The Aztecs at the Guggenheim -- Blood on the Chocolate

My Dad and I hit the Aztec Empire exhibit, which goes until Feb 13 at the Guggenheim in New York.

First off, can I just wonder why it is that the Guggenheim doesn't exhibit their shows so that you go up to the top of the building to begin with and then work your way down the spiral? I remember hearing that that was the orignal intention of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the shows that I've seen lately don't do that, and so you have to climb endlessly, or see the show backwards, which is what we did.

The artifacts --from collections all over, but largely from the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City -- are impressive, some even exquisitely crafted, but signage on the display was practically nil. I dislike walking around holding those laminated cards, so I relied partly on the museum's monthly guide, which had a fine article by Felipe Solis, director of the aforementioned Anthropoligcal Museum. Of course, I had to read it backwards.

One thing that continued to disturb me throughout the exhibit was the reckless imaginings that kept cropping up in my head of human sacrifice and mutilations. The culture of the Mayans and Aztecs, I suppose, will never be one I understand. No matter how many times I read about how it was an "honor" for the victims and how nicely they were treated leading up to the sacrifice, no amount of warm cups of chocolate makes having your living heart ripped out of your chest seem worth it.

Every so often I'd pass another image -- a statue of Xipe Totec wearing a human skin, a nicely curved stone made for holding human blood -- and (not to get too woo-woo about this, but...) I'd feel almost overwhelmed by a sense of horror at the amount of death that had been involved with that particular object.

Humans are such a queer bunch -- for all our vaunted logic, we seem to be the only creature on the planet that is superstitious and on such a scale! How would any logical creature imagine that sacrificing 20,000 individuals would have any direct association with the next year's harvest?