COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
At night, by a river or a canal, a woman is heard wailing for her children, and whoever meets her may not live. The oldest texts we found that call her La Llorona are Mexican poems of the 19th century, yet in the Florentine Codex, finished in 1577, Nahua elders already remember a woman heard weeping in the night before the Spaniards came.
Read story 13 min readHuitzilopochtli's mother waits on a hill of sand for a son who never came back, and a Mexica king sent sixty sorcerers to find her. Her great statue was dug up in 1790, buried again more than once, and still divides scholars over whom it shows.
Read story 10 min readLed by their god, the Mexica walked for generations from Aztlan until they saw an eagle on a cactus growing from a rock in a lake, and there they built Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City. The serpent in the eagle's beak on Mexico's flag is missing from the oldest pictures of the scene.
Read story 12 min readMost of the Mexica dead set out on a four-year road, past clashing mountains and a wind of obsidian blades, across a river on the back of a yellow dog, to the lord of Mictlan. Sahagún says the road ended in "the nine hells", but the famous list of nine levels comes from a single colonial codex.
Read story 11 min readA ball of feathers fell on Coatlicue as she swept a hilltop, and her daughter Coyolxauhqui led four hundred brothers up the hill to kill her. The god was born armed and cut his sister down, and the Mexica built their great temple as the hill where it happened.
Read story 10 min readHe went down to the land of the dead for the bones of the first people, and he was the wind, the morning star and a king of Tollan who left his city in shame. The feathered serpent is far older than the Mexica, and the story that they took Cortés for him is younger than the conquest.
Read story 12 min readThe Mexica called him Titlacauan, "we are his slaves": an invisible god of night and fate who gave riches and took them back, and whose living image, a young captive, was honoured for a year and then sacrificed. He was neither the devil the friars made of him nor simply the evil twin of Quetzalcoatl, with whom he tore the earth goddess in two to make the world.
Read story 14 min readFour worlds came before ours, and each was destroyed: by jaguars, by wind, by a rain of fire and by a flood, though the old texts disagree on the order. Then at Teotihuacan a god covered in sores leapt into a fire to become the Fifth Sun, the sun that, the elders said, will end in earthquakes.
Read story 11 min read
