Two things immediately strike the crowds at the Royal Academy's Aztecs exhibition. First, there is the skill and imagination that created art and artefacts in a civilisation that lasted only 200 years. Then there is the Aztecs' bloodthirstiness, which much of the display is given up to celebrating - for example, bowls for victims' blood and priestly garments made from victims' skin.
Aztec art was more than decorative; it was symbolic, and it played an essential role in religion, which was central to their daily existence. Like other pre-monotheistic societies, their gods ruled all aspects of their lives, though, alone among civilisations, the Aztecs engaged in battle at prescribed times, not to capture land or kill enemies but to take captives solely for the purpose of sacrifice.
Such a brutal society is enough to distance the average visitor imaginatively and emotionally. We may not find the Spanish who, in 1521 destroyed the Aztec civilisation, too palatable, but we are more likely to see ourselves as connected with them. They were, after all, Christians.
In some respects, we would not say that the Aztecs were primitive, any more than we would say it of the Romans. They had a well-ordered society with schools and aqueducts; they were a trading people with a great empire; they built magnificent cities (Tenochtitlan had 250,000 inhabitants when the Spanish arrived - the population of London did not reach 100,000 for another 40 years); they did not have an alphabet, but their codices, or painted books, are works of art. And yet, we would call their spiritual and mental world, with its many gods and sacrifices, primitive.
There is a superficial connection between the Aztec religion and the Christianity that replaced it. Just as the Christian God sacrificed himself for his creation, so did the Aztec gods; they died that the sun, moon and maize should be created. Human sacrifice was made that the moon and sun might rise each day. As the Aztecs borrowed from the practices of those they had overcome, so Catholic ceremonies in Mexico have assimilated something of the Aztecs.
Yet were the Aztecs so different in more significant ways? Were they just losers in the Darwinian struggle, or might not their Spanish conquerors have found more to recognise in them than they would if, today, they were able to revisit much of our western society?
The Aztecs and the Spanish had a sense of the numinous; they knew that they were not sufficient unto themselves. This is something that, in the nominally Christian west at least, is in danger of dissolving. Even if there is some residual inkling of it among some people, it has, today, no practical meaning; there is no sense of connection between any other life or being - let alone that which might affect our own lives.
We have cast off Paul Tillich's famous formulation that God is the ground of our being, that we may rely on our own practical and philosophical devices. As one of Bonhoeffer's modern popular interpreters, the late Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, put it, for practical purposes most people act as if they were atheists.
It is not long ago that a sense of otherness was assumed, known, a given. Expressed (very often) by religious observance, it was an acceptance by people that they lived in a world they had not made, and could not, in important ways, re-make, and a sense that they were part of something greater than themselves.
The Aztecs had this sense, even if it was manifested in brutally shocking ways. No civilisation has progressed without it, and Aztec art is a product of it as much as the Christian art of the Renaissance. It was once called a sense of the sacred, a denial of ourselves as just a collection of cells or the products of society.
Materialism, acquisitiveness, and much of science, militate against and deny the sacred. With all its beauty and brutality, the Aztec world, far from being a long-dead, ethnographic curiosity, says something important about us all.
· Terry Philpot is a freelance writer
