1991, Cambridge, NY, 398 pages

Inga Clendinnen’s searchingly textured account of Aztec life is the standard text on Aztec life for the general reader, who will find the author’s style engrossing and enlightening. In this reader’s opinion, Clendinnen’s two most notable achievements in Aztecs are:

1. The differentiation of worldviews within the Aztec hierarchy, are well-presented, contrasted and then integrated.

2. The examination of Aztec culture as a hierarchal, upward-looking framework for human suffering, making it something of a pure theist’s religion, the ultimate expression in faith-based socialization, varied in ways so many, so terrible, and so sublimely beautiful, as to stun the sensibilities of any reader with an agnostic or atheistic worldview, or, at its most searing, an ominous note struck by the cosmic chord, announcing to the person with libertarian notions or autonomous inclinations, that he is, in the end, nothing but systemic food.

“There they would be seized, forced back over the killing stone, a priest pressing down each limb to keep the chest taut and arched, while a fifth drove the wide flint blade of the sacrificial knife into the chest and dragged out the still-pulsing heart. The heart was raised to the Sun and the plundered body let fall aside. It was then sent soddenly rolling down the pyramid steps, to be collected at the base by old men from the appropriate calpulli temple, who would carry it away through the streets for dismemberment and distribution. So we have a careful, calculated shepherding of men, women, and children to their deaths…Mexica victims were purely victims…It is the combination of violence with apparent impersonality, the bureaucratic calculation of these elaborated Mexica brutalities, together with their habituated and apparently casual incorporation into the world of the everyday, which chills.”

For any reader who wonders at the potential for individual extinguishment at the hands of The State, cloaked in an ethos devoted fanatically to an environmentalist* notion of “the greater, human, collective, good,” Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs is a must read. The end notes are particularly informative and readable.

*The Aztec cosmology was essentially apocalyptic and their concerns purely environmentalist. I could well imagine Aztec priests fitting in at an Earth First rally—until the knives came out and the tree huggers discovered that their flesh and blood was indeed the cure to what ails Mother Earth.