Aztec customs

To know a society in depth we must talk about its customs, being those habits that an ancient culture performed often and whose knowledge allows us to glimpse the relevance that certain aspects of life had in his society. To know the lives of one of the Mesoamerican cultures with greater relevance in this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to talk about Aztec customs.

Before talking about their customs, we must briefly explain who were the aztecs to understand its great relevance to American and Mesoamerican history.

The Aztecs or Mexica were a great civilization that existed between 1321 and 1521, born from the union of various Mesoamerican peoples in a great alliance and ending with the colonization process carried out by the arrival of Europeans to the American territory. Its period of greatest splendor was the so-called period postclassic, achieving in its course be the dominant culture of all Mesoamerica thanks to his warrior and conquering spirit.

We must bear in mind that like all the peoples of the area, the Aztecs or Mexica had the influence of numerous previous or contemporary cultures, such as the

Maya wave olmec and that is why many of the customs that we are going to talk about already appeared in other civilizations in the same area.

We began this lesson on the customs of the Aztecs by talking about religion. We must bear in mind that, like the rest of Mesoamerican cultures, religion had a great weightThis being the reason why most of the Aztec customs that we have evidence of are religious. Therefore, in this section we must talk about the many customs related to the polytheistic religion of the Aztecs.

Human sacrifices

Possibly the information that we all have in mind when we talk about Aztec customs are the sacrifices, since in popular culture there have been many occasions in which it has been shown as the Aztecs they carried out human sacrifices to honor their gods.

Human sacrifices to the gods came from a long tradition in the Mesoamerican peoples, being carried out by cultures such as the Mayan. It is said that the sacrifices were great acts where a large number of Aztecs came, being therefore part of Aztec life.

Aztec festivals

The Aztecs had numerous festivals of different types to honor their gods and ask them for key elements for their day to day. One of these festivals was that of the rain, held at the beginning of the so-called farmer year, these festivals, as their name suggests, were held to ask the gods for rain. Other festivals were those of Xilonen in which a slave was disguised as the goddess of corn and sacrificed, or the festival of the new fire that was held every 52 years and whose function was to prevent the end of the world.

Mesoamerican ball game

One of the best known customs of the Aztecs and the rest of the Mesoamerican peoples is the ball game. Although at first they were just a game, it became a key element of the Aztec religion. From Olmec origin, this game was based on dunking a rubber ball into a stone hoop. For the Aztecs, playing ball was a form of tribute to the gods, and it is said that every time who took a new land, built a temple for the gods and next to it a court for this play.

To continue this lesson on the customs of the Aztecs we must talk about all those customs that were common in this culture and they were not religious, this information being interesting to understand what the day to day of an Aztec was like. The main Aztec customs were the following:

• The births of the children were acts especially important, being celebrations that could last days. It did not matter whether the infant was from the upper or lower classes, since a birth of any social scale was of great importance and led to numerous festivals.
• All houses were equipped with steam shower, since the Aztecs considered that they were essential to purify the inner soul. These so special baths allowed, on the one hand, to wash oneself, and on the other to purify the soul as requested by the shamans.
• The men were the ones who worked, generally in the field, while women were in charge of household chores. The women were also in charge of home schooling, in elements such as sewing.
• The kids were taught both in field tasks as in warrior tasks, being the two main areas of the Aztec civilization. All attended the same school, giving equal to the social situation of each one.
• The cocoa beans were so important that they were even used as currency. They used cocoa to create a chocolate drink, which displayed great social status.
• The poetry It had a lot of relevance in the Aztec culture, there were numerous events in which the poetry of the citizens were exhibited. Acts of poetry were great celebrations in which all the Aztecs gathered.
• The Aztec clothing It was very different from each other, since its shape and color represented the social status of the person wearing it. In the military part, the rank of each soldier was represented by one outfit or another.