At the annual feast of the great god Tezcatlipoca, which, like most similar festivals, fell about the same time as the Christian Easter, a young man was chosen to be the representative of the god for a twelvemonth. As in the case of almost all chosen victims, he had to be a person of unblemished body, and he was trained to behave like a god-king with becoming dignity. During his year of godship, he was lapped in luxury; and the actual reigning emperor took care that he should be splendidly attired, regarding him already as a present deity. He was attended by eight pages clad in the royal livery--which shows him to have been a king as well as a god; and wherever he went the people bowed down to him. Twenty days before the festival at which he was to be sacrificed, four noble maidens, bearing the names of four goddesses, were given him to be his brides. The final feast itself, like those of Dionysus, of Attis, and of Potraj, occupied five days--a coincidence between the two hemispheres which almost points to original identity of custom before the dispersion of the races. During these five days the real king remained in his palace--and this circumstance plainly shows that the victim belonged to the common class of substituted and temporary divine king-gods. The whole court, on the other hand, attended the victim. On the last day of the feast, the victim was ferried across the lake in a covered barge to a small temple in the form of a pyramid. On reaching the summit, he was seized and held down on a block of stone,--no doubt {327}an altar of funereal origin,--while the priest cut open his breast with a stone knife, and plucked his heart out. This he offered to the god of the sun. The head was hung up among the skulls of previous victims, no doubt for oracular purposes, and as a permanent god; but the legs and arms were cooked and prepared for the table of the lords, who thus partook of the god sacramentally. His place was immediately filled by another young man, who for a year was treated with the same respect, and at the end of that time was similarly slaughtered. I do not think I need point out the close resemblance of this ritual to that of the Khond Meriah, of the Potraj, and of the festivals of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. But I would also call particular attention to the final destination of the skull, and its exact equivalence to the skull of the animal-god in India and elsewhere.