World Indigenous Peoples Day: This Book Debunks The Barbarous Reputation Of The Aztecs

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. Camilla Townsend. Oxford University Press. Rs. 294 (Kindle). 320 Pages.

Whenever the name Aztec is mentioned for most educated persons around the world, the only image that comes to mind is the image of their lofty buildings and then the bloody sacrifices, where their priests cull out the hearts of living persons and offer it to the sun god so the sacrifice would make the sun go on doing its duty.

Another persisting myth is how the Aztecs thought the Aztec chieftain, Moctezuma, thought that Hernan Cortés, a conquistador for a god prophesied in Aztec religion, gave up without a fight.

In a detailed study of Aztec society using Aztec sources, historian Camilla Townsend, in her book Fifth Sun (Oxford University Press, 2019), provides an account that — decidedly more objectively and interestingly — comes closer to the way the Aztecs would have perceived themselves.

Even the boastful Hernan Cortés did not make such a claim in his letters — that Aztecs accepted him as the returning god prophesied in their religion.

But what Townsend brings out regarding the origin of this ‘return prophesy’ myth is quite illuminating. It was not the Europeans who created it.

The children of the elite Aztecs, taken by the Franciscans — known for their religious fervour for schooling — created this myth in its original form as they grew up.

The colonial and evangelical frameworks often reinforced each other. The terrestrial aggression over the Aztecs, which brought definite economic prosperity to the plunderers, was justified and rid of guilt with the 'nobler' missions of 'civilising' their 'inhuman barbaric cultures' and 'saving their souls'.

Then, these justifications became history. In this book, Camilla Townsend penetrates these castles of deception and brings out the historical truth deeply imprisoned for the last four centuries.

More importantly, the author does not bring in her own emotions, but allows the facts to speak.

Fifth Sun does not romanticise the pre-Spaniard Aztec life either. So before the Spaniards, the Aztecs had indeed built a stable empire with huge pyramids and flourishing art forms and safety offered to the citizens of their empire:

The author brings out gently, that whatever today we view as negative or inhumanly strange about Aztecs, could be told about every civilisation, even in a much worse way about the great powers of Western civilisation.

Ceremonial killings pervaded entire Europe. Inquisition burnings were religious executions. Mass executions were done in public.

Here is what Townsend writes about the Aztec human sacrifice:

So, it was not a barbarous, wicked event where blood thirsty mobs and perverted priests killed for joy, but rather a solemn, sacred event.

Religious heretics suffered the most, depending on who ruled. Thus, in 1642, the severed head of a Catholic priest was used by the spectators to play football for six hours.

One cannot but imagine what would have been the narrative of history in a parallel universe where the Aztecs traded with England and France almost at the same time in our universe when the Spaniards conquered Aztec.

An Aztec observer would have been horrified by his own value system as we are today, when we learn about these inhuman aspects of European ‘civilisation.’

The entire book is an attempt to shatter the popular image that has been built in the minds of people about Aztecs. As pointed out earlier, Aztecs do not come out as living in a romantic, peaceful world before the Spaniards arrived.

Their world was filled with happiness and sorrow, pursuit of justice and tyranny of the powerful, sufferings of war and the prosperity of a centralised empire. They had a religion that had a sophisticated cosmology and also gods who demanded sacrifices in exchange of prosperity and victories.

If anything, they lacked the blood thirsty mirth one finds in the mobs of England and France that cheered the executions.

Ultimately, the book also shows why it is important to hold on to the narratives about the people produced by those very people and preserve and nurture them in the forms they venerated.

If a story of a Spaniard conquest as the 'bloodless return of the prophesised god' could be made and it could be entered into history and that too by the very children of the families conquered and massacred by the very Spaniards, imagine what might be happening to the tribal communities conquered by the missionaries in our own Northeast and also how much of the colonial periods’ converted elite’s self-perception should be considered factual.

The book is in a way the retrieval of the truth through the memories held onto and recorded by the unconverted.