9 ms·

A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon

289 points by sdoering 4y ago

once_inc 4y ago
This is pretty cool; a very interesting way of displaying the information. The final grid and the information about the gods is underwhelming though. I would have liked to know what the reason for the structuring of the grid is, and would love far more information about each of the gods, but especially the major ones.
- sparsely 4y ago
  If this was run by a major collection or archive it would have been cool to link out from the gods to images of the works that depict them.
rendall 4y ago
Excellent work and work of art. It was a pleasant surprise to see Svelte being used for this.
scaglio 4y ago
Amazing work! I'd just like the final table to be interactive as soon as it becomes visible, but it's a great site.
AnthonBerg 4y ago
Here’s a wonderful series of comments on Aztec culture and thought, here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060487 The post and discussion recommend the book Aztecs – An Interpretation by Inga Clendinnen: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107589094#fndtn-information https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107589094#fndtn-information It’s a captivating book. Truly. From the Cambridge Books site: Book description: In 1521, the city of Tenochtitlan, magnificent centre of the Aztec empire, fell to the Spaniards and their Indian allies. Inga Clendinnen's account of the Aztecs recreates the culture of that city in its last unthreatened years. It provides a vividly dramatic analysis of Aztec ceremony as performance art, binding the key experiences and concerns of social existence in the late imperial city to the mannered violence of their ritual killings. Reviews '… a fascinating, thought-provoking book. Aztecs offers a gripping account of an alien society and thus enlarges our apprehension of the sheer diversity of human culture.' Source: London Review of Books 'This is an outstanding book …' Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bradrn 4y ago
  I recall thinking that was an excellent blog post too… until I actually mentioned it to someone who knew something about the Aztecs, at which point we realised that both it and Clendinnen badly misremresented Aztec society as compared to European society. The relevant conversation may still be found at http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=33912#p33912 http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=33912#p33912.
  - AnthonBerg 4y ago
    Thank you!!
Namari 4y ago
Nice to see something about MesoAmerican gods! I like how Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan is sometimes represented as a Viking with scale and beard, makes you think there could have been "Vinland" in the Gulf of Mexico too.
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  The article makes no mention of this and since Vikings didn’t have a monopoly on beards or scales, I don’t think your statement earned the matter-of-fact-edness with which you delivered it.
joe8756438 4y ago
The illustrations are _so good_, beautiful work and rendered well for breaking down the whole to understand the meaning of the components.
bane 4y ago
I'm wondering if anybody can shed light on the prevalence of 'TL' in so many Aztec language words? IIR it's a latinized way of representing a single unique consonant, but it's fascinating that it's in nearly every name and in so many other Aztec words I've seen.
- dwringer 4y ago
  There is some limited discussion here[0] which doesn't fully explain the prevalence of "tl" but suggests the word "atl" meaning "water" was very common and often combined with other words to create new words metaphorically. [0]https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1508 https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1508
- sudenmorsian 4y ago
  In Classical Nahuatl, non-possessed nouns would take the absolutive case with -tl for nouns ending in vowels, and -tli for nouns ending in consonants. [0] Here, as you mentioned, <tl> marks a single consonant: the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate /tɬ/ [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Noun... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  I've read that 'tl' was similar to the welsh 'll' sound (a kind of hissy L sound, though not really, youtube will have some spoken examples) but when I've heard 'tl' spoken it usually sounds like a 'tl', as in 'little'.
  - sudenmorsian 4y ago
    Yes, it’s a very similar sound. The Welsh <ll> is the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, which is effectively <tl> without the initial ‘t’ at the start of the phoneme. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
- 4y ago
bigmattystyles 4y ago
I was going to make an NFT joke but these illustrations are so cool they don't belong in the same breath.
- 1shooner 4y ago
  I was thinking that minting deities would get us even further into Stephenson territory, which means its probably happening already...
