Word: aztecs
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...when it is fashionable to bash Western culture and exaggerate the traditions of the southern and eastern hemispheres, Paz's work is a reminder that no part of the contemporary world is free of profound influences from another. His best-known poem, Sun Stone (1957), casts ancient Aztec symbolism in a modern mold. As a critic, he broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study of Mexico as a New World nation improvising its future from indigenous traditions as well as revolutionary ideals from Europe and North America...
...implacable and bloodthirsty conservatism of Aztec art that forces itself on you first, even in the Met's galleries, so far from the real context of the sacrificial pyramids and the thousands of other effigies that make up its body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice...
...Chacmool figures. But the best pieces here, such as the stone figure of a standard-bearer from Chichen Itza with its fierce gaze and crippled foot, are beyond such comparisons. From the delicately modeled stucco glyphs of Palenque, imbued with an almost rococo elegance, to the frightful severity of Aztec pieces such as the cuauhxicalli, or blood receptacle, in the form of a stone eagle, ancient Mexican sculpture is as powerful as any in human history...
...kill in battle. Leadership too in a warrior culture is typically contingent on military prowess and wrapped in the mystique of death. In the Solomon Islands a chief's importance could be reckoned by the number of skulls posted around his door, and it was the duty of the Aztec kings to nourish the gods with the hearts of human captives...
...tried to work with the teponaxtli, an old South American--I forget if it is Mayan or Aztec--log with an 'H' cut out of it with two tongues in the middle," he says. "I trained groups of people to play those, and we had performances at the Museum of Modern Art--I think that with my work the repertoire of percussion instruments jumped from about three or four to about...