Aztec Mythology

The Mexica of Tenochtitlan told a mythology of debt. The present world is the Fifth Sun, and it exists because the gods gathered at Teotihuacan and threw themselves into a fire to start it moving — Nanahuatzin, the poor and scabbed one, going first. What the gods spent, people are obliged to repay, and the form of repayment was blood.

The sources are a problem that has to be stated plainly. Most of what we have was written after the conquest, in the Florentine Codex compiled under Bernardino de Sahagún and in other colonial manuscripts, by or for people with an interest in how the Mexica appeared. A few pre-conquest screenfolds survive. Everything else has been through a filter.

Huitzilopochtli is the war and sun god who led the migration and is born fully armed to defend his mother; Tezcatlipoca is the smoking mirror, night and discord; Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent, who goes down to the underworld to steal the bones of the previous humanity and bleeds on them to make this one.