Aztec Religion

The people we call the Aztecs called themselves the Mexica. According to their own traditions, they left a homeland named Aztlan, somewhere to the north, and wandered for generations under the guidance of their god Huitzilopochtli. He promised them a home where they would see an eagle perched on a cactus growing from a rock. They found the sign, tradition says, on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco, and there in about 1325 they founded Tenochtitlan. The eagle on the cactus still appears on the flag of Mexico.

The Mexica did not invent their religion from nothing. They arrived late in a valley full of older cities and inherited ideas shared across Mesoamerica for more than two thousand years: a 260-day ritual calendar, the ballgame, pyramid temples, the feathered serpent and the offering of blood. They revered the ruins of Teotihuacan, abandoned centuries before, as the place where the present sun had been born, and they looked back to the Toltecs of Tula as models of wisdom and kingship.

After 1428, when Tenochtitlan joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in the Triple Alliance, the Mexica became the dominant power of central Mexico. Their religion grew with their empire. Later chronicles credit the royal adviser Tlacaelel with raising Huitzilopochtli to the head of the state cult, though historians treat these accounts with caution. Conquered peoples paid tribute, and their gods were sometimes brought to the capital and housed in its sacred precinct.

Aztec thought pictured the world as fragile. Myths told of four earlier ages, or Suns, each destroyed in turn by jaguars, wind, fiery rain and flood. The present age, the Fifth Sun, began at Teotihuacan when the gods gathered in darkness and one of them, Nanahuatzin, leapt into a fire to become the sun. In some tellings the other gods then gave their own lives so that the sun would move. This age too, the Mexica believed, would one day end in earthquakes.

From these stories came a central idea: humans owed a debt to the gods, who had sacrificed themselves to create and sustain the world. Offerings of food, flowers, incense, song and blood repaid that debt and kept the cosmos in motion. Huitzilopochtli, the sun and war god, and Tlaloc, the rain god, shared the summit of the great temple, a pairing that joined the two needs of an agricultural and warrior society: victory and rain.

Many other gods filled the Aztec world. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was linked with wind, learning and the priesthood; Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, with night, fate and the power of kings. Deities of maize, water, earth and fire each had their festivals. The dead travelled to different places according to how they died: warriors and women who died in childbirth joined the sun, those taken by water went to Tlaloc’s paradise, and most made a four-year journey to Mictlan, the realm of the dead.

At the heart of Tenochtitlan stood a walled sacred precinct with dozens of temples, schools and ball courts, dominated by the Templo Mayor. Its twin stairways led to the shrines of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. The building was enlarged at least seven times, each new layer encasing the last, and its base represented Coatepec, the mountain where Huitzilopochtli was born.

Time was sacred. The tonalpohualli, a ritual cycle of 260 days formed by thirteen numbers and twenty day signs, guided divination, naming and the choice of lucky days. The xiuhpohualli, the 365-day solar year, was divided into eighteen months of twenty days, each with its festival, plus five unlucky days. The two cycles meshed every 52 years, a moment of danger. Then every fire was put out, and priests kindled a new fire on the Hill of the Star; when it caught, runners carried it to every hearth. The last such ceremony took place in 1507.

A large priesthood served the temples. Priests fasted, kept vigils, burned copal incense at set hours of the day and night, and offered their own blood, drawn with maguey thorns, as did many laypeople. Noble boys were educated in the calmecac, temple schools where priests taught the calendar, the songs of the gods, history and the reading of painted books, while commoners’ sons trained mainly for war in the ‘houses of youth’. Women served too, as priestesses and in temple households, and midwives held a respected religious role. Festivals filled the city with music, dance and processions, and many involved the whole population, not only the priests: households made offerings at home altars, families feasted, and dancers performed for days in the great plazas.

Human sacrifice was part of the major festivals. Most victims were war captives, though some festivals involved slaves or children, especially in rites for Tlaloc. In Aztec understanding these deaths fed the sun and the earth and repaid the gods’ own sacrifice. Spanish and some colonial Indigenous chronicles give very large figures, such as 80,400 victims at the rededication of the Templo Mayor in 1487, which most historians regard as exaggerated. Archaeology, including the skull rack excavated since 2015, confirms that sacrifice took place on a large scale, but no reliable total can be reconstructed. Scholars also note that the conquerors had reasons to emphasise sacrifice in order to justify conquest.

In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast with a few hundred Spaniards. Joined by tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, especially from Tlaxcala, and helped by a smallpox epidemic, his forces besieged Tenochtitlan, which fell on 13 August 1521. The Templo Mayor was demolished, and the cathedral of Mexico City was later built close to its site. Priests were killed or dispersed, painted books were burned, and friars launched a campaign of conversion.

Yet much survived. Friars such as Bernardino de Sahagún worked with Nahua scholars to record the old religion in detail, partly so that missionaries could recognise and suppress it; their work, above all the Florentine Codex, is now the main written source. In 1790 workers in the main square of Mexico City unearthed the great Coatlicue statue and the Sun Stone, and in 1978 electricity workers struck the Coyolxauhqui stone, leading to the excavation of the Templo Mayor itself.

Nahuatl is still spoken by more than a million and a half people, and English owes it words such as chocolate, tomato, avocado and chilli. The name Mexico comes from the Mexica. In popular Catholicism, scholars see older patterns living on in pilgrimages, offerings and the Day of the Dead, though how much of each custom is pre-Hispanic is debated. Some modern Mexicans also take part in revived dances and ceremonies inspired by Mexica tradition, often called Mexicayotl.