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How could the practice of human sacrifice among the Aztecs be looked upon as anything less than barbaric, even to the point where they could be regarded as uncivilized? The answer, in my opinion, arises from their view of their creation, their position in the world, their relative importance therein, and how they were only holding on by a thread - in sum, their mythology.

If the Judeo-Christian God took only six days to create the heavens and earth (and rested on the seventh day), the Meso-American deity took awhile longer to get it right. The Aztecs believed that the sun and earth had been destroyed in a cataclysm and were regenerated four times. They believed that they were living in the fifth, and final, stage of creation, and (according to Meyer and Sherman's The Course of Mexican History) "that in their age of their fifth sun, final destruction was imminent."

To add to the paradox of sacrifice versus civilization, the evidence is that the Aztecs regarded the individual human as "a most significant locus of the meditation of the human and divine." The Aztecs believed that without human sacrifice and the offering of the most precious and sacred thing the human possessed (blood), the sun might not rise to make its way across the sky. This rather strange and naive belief was supported by a mythology in which Huitzilopchitli, their fierce bloodthirsty god played a central part.

An explanation of the Aztecs' beliefs regarding the creation of their current age does shed some light on the role of sacrifice and Huitzilpochitli's cult, which later ran rampant and reached its zenith in the sacrifice of 20,000 at the dedication of the temple in 1487. A succinct description of Meso-American mythology appears in The Daily Life of the Aztecs by Jacques Soustelle. The ancient Mexicans believed that the two parent gods lived at the summit of the world. Their "unending fruitfulness" produced all the gods, and from it all mankind was born.

The sun was born when "the gods gathered in the twilight at Teotihuacn and a little leprous god "covered with boils," threw himself into a huge brazier as a sacrifice and "rose from the blazing coals changed into a sun..." This sun was motionless and it needed blood to move. So the gods "immolated themselves, and the sun, drawing life from their death began its course across the sky."

To keep the sun moving on its course, "so that the darkness should not overwhelm the world forever, it was necessary to feed it every day with its food, the

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