David Zsutty

To really grapple with the Aztecs is to experience a sort of vertigo every bit as disorienting and nauseating as cosmic horror itself...The nine most frightening words in the English language might be 'the distribution of possible human societies is very wide.'

…small children [were] offered to Tlaloc over the first months of the ritual calendar… The children were kept by the priests for some weeks before their deaths (those kindergartens of doomed infants are difficult to contemplate). Then, as the appropriate festivals arrived, they were magnificently dressed, paraded in litters, and, as they wept, their throats were slit: gifted to Tlaloc the Rain God… The pathos of their fate as they were paraded moved the watchers to tears, while their own tears were thought to augur rain… the onlookers wept as the children destined for Tlaloc… were carried weeping in their litters, and wept as the terrified wailing choked and stopped.