Aztec Mythology

Not one Aztec account of creation was written down before the conquest. What survives from before it are pictorial books of the Borgia type, which are divinatory almanacs and do not narrate. Every narrative version was set down in the Latin alphabet between the 1530s and the 1570s: the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas (usually traced to the circle of the Franciscan Andrés de Olmos), the Nahuatl Leyenda de los Soles of 1558, Book 7 of Sahagún's Florentine Codex, and the Histoyre du Mechique, Thevet's French rendering of a lost Spanish text also generally traced to Olmos. Friars asked the questions and held the pen, and the questions shape the answers; how much of the flood episode's resemblance to Genesis is native and how much is an artefact of the asking cannot be cleanly separated.

The versions contradict each other, most visibly over the world-ages. The Leyenda de los Soles runs jaguar, wind, rain, water, at 676, 364, 312 and 676 years. The Historia de los mexicanos keeps roughly that order but names a god to serve as the sun in each age, in turn Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue; the last two are not among the four brothers. Codex Vaticanus A starts with the water age instead and gives spans in the thousands of years. The four cartouches around the 4 Movement glyph at the centre of the Sun Stone are conventionally read as jaguar, wind, rain and water, though the monument as a whole remains disputed. The stages below follow the Leyenda de los Soles.

The sequence itself is a modern splice, and there is no guarantee the Mexica told it as one continuous story. The thirteen heavens and the four brothers come from the Historia de los mexicanos; the dismemberment of the earth monster appears only in the Histoyre du Mechique and in no Nahuatl source; the descent into Mictlan and the theft of maize come from the Leyenda de los Soles; the bonfire at Teotihuacan from Sahagún. Different city-states told the story differently, and what follows is the version of the Valley of Mexico. The making of the earth is the roughest join. In the Historia de los mexicanos the earth is made straight out of the body of Cipactli, the monster in the water; in the Histoyre du Mechique the body torn in two is Tlaltecuhtli's. Those are two accounts, later retellings tend to merge them into a single earth monster, and running one into the other, as below, is an editorial choice. Tezcatlipoca's missing foot is a fixture of the imagery, the stump drawn as a smoking obsidian mirror or a serpent, but no sixteenth-century text says how he lost it; the familiar story that the earth monster bit it off comes from later retellings and is kept out of the stages. Two further cautions. Ometeotl as a single supreme dual god is largely a twentieth-century construction, associated above all with Miguel León-Portilla; the name is almost absent from the sixteenth-century sources, which give a divine pair and the place-name Omeyocan, and scholars including Richard Haly have challenged the reading of a single Aztec high god. And Tlaltecuhtli means Earth Lord and is grammatically masculine, though the sculpture of her is overwhelmingly female; the stages below follow the gender used in the Histoyre du Mechique.