Pre-Conquest:– The strange
idols, great temples, and barbaric rituals of the pre-Conquest Mexicans
fascinated many of the early chroniclers, particularly the priests. They
gathered a wonderful amount of detailed information on heathen ceremonies and
wrote long descriptions which contain much information on ceremonial plants.
One of the oldest and most copied
documents on Aztec ritual is the so-called 'Ramirez Codex,' which describes the
May festival honoring the war god, Huitzilopochtli (Anonymous, ca. 1550, pp.
128-135). The festival was observed throughout the empire, but the chief
ceremony was at the temple pyramid in Tenochtitlán, the capital. The whole city
attended, all the state and temple officials dressed in ceremonial garlands,
feathers, and colored robes, according to rank. The intricate ritual involved
dances, processions, singing, much noise of flutes, shell-trumpets, and drums,
and human sacrifices in greater number than on any other day. The focus of all
the activity was a huge idol of the god made of dough, as large as the regular
idol of wood. The temple maidens, two days before the festival, had
"milled a quantity of seed of bledos together with toasted maize,
and after it was milled, kneaded it with honey, and made of that dough an
idol." (See Appendix-B). The idol was carried on a litter in a great
procession through the capital and the suburbs and then returned to the temple.
At the close of the ceremony it was broken up, with other chunks of the same
dough, and all the pieces were consecrated as the bones and flesh of
Huitzilopochtli. The pieces were handed out to the populace and were eaten in
communion with reverence, fear, and tears. On this day "it was a strictly
observed rule in all the land that no other food was to be eaten except that
dough with honey of which the idol was made. All those that participated were
obliged to give a tithe of that seed of which the idol was made." (Jonathan
Deininger Sauer, “The Grain Amaranths: A Survey of Their History and
Classification,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 37, no. 4 [November
1950]: 567-68, emphasis in bold added)
