attend to him as though he were a lord. Dressed in the attire of the gods, this impersonator of Tezcatlipoca would stroll the streets smoking fine tobacco from gilded reed pipes carrying a bouquet of flowers. Any citizens who met him on the street held him in as high of esteem as the king himself. Twenty days before the celebration of the festival, his dress was changed to that of a great captain. He was married to four young maidens, incarnations of the wives of the god of providence: Xochiqutzal, Xilonen, Atlatonan, and Huixtochuatl. When the day of the festival finally came, banquets, ceremonies, and dances were held in honor of the youth. The entire population praised him, commoners and nobles alike. Suddenly, he was taken with his wives and court to a small, neglected temple on the shore of a lake. Here, his wives and entourage left him. Left with but a few pages and his clay pipes, he was escorted to the base of the temple. Here, even the pages left him. He ascended the temple steps alone. On each of the steps, he broke one of his flutes, symbolizing his passed grandeur. Finally, atop the temple he was seized by four priests and stripped of his remaining finery. A priest seized each of his arms and legs, and the young man was stretched atop an altar resembling a flattened cylinder, with his chest thrust high in the air. A fifth priest, in a plunging motion, thrust an obsidian knife into the young man's chest. The priest then reached in through the wound and tore out the young man's heart. Txcatl had a moral: it was to instruct people that those who enjoy wealth and pleasures in this life would end in poverty and sorrow (Caso 69). Txcatl is just one example of Aztec sacrifice. Captured warriors were painted with red and white stripes, in imitation of the astral gods, and sacrificed in the same way. The emptied corpses were then taken to the captors houses "for dismemberment and distribution: flesh scraped from the skulls and thigh...
