Aztec Pantheon

The Mexica and their neighbours

'Aztec' usually refers to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico and especially to the Mexica, who founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, traditionally in 1325, and, through the Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan, dominated much of Mesoamerica until the Spanish conquest in 1521. Their religion shared a great deal with other Mesoamerican peoples: the 260-day ritual calendar, the ballgame, a layered cosmos of heavens and underworld, and the feathered serpent.

The sources

Only a handful of pre-conquest manuscripts survive, among them ritual and divinatory books of the Borgia Group from central and southern Mexico. Most of what is known was recorded after 1521. The most important source is the General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, compiled in Nahuatl and Spanish between the 1540s and about 1577 by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars and elders. Other key texts include the Leyenda de los Soles (1558), the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, the Histoyre du Mechique, and illustrated colonial codices such as the Codex Borbonicus and Codex Mendoza. All were produced under Spanish rule, often by missionaries seeking to understand and suppress the old religion, and their framing needs care.

Gods and the Fifth Sun

The cosmology tells of four earlier worlds, or suns, each destroyed, before the present Fifth Sun was created at Teotihuacan when the gods Nanahuatzin and Tecuciztecatl threw themselves into a fire. The gods then gave their own blood to set the sun moving, and humans were thought to owe a debt repaid through offerings, including blood and, in state ritual, human sacrifice. Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica patron, and Tlaloc, god of rain, shared the Templo Mayor; Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and many others were worshipped through a year of monthly festivals.

After 1521

The temples were destroyed, but Nahuatl, the calendar's memory, and many practices continued in altered forms, and Nahua communities today are the descendants of the people who kept these traditions.