the
Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had
been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury
and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he
desired) had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving
his companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple
staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and
breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments;
till, reaching the summit, he was stretched, curved on his back, and
belly upwards, over the altar stone, while the priest with obsidian
knife cut his breast open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet
beating, as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and while the heart
still lived, his successor for the next year was chosen.

In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the similar
offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases (he explains) of young
man or young woman, the victims were richly adorned in the guise of the
god or goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time great
largesse of food was distributed to all who needed. (Here we see the
connection in the general mind between the gift of food (by the gods)
and the sacrifice of precious blood (by the people).) More than once
Sahagun mentions that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not
infrequently offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
says (1) that the offering of one's life to the gods was "sometimes
voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening a sure passage
into Paradise."

(1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.

Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea
in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's
robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands
he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the
king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped
of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly
astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far
removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D.
and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a
king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has espec