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Very interesting, would love to see something similar for what we know of the Mayan deities and beliefs too.
agomez314 4y ago
This is very useful as I've been reading Hugh Thomas' epic, "Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico"[1] and having a good understanding of these deities is fundamental to understand the life and culture of the Mexica people. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico/dp/0671511041 https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico...
delaaxe 4y ago
What JS library is used to produce this scrolling effect?
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Likely just some custom css animations. This build doesn't obfuscate what it's done with, so wappalizer can show some of the technologies used. (Svelte, vite, corejs, AWS, nodejs) And Svelte makes it pretty straightforward to make custom animations like this
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Perhaps scrollyteller.
timmy-k 4y ago
Things I didn't even know I needed. And a brilliant way to present the info
725686 4y ago
The images are amazing an are SVG.
- divbzero 4y ago
  What are the best editors for creating images like this?
  - youessayyyaway 4y ago
    Inkscape is a good place to start.
whatshisface 4y ago
More than one of these purports to have become the moon; I'm skeptical.
zasdffaa 4y ago
This surprises me as I read a lot about Aztecs and their iconography was described by an expert as 'dense and obscure' and i never found good examples of any of it, so this is ... interesting. Some doubts, the 'blood drops' on the skull are - I think - actually pox marks from disease, quite appropriate for the death god. Also, missing is a note on their sandals which if you look, have a high back to them around the heel. This was apparently a symbol of rank (weird eh). I'd like to see clearer references to explain each, and some explanation of why, as well as what. But good to see this.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Or maybe blood drops. They slaughtered tens of thousands of people at at time, women and children included.
armandososa 4y ago
> But, despite this enchantment, Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc were the only gods I could identify, while I could name dozens of Greek, Egyptian or Norse Gods. I think this is related to racism. The Aztecs were short and brown people who were considered inferior by the europeans who "conquered" them. Thus, their deities and religion are unimportant. My middle name is "Quetzalcoatl" and I spent most of my life ashamed of it, and hiding it, because of the bullying. I would've been call an "indio" (I'm short and brown) and indios are supposed to be stupid and ignorant. These days I would like to proudly present myself as Quetzalcoatl, but the prejudice is still there.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. > who were considered inferior by the europeans who "conquered" them Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors > indios are supposed to be stupid and ignorant news to me.
  - cambalache 4y ago
    > we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. Who is "We" here? Because I would easily bet this is not the case for most of the population in the world > Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors Thanks God for the superior and enlightened British colonizers,you can see the different policies in current native populations in the US compared to the Spanish-ravaged south. > news to me. Spoken like one who has not spent 1 min with people with Native-American ancestors.
  - calibas 4y ago
    > Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. Ah, eurocentrism. It's forgivable since you were likely educated this way since birth, but it comes off as hideously insensitive to other cultures.
JoeDaDude 4y ago
The author mentions being inspired by the anime The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I found that anime to be historically well informed (informed, but not historically accurate, just consider the flying Conder machine). This led me to do some digging on the story and I found the real, historical inspirations for the characters. Shameless plug, read my findings here: https://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-gold/ https://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-...
oersted 4y ago
How is such particular symbolism derived and recovered in practice during research? Is it from surrounding writing? How explicit is it? I mean, how do we know for instance that the necklace of prickly pears symbolizes the human heart?
