Yet more quotes on the Aztecs...

‘The [Aztec] priests who performed these bloody rituals were not just gruesome murderers but what we would also call the learned men of the empire: the astronomers, keepers of books of dreams, soothsayers, and wise men. In dream trances, often aided by hallucinatory drugs, they would travel through the underworld, seeking to know the will of their gods. They were shamans, diviners, and healers in a grand style, who cared for both their people and their gods. They were the ancestors of the tradition followed by Rubia and Inocente [two modern Nahua healers]’. Timothy J. Knab (‘A War of Witches’).

‘A War of Witches’

‘During the period that [William H.] Prescott [History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1843] was describing Aztec civilisation as rude and barbaric, both Britain and the United States were busy removing pre-Columbian material culture to museums and private collections in London and New York. The taking in of landscape views and antiquities were historically and ideologically coincident’. Robert D. Aguirre (‘Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture’).

‘Informal Empire’