excuse. Man is by nature carnivorous as well as graminivorous, and the natural promptings of his physical wants would suggest the food that we, with our plethora of beef and mutton, too unadvisedly stigmatize as