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The prickly pear thing is pretty straightforward, it's part of the founding myth of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire. When the Mexica were wandering from Aztlan, they had a battle where they cut out the heart of a demigod named Copil and threw it into Lake Texcoco, where it grows into a prickly pear. Awhile later, the Aztecs are ready to settle down and their patron deity Huitzilopochtli told them to look for the eagle eating a snake. Eventually they come to the lake and see an eagle sitting on Copil's cactus heart eating a snake, so that's where they founded Tenochtitlan and where the Mexican flag comes from. There's no single way we figure out symbolism though. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like Copil's heart. Sometimes you can just ask people (ethnographic analogy). In other cases people use the symbol as a reference to the deity and you figure it out from context. Sometimes writings and rituals straight up say it, or you can figure it out from related cultures. And sometimes it's basically a pun, where the words/symbols look or sound like something else associated with the deity. The biblical name of Adam vs Adamah (dirt/earth) is a more familiar example of the last one.
TheMerovingian 4y ago
I'd love to see this for the old Slavic gods (e.g. Perun, Vales, etc).
christkv 4y ago
I’ll post this great documentary about the rise and fall of the Aztec empire. This is the first part https://youtu.be/f8JVdpWCKeM https://youtu.be/f8JVdpWCKeM
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Worth pointing out that while that documentary isn't irredeemably bad, it gets a lot of information wrong. The whole point about the timing of corn domestication, for example? Wrong dates, and corn wasn't even close to the first crop domesticated. Squashes were and evidence for their domestication in the Americas extends to at least 11k BP. The bronze-making thing? Mesoamerica was notoriously late to game as far as American metallurgy goes, but it had been present in mesoamerica since around the 7th century. The second has much the same issues with being unfamiliar with current knowledge and an uncritical acceptance of literary sources/narratives.
  - thealig 4y ago
    ok, i'm curious, could you elaborate on what literary sources/narratives are you referring to? are those one the lines of "Gun, germs and steel" for example(criticised for floating inaccurate narratives)?
ivanhoe 4y ago
It's not a huge deal and maybe it's just me, but I find adding the word "Imaginary" in front of their Gods completely unnecessary, even annoying. I never heard anyone explaining Christianity by putting Imaginary in front of every mention of the God, so why do it to other religions?
- gfaure 4y ago
  Did you misinterpret the article? Before the section with the imaginary gods, it clearly reads: > The Gods illustrated below are imaginary. These made-up illustrations show how symbols and attributes in real Aztec iconography were composed to depict a God’s domain, abilities and needs. The mentions of the real Aztec gods (Tlaltecuhtli and on) do not suggest that they are imaginary.
  - ivanhoe 4y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, I totally misunderstood the idea obviously... it was a long day I guess...
- Seich 4y ago
  The first two are “Imaginary” in the sense that the author made them up to show how the iconography works. The rest are real Aztec gods and are denoted with their actual names.
derevaunseraun 4y ago
imo the most bizarre thing about the Aztecs was the sheer magnitude of human sacrifice. In order for human sacrifice to be such a big tradition during times of peace implies a completely different sense of self and life as a whole. When the missionaries came and tried to put a stop to the sacrifices, the victims actually fought to be sacrificed. It's just bizarre (and unsettling) how culture can push people to do things to their own detriment Source (alternative frontend w/ no ads): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=or6W4sXpl3c https://yewtu.be/watch?v=or6W4sXpl3c
- dylan604 4y ago
  But to their culture, you're not a very good whatever to not be willing to sacrafice yourself for the betterment of the group. Everything is a matter of perspective. You believe that the gods they believe(d) in are not real, but to them, it was. They were happy in their ways of life until the foreigners came in and forced their beliefs on them. Are/were they better off being forced to stop? No way to know. Soldiers in ancient times thought it was better to die in combat than escape to fight another day.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  I'm not going to say that no victim ever fought to be sacrificed, but most commonly their victims were taken from neighboring tribes, and were certainly not willing. The destruction of the Aztec empire is usually attributed to Cortés, but really he had 500 men, some horses, and some guns/arquebuses. Not quite enough to besiege and overrun an island-fortress with 200,000 inhabitants. No, his secret weapon was 100,000+ people from neighboring tribes, who were very tired of having the Aztecs raid them for sacrifices and enslavement. This is also why the violence witnessed during the conquering was so brutal that even the Spanish tried to rein them in (without much luck).
dimmke 4y ago
This is seriously rad. I have been visiting a lot of Mayan ruins lately and I want to learn more about all of these old indigenous peoples.

