Further details
Like many Pre-Columbian societies, the Aztec world practiced large scale human sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, and physical mortification. These practices had an eminently religious function. Since the gods had sacrificed themselves in the course of the successive creations of our world, humanity, in paying its debt, was taking part in the preservation of the unstable balance of the cosmos.
Among the many forms of physical mortification that the Aztecs experienced, the most widespread was undoubtedly the nextlahualli. This “self-sacrifice” consisted in piercing different organs of one’s own body in order to provoke the effusion of the blood and its corollary: pain. The bloodier and the more painful the act, the greater the offering which, unlike human sacrifice, could be repeated throughout one’s life.
According to sources, shedding of blood took place at all levels of Aztec society, from the humblest peasants to princes. However, it took on a disproportionate role among the elite in the course of many diverse rituals.
In different rituals, various parts of the body could be mutilated: the ears, the tongue, the limbs, the nose, the lips, the eyelids or the penis. In order to increase the amount of bloodshed and the intensity of the pain, cords or rods were inserted into the wounds. Special objects were used: agave thorns, small obsidian lances, stingray stings and sharpened reeds. However, the most precious instruments, reserved for the nobility, for priests and for warriors, were the beveled long bones of felines and birds of prey.
This sculpture perfectly illustrates this practice. It represents a young man, dressed only in a loincloth. He holds in his right hand the bone stylus recognizable as one of the epiphysia. In his left hand he guides the tip so as to be able to pierce the upper lobe. Folio 50r/51r of the Codex Tuleda - fig. 1 - (a Mexican manuscript dating from the middle of the 16th century) gives us a prime example of the act.
While it is difficult to identify, there’s no doubt of the importance of this person as indicated by the the circular labret which can be seen under the lower lip, a distinction reserved for warriors and nobles.
Humbly squatting, he is participating in one of the great rites of Aztec society, perhaps an initiation or an enthronement, like that of the famous Moctezuma, described by the Dominican Diego Durán years after the death of the unfortunate emperor : “he took the three points of bone (…) and with the one from the tiger made his ears bleed, with the lion’s the fleshy parts, and with the eagle’s the front of the tibias" (Historia de la Indias de Nueva-España e islas de Tierra Firme, 1571-1581).
Pascal Mongne, Paris, September 2020
AZTEC STONE FIGURE OF A NOBLEMAN
Seated and staring forward resolutely, the hands sensitively treated with long fingers accentuated, the right hand wrapped around his knees and grasping a sharpened radius bone pushed into his ear lobe for bloodletting, the left arm turned sharply with palm open and held behind the injured ear hole, the face marked by the downward-turned lips and large circular labret, denoting an elite rank, inserted in the chin, the coiffure treated as a tightly coiled spiral on the back, possibly an indication of social status, in grey basalt with a faint remain of red pigment.
See Kerchache, J. et al., Sculptures. Afrique, Asie, Océanie, Amériques, Paris, 2000, p. 411, for a figure adorned with a large circular besote (labret), emblematic of elite status (ibid, p. 410).
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