Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

The Mexica, like all their Nahua neighbors, believed they owed everything to the gods. “They are the ones who taught us everything,” their priests would later explain to the Spanish. “Before them, we kiss the ground, we bleed. We pay our debts to the gods, offer incense, make sacrifices…. We live by the grace of the gods.”49 Each group of Nahuas had carried sacred bundles devoted to its own deity in the long marches from Aztlan; in the case of the Mexica, it was the relics of Huitzilopochtli that they had protected year after year, until they were finally able to bury them beneath a permanent temple. Other altepetls had carried relics of the rain god Tlaloc or his water-world consort, Jade-Skirted Woman. Others honored Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent, the god of wind, who was at home both on earth and in the sky, a crosser of boundaries, special protector of priests. Some were most dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, a mischievous god who led humankind in a dance by assisting chiefs and warriors to bring change through conflict. Cihuacoatl, Woman-Snake, was known by many other names as well, but she was always sacred to midwives; she often bore a shield and spear, for she helped birthing mothers seize a new spirit from the cosmos. There were many gods and goddesses each of whom appeared with a range of possible traits; today, we do not always understand their characteristics as well as we would like to, for the Nahuas did not write freely of them in the colonial era...