festival was
considered complete without some human bloodshed.

Prescott takes as an example the great festival in honor of
Tezcatlipoca, a handsome god of the second rank, called "the soul of the
world," and endowed with perpetual youth.

A year before the intended sacrifice, a captive, distinguished for
his personal beauty and without a blemish on his body, was
selected.... Tutors took charge of him and instructed him how to
perform his new part with becoming grace and dignity. He was
arrayed in a splendid dress, regaled with incense and with a
profusion of sweet-scented flowers.... When he went abroad he was
attended by a train of the royal pages, and as he halted in the
streets to play some favorite melody, the crowd prostrated
themselves before him, and did him homage as the representative of
their good deity.... Four beautiful girls, bearing the names of the
principal goddesses, were selected, and with them he continued to
live idly, feasted at the banquets of the principal nobles, who
paid him all the honors of a divinity. When at length the fatal
day of sacrifice arrived, ... stripped of his gaudy apparel, one of
the royal barges transported him across a lake to a temple which
rose on its margin.... Hither the inhabitants of the capital
flocked to witness the consummation of the ceremony. As the sad
procession wound up the sides of the pyramid, the unhappy victim
threw away his gay chaplets of flowers and broke in pieces his
musical instruments. ... On the summit he was received by six
priests, whose long and matted locks flowed in disorder over their
sable robes, covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import.
They led him to the sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with
its upper surface somewhat convex. On this the victim was
stretched. Five priests secured his head and limbs, while the
sixth, clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of his bloody office,
dexterously opened the breast of the wretched victim with a sharp
razor of _itzli_, and inserting his hand in the wound, tore out the
palpitating heart, and after holding it up to the sun (as
representing the supreme God), cast it at the feet of the deity to
whom the temple was devoted, while the multitudes below prostrated
themselves in humble adoration.

Such was an instance of the human s