289 points by sdoering 4y ago

This is pretty cool; a very interesting way of displaying the information. The final grid and the information about the gods is underwhelming though. I would have liked to know what the reason for the structuring of the grid is, and would love far more information about each of the gods, but especially the major ones.

sparsely 4y ago
If this was run by a major collection or archive it would have been cool to link out from the gods to images of the works that depict them.

rendall 4y ago

Excellent work and work of art. It was a pleasant surprise to see Svelte being used for this.

scaglio 4y ago

Amazing work! I'd just like the final table to be interactive as soon as it becomes visible, but it's a great site.

AnthonBerg 4y ago

Here’s a wonderful series of comments on Aztec culture and thought, here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060487 The post and discussion recommend the book Aztecs – An Interpretation by Inga Clendinnen: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107589094#fndtn-information https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107589094#fndtn-information It’s a captivating book. Truly. From the Cambridge Books site: Book description: In 1521, the city of Tenochtitlan, magnificent centre of the Aztec empire, fell to the Spaniards and their Indian allies. Inga Clendinnen's account of the Aztecs recreates the culture of that city in its last unthreatened years. It provides a vividly dramatic analysis of Aztec ceremony as performance art, binding the key experiences and concerns of social existence in the late imperial city to the mannered violence of their ritual killings. Reviews '… a fascinating, thought-provoking book. Aztecs offers a gripping account of an alien society and thus enlarges our apprehension of the sheer diversity of human culture.' Source: London Review of Books 'This is an outstanding book …' Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bradrn 4y ago
I recall thinking that was an excellent blog post too… until I actually mentioned it to someone who knew something about the Aztecs, at which point we realised that both it and Clendinnen badly misremresented Aztec society as compared to European society. The relevant conversation may still be found at http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=33912#p33912 http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=33912#p33912.
- AnthonBerg 4y ago
  Thank you!!

Namari 4y ago

Nice to see something about MesoAmerican gods! I like how Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan is sometimes represented as a Viking with scale and beard, makes you think there could have been "Vinland" in the Gulf of Mexico too.

alehlopeh 4y ago
The article makes no mention of this and since Vikings didn’t have a monopoly on beards or scales, I don’t think your statement earned the matter-of-fact-edness with which you delivered it.

joe8756438 4y ago

The illustrations are _so good_, beautiful work and rendered well for breaking down the whole to understand the meaning of the components.

bane 4y ago

I'm wondering if anybody can shed light on the prevalence of 'TL' in so many Aztec language words? IIR it's a latinized way of representing a single unique consonant, but it's fascinating that it's in nearly every name and in so many other Aztec words I've seen.

dwringer 4y ago
There is some limited discussion here[0] which doesn't fully explain the prevalence of "tl" but suggests the word "atl" meaning "water" was very common and often combined with other words to create new words metaphorically. [0]https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1508 https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1508
sudenmorsian 4y ago
In Classical Nahuatl, non-possessed nouns would take the absolutive case with -tl for nouns ending in vowels, and -tli for nouns ending in consonants. [0] Here, as you mentioned, <tl> marks a single consonant: the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate /tɬ/ [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Noun... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...
zasdffaa 4y ago
I've read that 'tl' was similar to the welsh 'll' sound (a kind of hissy L sound, though not really, youtube will have some spoken examples) but when I've heard 'tl' spoken it usually sounds like a 'tl', as in 'little'.
- sudenmorsian 4y ago
  Yes, it’s a very similar sound. The Welsh <ll> is the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, which is effectively <tl> without the initial ‘t’ at the start of the phoneme. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
4y ago

bigmattystyles 4y ago

I was going to make an NFT joke but these illustrations are so cool they don't belong in the same breath.

1shooner 4y ago
I was thinking that minting deities would get us even further into Stephenson territory, which means its probably happening already...

jamal-kumar 4y ago

Very interesting, would love to see something similar for what we know of the Mayan deities and beliefs too.

agomez314 4y ago

This is very useful as I've been reading Hugh Thomas' epic, "Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico"[1] and having a good understanding of these deities is fundamental to understand the life and culture of the Mexica people. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico/dp/0671511041 https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico...

delaaxe 4y ago

What JS library is used to produce this scrolling effect?

