Ometeotl

The Dual Principle

Ometeotl, meaning "Two God" or "Dual God," names a primordial, dual-gendered creative force described in a cluster of colonial-era Nahua sources, most notably the anonymous 16th-century Spanish compilation Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas, as dwelling in Omeyocan, the thirteenth and highest level of the Aztec heavens. In this account, the dual god, also called Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl ("Lord and Lady of Our Sustenance"), engendered the four Tezcatlipocas (Xipe Totec (the Red Tezcatlipoca), Huitzilopochtli (associated with the Blue Tezcatlipoca in this telling), Quetzalcoatl (the White Tezcatlipoca), and Tezcatlipoca proper (the Black Tezcatlipoca)) who in turn undertook the work of creating the world and the successive Suns (world-ages).

A Genuinely Contested Concept

Unlike most entries in this catalog, Ometeotl's very status as a coherent, singularly named deity is disputed among scholars of Mesoamerican religion, and that debate deserves to be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. The historian and philosopher Miguel Leon-Portilla, in his influential Aztec Thought and Culture (1963), argued that Ometeotl represented a sophisticated, near-monotheistic or panentheistic philosophical current within elite Nahua religious thought, synthesizing the paired creator deities into a single, transcendent dual principle. Other scholars, notably Richard Haly in "Bare Bones: Rethinking Mesoamerican Divinity" (1992), have pushed back forcefully, arguing that the primary colonial-era sources consistently speak of paired deities, Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl or Tonacatecuhtli/Tonacacihuatl, and that a single deity named simply "Ometeotl" as commonly presented in modern popular and even some scholarly accounts is substantially a 20th-century interpretive construct rather than a term with clear, direct standing in the primary sources.

The Parent of the Four Tezcatlipocas

Whatever position one takes in that scholarly debate, the underlying mythic material, the paired dual god's generation of the four Tezcatlipoca brothers who go on to shape the world, is well attested in the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas and related texts, and it is on this basis that Ometeotl/Ometecuhtli-Omecihuatl is treated here as the ultimate primordial source of several of the Aztec pantheon's most important gods.