The following thirteen days were given up to festivity. The houses were cleansed and whitened. The broken vessels were replaced by new ones. The people, dressed in their gayest apparel, and crowned with garlands and chaplets of flowers, thronged in joyous procession to offer up their oblations and thanksgivings in the temples. Dances and games were instituted, emblematical of the regeneration of the world. It was the carnival of the Aztecs; or rather the national jubilee, the great secular festival, like that of the Romans, or ancient Etruscans, which few alive had witnessed before, or could expect to see again.63
M. de Humboldt remarked, many years ago, “It were to be wished that some government would publish at its own expense the remains of the ancient American civilization; for it is only by the comparison of several monuments that we can succeed in discovering the meaning of these allegories, which are partly astronomical and partly mystic.” This enlightened wish has now been realized, not by any government, but by a private individual, Lord Kingsborough. The great work published under his auspices, and so often cited in this Introduction,