411111111111111 4y ago
Likely just some custom css animations. This build doesn't obfuscate what it's done with, so wappalizer can show some of the technologies used. (Svelte, vite, corejs, AWS, nodejs) And Svelte makes it pretty straightforward to make custom animations like this
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
Perhaps scrollyteller.

timmy-k 4y ago

Things I didn't even know I needed. And a brilliant way to present the info

725686 4y ago

The images are amazing an are SVG.

divbzero 4y ago
What are the best editors for creating images like this?
- youessayyyaway 4y ago
  Inkscape is a good place to start.

whatshisface 4y ago

More than one of these purports to have become the moon; I'm skeptical.

zasdffaa 4y ago

This surprises me as I read a lot about Aztecs and their iconography was described by an expert as 'dense and obscure' and i never found good examples of any of it, so this is ... interesting. Some doubts, the 'blood drops' on the skull are - I think - actually pox marks from disease, quite appropriate for the death god. Also, missing is a note on their sandals which if you look, have a high back to them around the heel. This was apparently a symbol of rank (weird eh). I'd like to see clearer references to explain each, and some explanation of why, as well as what. But good to see this.

tomcam 4y ago
Or maybe blood drops. They slaughtered tens of thousands of people at at time, women and children included.

armandososa 4y ago

> But, despite this enchantment, Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc were the only gods I could identify, while I could name dozens of Greek, Egyptian or Norse Gods. I think this is related to racism. The Aztecs were short and brown people who were considered inferior by the europeans who "conquered" them. Thus, their deities and religion are unimportant. My middle name is "Quetzalcoatl" and I spent most of my life ashamed of it, and hiding it, because of the bullying. I would've been call an "indio" (I'm short and brown) and indios are supposed to be stupid and ignorant. These days I would like to proudly present myself as Quetzalcoatl, but the prejudice is still there.

zasdffaa 4y ago
Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. > who were considered inferior by the europeans who "conquered" them Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors > indios are supposed to be stupid and ignorant news to me.
- cambalache 4y ago
  > we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. Who is "We" here? Because I would easily bet this is not the case for most of the population in the world > Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors Thanks God for the superior and enlightened British colonizers,you can see the different policies in current native populations in the US compared to the Spanish-ravaged south. > news to me. Spoken like one who has not spent 1 min with people with Native-American ancestors.
- calibas 4y ago
  > Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures. Ah, eurocentrism. It's forgivable since you were likely educated this way since birth, but it comes off as hideously insensitive to other cultures.

JoeDaDude 4y ago

The author mentions being inspired by the anime The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I found that anime to be historically well informed (informed, but not historically accurate, just consider the flying Conder machine). This led me to do some digging on the story and I found the real, historical inspirations for the characters. Shameless plug, read my findings here: https://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-gold/ https://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-...

oersted 4y ago

How is such particular symbolism derived and recovered in practice during research? Is it from surrounding writing? How explicit is it? I mean, how do we know for instance that the necklace of prickly pears symbolizes the human heart?

AlotOfReading 4y ago
The prickly pear thing is pretty straightforward, it's part of the founding myth of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire. When the Mexica were wandering from Aztlan, they had a battle where they cut out the heart of a demigod named Copil and threw it into Lake Texcoco, where it grows into a prickly pear. Awhile later, the Aztecs are ready to settle down and their patron deity Huitzilopochtli told them to look for the eagle eating a snake. Eventually they come to the lake and see an eagle sitting on Copil's cactus heart eating a snake, so that's where they founded Tenochtitlan and where the Mexican flag comes from. There's no single way we figure out symbolism though. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like Copil's heart. Sometimes you can just ask people (ethnographic analogy). In other cases people use the symbol as a reference to the deity and you figure it out from context. Sometimes writings and rituals straight up say it, or you can figure it out from related cultures. And sometimes it's basically a pun, where the words/symbols look or sound like something else associated with the deity. The biblical name of Adam vs Adamah (dirt/earth) is a more familiar example of the last one.

