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9 The Festival of the Raising of the Banners Preparations for Panquetzaliztli (the Festival of the Raising of the Banners) began immediately after the close of Ochpaniztli. Nightly, during the intervening months, naked, fasting priests, blowing shell trumpets and pottery whistles, spread fir branches on mountaintop altars around Tenochtitlan. On the branches they laid bloodied reeds and maguey thorns that had been passed through perforations in their own flesh. Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Great Temple of Huitzilopochtli, young men burned pine bonfires against the dark, sprinkling blood from their earlobes into the fire, while a captive ixiptla, dressed as Huitzilopochtli, danced.1 Panquetzaliztli honored Huitzilopochtli, whom we have already met as the instigator of war, the bridegroom of Toci, and the god whose appetite for sacrificial victims prompted Tlacaelel’s flowery wars. He was the patron god of the Mexica, lately raised to the status of sun god, whose fiery energy “had, by extraordinary convention , to be given nourishment, in the shape of human blood.”2 He was also, according to Sahagún’s informants, “only a common man, a human being,” a phrase generally taken to mean that the original Huitzilopochtli had been a warrior leader of the early Mexica. Some believe that the final stages of Huitzilopochtli’s metamorphosis from local hero to tribal deity and bloodthirsty sun god had been engineered by Tlacaelel as part of his transformation of the Mexica from a minor tribal power into a military empire.3 According to Mexica myth at the time of the conquest, Coatlicue was said to have conceived Huitzilopochtli immaculately by clutching a ball of feathers to her breast. Misconstruing her pregnancy, her daughter (Coyolxauhqui) and her innumerable warrior sons (the Centzon Huitznahua) planned to kill their mother. But one of the brothers, Quauitlicac, warned the unborn Huitzilopochtli of the matricidal (and hence fratricidal) intentions of his siblings. As the Huitznahua advanced in full “war array” on Coatlicue, Quauitlicac kept Huitzilopochtli informed of their progress. At the moment of their arrival, Huitzilopochtli “burst forth, born.” Grasping a “fire serpent,” he used the magical weapon to decapitate his sister. Then he pursued his brothers until they, too, perished at his hands.4 Following Seler’s early-twentieth-century lead, many scholars have interpreted this myth as the first decisive victory of the sun (Huitzilopochtli) over the moon (Coyolxauhqui) and the stars (Huitznahua), a triumph recapitulated every sunrise .5 Others, noting that the myth makes no mention of sun, moon, or stars, have understood it to refer to an early battle for control of the Mexica shortly after they arrived in Coatepec, near Tula, in 1163. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma writes, “From reviewing the historical evidence, it seems certain that part of the Mexica 85 group, made up of people from the barrio of Huitznahua, opposed the authority of the human leader Huitzilopochtli. The Huitznahua, led by a warrior woman, Coyolxauhqui, . . . were defeated in the confrontation. This rebellion signifies the historical attempt to usurp the power and control of the larger group led by Huitzilopochtli. It is a matter, then, of an internal power struggle that was remembered by subsequent generations as a turning point in their history.”6 In any case, it is this narrative that lies behind much of the action of Panquetzaliztli. Tenochtitlan’s merchants also readied themselves for the festival, for this was the only public occasion on which their contribution to the Mexica cycle of war and sacrifice found dramatic expression. The merchants regarded themselves as warriors of trade, routinely penetrating enemy territory for profit, serving as royal spies, collecting tribute in the form of imposed trade, and sometimes resorting to defensive arms to protect their lives and goods. During Panquetzaliztli they appropriated for themselves the ceremonial role of soldiers bringing sacrificial victims to Huitzilopochtli. Whereas true warriors captured sacrificial offerings in the “military marketplace” of warfare, merchants bartered for them in the slave market of Azcapotzalco, to the west of Tenochtitlan. A good slave, unblemished and able to dance well, cost “forty large capes” or more than four thousand cacao beans. To enhance the illusion that the slaves were prisoners of war, the men among them were armed with shields made of flowers and their hair cut “in the manner of seasoned warriors.” The merchants stocked their homes with grains, beans, chilis, salt, tomatoes, turkeys, edible dogs, chocolate, and other foods for the upcoming feast; and they tried to ingratiate themselves with the warrior class by...

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