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OceanofPDF.com
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OceanofPDF.com
About the Author
Camilla Townsend is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers
University and a vocal supporter of the rights of indigenous peoples. She is
the author of numerous books, including Fifth Sun: A New History of the
Aztecs, which won the Cundill History Prize in 2020. Her other books
include Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico,
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma and The Annals of Native America:
How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive.

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 Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:

The Celtic Myths

Miranda Aldhouse-Green
With 82 illustrations

The Chinese Myths

Tao Tao Liu
With 101 illustrations

The Egyptian Myths

Garry J. Shaw
With 95 illustrations

The Greek and Roman Myths

Philip Matyszak
With 95 illustrations

The Japanese Myths

Joshua Frydman
With 90 illustrations

The Norse Myths

Carolyne Larrington
With 102 illustrations

Be the first to know about our new releases,

exclusive content and author events by visiting
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
www.thamesandhudson.com.au

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Dedicated to my students, past and present.
I thank you for the joy you have brought me.

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 CONTENTS

Map
Central Mexico, c. 1500

1
What are the Aztec Myths?

2
The Divine Universe

3
The Beginnings of Human Society

4
Legends of History

5
Talking to the Divine

6
Adapting to a New World

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Sources of Illustrations
Index

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 1

WHAT ARE THE AZTEC MYTHS?

10 House. In this year Huactli died, he who had been ruler of

Cuauhtitlan. He had been ruler for sixty-two years! He was a ruler
who did not know how to plant corn for food. Nor did his subjects
know how to make textiles. They still wore hides. Their food was
just birds, snakes, rabbit, and deer. They did not yet have houses.
They just kept going from place to place, kept moving on…1

Few cultures are generally understood to have been so controlled by their

religion as the Aztecs of Mexico, and few religions are envisioned as being
as violent and as celebratory of death as theirs. In textbooks as well as
popular lore, the story goes that the Aztecs believed that the universe would
collapse if they did not feed the gods by practicing brutal human sacrifice.
Because of this, continues the usual narrative, the Aztecs were universally
hated by their neighbors, who therefore were delighted to side with the
Spaniards when the Europeans appeared on the scene in the early sixteenth
century.
Readers may be surprised to learn that although there is a kernel of truth
buried in this narrative, it is distorted almost beyond recognition. The story
is largely what the invading Spaniards wished to believe themselves—and
wished the world to believe—about the people they had conquered and
were continuing to treat harshly. Aztec religion, the surviving evidence
indicates, was actually comprised of a variety of rich and compelling
traditions. Human sacrifice did have a place within the whole, but not in the
way that it is generally portrayed. This book will offer a guide to the
Aztecs’ myths based not on assertions that have been made—and continue
to be made—by outsiders, but rather, on the stories the Aztecs wrote down
in their own language for their own posterity not long after the arrival of the
Europeans.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARLY CENTRAL MEXICO

During the last Ice Age, with its attendant lower sea levels, there existed a
land bridge between today’s Siberia and today’s Alaska. Between about
15,000 and 11,000 years ago, in at least three successive waves, distinct
populations of Asians crossed the Bering Strait, ultimately peopling the
Americas. As the ice melted and the ecological environment changed,
nomadic hunter-gatherers moved ever further south, seeking not only game
but also nutritious plants that now grew abundantly and could be gathered
easily. As these migrating groups became isolated from each other, they
developed distinct language families and unique cultures.
In about 1500 BCE the Olmecs, located on the northern coast of
Mexico’s isthmus, seem to have become the first people in the hemisphere
to dedicate themselves to a sedentary lifestyle based on full-time farming,
relying on a combination of corn and beans to yield a complete protein. As
is always the case when people settle down permanently, a division of labor
arose and a wide variety of technologies (including writing, irrigation, and
architecture) soon followed. It is important to note that this same shift had
occurred at least five thousand years earlier across the Atlantic in the Fertile
Crescent, where the presence of a constellation of especially protein-rich
plants (notably, wheat and legumes) had encouraged people to become
farmers sooner than anywhere else. The farming lifestyle had then spread to
both Europe and Asia. Much later, when the people of Eurasia and those of
the Americas came face to face, this head start in the varied technologies
that accompany sedentary life would render it possible for the European
explorers to subjugate the people of the Americas in a political and
economic sense. But that remained millennia in the future.
 The Olmecs are famous for their large carvings of the heads of great chiefs or gods.

The artisans of Teotihuacan crafted striking face masks. This one is of shell mosaic.

In the meantime, the Olmecs with their agricultural society developed

an impressive cultural repertoire. Their calendar, glyphic writing system,
and craftwork awed their neighbors. Olmec influence spread eastward to
what would become Maya country, as well as westward to a remarkable
circular basin enclosed by a ring of mountains (often called the Valley of
Mexico). There, a series of different city-states devoted to farming rose to
dominance and then were successively brought low.
The grandest of all the cultures in the central basin was the city of
Teotihuacan (Tay-oh-tee-WA-kan) whose magnificent ruins can still be
visited. Scholars know relatively little of Teotihuacan, in the sense that
there are no surviving texts for us to read. But the archaeological remains
reveal a great deal about the residents’ cosmology as well as their economic
lives. Teotihuacan was the center of a long-distance trade network that
extended northward to what is today the United States and southward to
Central America. When their government collapsed in about the year 650
CE, word of the fall spread far and wide. The power vacuum instigated
invasions by nomadic peoples from the northern deserts, who were
sometimes escaping warfare, sometimes seeking more fertile lands.

The archaeological remains of the city of Teotihuacan are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Those deserts lay in what is now northern Mexico and southwestern

United States. Speakers of languages in the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family,
especially the language called Nahuatl, comprised the majority of the
successive streams of people who made their way south to the central
valley. These migrations took many generations to accomplish. It is
probable that no single person traveled from today’s Arizona to today’s
Mexico City. As the migrating groups made their way south, they often
settled for a while in a particular region, intermarrying with the local
populace, adopting some of their ways, listening to their stories. Then they
would move on again if disagreements or outright warfare rendered it
necessary.

Carvings of the feathered serpent adorn Teotihuacan’s surviving pyramids.

 Living quarters and ceremonial spaces were full of vessels like this tripod ceramic piece.

The Mexica (Me-SHEE-ka) were among the later Nahuatl-speaking

ethnic groups to arrive in the fertile central basin. (Indeed, in their own
accounts, they were the very last.) They got there at some point in the
thirteenth century. By then, the area was quite crowded, and for many years,
the Mexica remained an itinerant people, willing to hire themselves out to
others as a fighting force in exchange for the right to hunt some deer and
plant a little corn. In the early to mid-fourteenth century, they managed to
establish a permanent town on an island in the great lake that filled the
center of the basin, and soon after that, they celebrated the formation of a
kingly line.
Still, the Mexica remained relatively weak and vulnerable. The central
basin’s dominant city-state at the time was Azcapotzalco (Az-ka-po-TZAL-
ko), populated by Tepanec people (who also spoke Nahuatl). In the early
fifteenth century, Azcapotzalco’s longtime king died. In the ensuing
commotion, an underdog faction of the Mexica cleverly allied with a
faction of Tepanec people who seemed otherwise to be about to lose all
power. Together, working with allies from a third city-state called Texcoco
(Tesh-KO-ko), they engineered a great reshuffling of power in the valley.
From that day forward, the Mexica were the most powerful players in the
area, and they continued to work closely with their Tepanec allies (who
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