TheMerovingian 4y ago

I'd love to see this for the old Slavic gods (e.g. Perun, Vales, etc).

christkv 4y ago

I’ll post this great documentary about the rise and fall of the Aztec empire. This is the first part https://youtu.be/f8JVdpWCKeM https://youtu.be/f8JVdpWCKeM

AlotOfReading 4y ago
Worth pointing out that while that documentary isn't irredeemably bad, it gets a lot of information wrong. The whole point about the timing of corn domestication, for example? Wrong dates, and corn wasn't even close to the first crop domesticated. Squashes were and evidence for their domestication in the Americas extends to at least 11k BP. The bronze-making thing? Mesoamerica was notoriously late to game as far as American metallurgy goes, but it had been present in mesoamerica since around the 7th century. The second has much the same issues with being unfamiliar with current knowledge and an uncritical acceptance of literary sources/narratives.
- thealig 4y ago
  ok, i'm curious, could you elaborate on what literary sources/narratives are you referring to? are those one the lines of "Gun, germs and steel" for example(criticised for floating inaccurate narratives)?

ivanhoe 4y ago

It's not a huge deal and maybe it's just me, but I find adding the word "Imaginary" in front of their Gods completely unnecessary, even annoying. I never heard anyone explaining Christianity by putting Imaginary in front of every mention of the God, so why do it to other religions?

gfaure 4y ago
Did you misinterpret the article? Before the section with the imaginary gods, it clearly reads: > The Gods illustrated below are imaginary. These made-up illustrations show how symbols and attributes in real Aztec iconography were composed to depict a God’s domain, abilities and needs. The mentions of the real Aztec gods (Tlaltecuhtli and on) do not suggest that they are imaginary.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  Thanks for the clarification, I totally misunderstood the idea obviously... it was a long day I guess...
Seich 4y ago
The first two are “Imaginary” in the sense that the author made them up to show how the iconography works. The rest are real Aztec gods and are denoted with their actual names.

derevaunseraun 4y ago

imo the most bizarre thing about the Aztecs was the sheer magnitude of human sacrifice. In order for human sacrifice to be such a big tradition during times of peace implies a completely different sense of self and life as a whole. When the missionaries came and tried to put a stop to the sacrifices, the victims actually fought to be sacrificed. It's just bizarre (and unsettling) how culture can push people to do things to their own detriment Source (alternative frontend w/ no ads): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=or6W4sXpl3c https://yewtu.be/watch?v=or6W4sXpl3c

dylan604 4y ago
But to their culture, you're not a very good whatever to not be willing to sacrafice yourself for the betterment of the group. Everything is a matter of perspective. You believe that the gods they believe(d) in are not real, but to them, it was. They were happy in their ways of life until the foreigners came in and forced their beliefs on them. Are/were they better off being forced to stop? No way to know. Soldiers in ancient times thought it was better to die in combat than escape to fight another day.
oh_sigh 4y ago
I'm not going to say that no victim ever fought to be sacrificed, but most commonly their victims were taken from neighboring tribes, and were certainly not willing. The destruction of the Aztec empire is usually attributed to Cortés, but really he had 500 men, some horses, and some guns/arquebuses. Not quite enough to besiege and overrun an island-fortress with 200,000 inhabitants. No, his secret weapon was 100,000+ people from neighboring tribes, who were very tired of having the Aztecs raid them for sacrifices and enslavement. This is also why the violence witnessed during the conquering was so brutal that even the Spanish tried to rein them in (without much luck).

dimmke 4y ago

This is seriously rad. I have been visiting a lot of Mayan ruins lately and I want to learn more about all of these old indigenous peoples.