A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon

https://pudding.cool/2022/06/aztec-gods/

by sdoering • 4 years ago

289 65 4 years ago

once_inc• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

scaglio• 4 years 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.

AnthonBerg2• 4 years ago

Here’s a wonderful series of comments on Aztec culture and thought, here on HN: 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

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

bradrn• 4 years 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.

AnthonBerg2• 4 years ago

Thank you!!

Namari• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

bane• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

sudenmorsian2• 4 years 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#Noun...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...

zasdffaa6• 4 years 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'.

sudenmorsian2• 4 years 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_...

craigbaker• 4 years ago

It is a common noun-forming suffix in Nahuatl. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tl

bigmattystyles• 4 years ago

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

1shooner• 4 years ago

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

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

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

agomez314• 4 years 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...

delaaxe• 4 years ago

What JS library is used to produce this scrolling effect?

411111111111111• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Perhaps scrollyteller.

timmy-k• 4 years ago

Things I didn't even know I needed.

And a brilliant way to present the info

725686• 4 years ago

The images are amazing an are SVG.

divbzero• 4 years ago

What are the best editors for creating images like this?

youessayyyaway• 4 years ago

Inkscape is a good place to start.

whatshisface3• 4 years ago

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

zasdffaa6• 4 years 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.

tomcam2• 4 years ago

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

armandososa• 4 years 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.

zasdffaa6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

tomcam2• 4 years ago

truly appalling conquistadors

Do you consider killing thousands of people for human sacrifice appalling?

whatshisface3• 4 years ago

The Aztec religion before the plague and the establishment of that awful island empire might have been very different - imagine what would happen of American Christianity if 90% of the population died and a bloodthirsty militant faction took over the remnants. Maybe some of it will turn up over the next century of archeology.

ch4s33• 4 years ago

Probably not so different. There were numerous dialogues and debates between Mexica priests and Jesuits, as many priests survived the collapse of Tenochtitlan so there's good second hand evidence about their beliefs. Nahuas were writing their language using the Spanish alphabet by 1528 and there are accounts written by Mexica that remembered the time prior to the arrival of the Spanish. There's also a lot of archeological evidence that's turned up in the lat decade including in 2020 a skull tower that scholars had previously thought was an invention of Spanish writers.

jollybean2• 4 years ago

Mayans were there from antiquity, so have have quite a bit of archaeological indication.

But it would be exciting to see big new discoveries!

lliamander• 4 years ago

I think this is related to racism.

I don't know the author's cultural background, although I would guess they are from either the U.K. or France (their name is Breton in origin). It is at best straining the definition of racism to claim that it is racist to be more familiar with one's own culture (including it's historical influences) than with a foreign culture.

It is sad to hear that you were belittled for your name (that is racist) but it is not because of racism that Westerners are generally unfamiliar with the gods of the Aztec.

jollybean2• 4 years ago

Greece and Rome are antecedents to Western civilization, you're literally reading Latin text right now.

Egypt is an indirect antecedent, very well established in the West.

As foundational elements of the Western Canon, they're going to be well known.

The names of the planets are the names of 'Gods'.

Aztec culture was 'discovered' in the Western context, very recently, still not particularly well understood, and not particularly well documented.

You'll also note that each of the Aztec gods presented carried knives with human blood, for 'sacrifice' and 'auto-sacrifice' - their chief concern being of providing human blood and sacrifice, which they did, en masse.

It would be rational to argue that the Aztec religion was thus a 'Death Cult' at least by some purview, which would be viewed as 'more than very scary' by any classical standards, and 'tolerable' only from the most modern perspective wherein we can disassociate ourselves with the act of 'constant sacrifice' from a moral purview and just investigate the culture itself without judgment. And even then, it's hard to ignore; it's deeply unsettling.

JoeDaDude• 4 years 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-...

oersted• 4 years 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?

AlotOfReading2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

christkv• 4 years 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

AlotOfReading2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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)?

ivanhoe2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

ivanhoe2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the clarification, I totally misunderstood the idea obviously... it was a long day I guess...

Seich• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

dylan6042• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon

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