e it doubtlessly would have transpired, in Mexico as
elsewhere, that the set of primitive ideas which, during untold centuries,
imposed upon women seclusion, obscurity and inactivity and thus hindered
her development of strength of body and mind, would have directly induced
an inferiority. This has been subsequently proclaimed, as we know, in many
countries, as a direct proof of her lower nature and of her affinity with
the element earth. The assumed and actual inferiority of woman may
therefore be regarded as the logical, inevitable but artificial result of
primordial classification and association. Suggested by the same natural
phenomena which were visible to all inhabitants of the same latitudes,
these ideas occurred to all people at a certain stage of their development
and exerted a dominating influence over the subsequent growth of their
intelligence. It is but now, that, unconsciously, mankind is beginning to
emerge from the leading strings of its infancy, which became an iron
bondage to its prolonged childhood. In Mexico, at the period of the
Conquest, the absolute equality of the male and female principles was
theoretically maintained. At the same time it is possible to discern
certain agencies at work which were tending to connect the Below, the
female principle, with harm and evil. From time immemorial it had been the
custom of the Chichimecs, who, according to Sahagun (book XII, chap. 12,
par. 5), inhabited an extremely poor and barren region of Mexico, to
sacrifice the first animal killed in a hunting expedition and to offer it
to "the Sun whom they called father and to the earth their mother." They
severed its head and raised this as though offering it to the sun. They
_then tilled the earth where the blood had been spilt_ and left the animal
which had been sacrificed, on the spot (Ixtlilxochitl, Historia Chichimeca
chap. VI and Relaciones p. 335). This passage, establishing the
cultivation of the soil where the blood had been spilt, sheds a flood of
light on the origin of the offerings of human blood and the sacrifices of
human life, which were such a prominent and hideous feature of the Aztec
religion.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, instead of the blood being
spilt directly upon the earth, to insure and increase the fruitfulness of
the soil, a human being was stretched across a conical stone which became
thus the image of the earth-mother, his heart was extracted and offered to
the sun, the Ab