Word: aztecs
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...honor the spring god Xipe, Aztec priests flayed human beings and clad themselves in the tattered hides. This symbolized the new vegetation in which the earth clothes itself...
...When warfare netted too few victims, Aztec tribes arranged a ceremonial combat, called the War of Flowers. No one was killed in the battle, but prisoners were used for human sacrifices...
...many as 20,000 captives were sacrificed at one time in the Aztec metropolis. Victims' flesh was sometimes eaten "in the belief that the eater can absorb the virtues of the eaten...
These are among the cheerful points of Aztec history mustered by Archeologist George Clapp Vaillant of the American Museum of Natural History in his new book Aztecs of Mexico (Doubleday Doran; $4). Assembling the wealth of new historical evidence dug up since William Hickling Prescott finished his great Conquest of Mexico in 1843, it will muffle the sighs which four generations have sighed over "the tragic destruction of a great culture by lustful Spanish barbarians...
...Western Hemisphere has produced two arts all its own: 1) U. S. jazz, 2) Mexican painting. These two arts are curiously alike. Neither is much influenced by European traditions; jazz grows from Negro folk tunes, Mexican painting from Aztec and Maya religious sculpture and the primitive religious paintings (retablos) that have hung for generations, as thick as shingles, in every mud-walled Mexican church. Like jazz, Mexican art is the product of exuberant talent rather than of training; like jazz, it has produced few first-rank geniuses, but the scintillating feats of line-&-color-crazed Mexicans often leave the learned...