A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon | Hacker News Reader

A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon

pudding.cool

289 pointssdoering66 comments

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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

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.

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

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...

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'.

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_...

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

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

>but it comes off as hideously insensitive to other cultures.

more ignorant than insensitive. it's not that they aren't showing concern because they don't like and feel it is inferior, it is just unknown in totatlity to them. is being unaware of something's existence being insensitive to it, or have others become hypersensitive?

Right. I'm a brit - now that should make it clearer - I'm not on that continent. If you were, yes, I can see your point, there should by my argument be more exposure therefore uderstanding.

And there was no education about aztecs, I just read a lot, ditto for the norse and greek gosds. Might have got a tiny bit about the romans but any of their legends were picked up very much outside of school. We weren't educated in any of that, just immersed, shall we say.

> truly appalling conquistadors

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

Aztecs weren't charming in this regard and by that probably sowed the seeds of their own defeat by pushing other tribes to support the invading spaniards, but the conquistadors went in for full on genocide, totally deliberately.

Nonsense. The conquistadors were indeed appalling in many ways, but no they did not go for full on genocide. The diseases that came with them killed off possibly 90% of the New World population regardless of what they did or didn't do. They were slavers for a time and even that was fought against quite vigorously by a surprising number of other Europeans (read for example about Bartolomé de las Casas). Much of the modern narrative mixes up an essentially unstoppable and non-deliberate mass die-off from European diseases with genocide. The two things were not the same even if the conquistadors also did often butcher native populations in specific contexts. As for the Aztecs, they truly were barbarous to their subjects. Their culture, for all its sophistication and many fascinating aspects, was based on an enormous amount of ritual and practical violence across many areas. There's no white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature about their empire. Even the Spanish didn't practice the ritual slaughter of over 20,000 people in just a few days simply for the sake of a religious festival. The Aztecs did indeed do this at times.

Well, read this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...>. It's not very long. Genocide is discussed, depending on defintions of it. Some say genocide, some say it wasn't.

I've heard the claim of 100,000 killed in 3 das by the aztecs which has been put down to exaggeration by the invaders to justify their brutality towards aztecs, do you have a reliable link to the 20,000 figure?

> white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature

I have, and any whitewashing is your assumption of me, not my view (I mean, literally read my comment that you replied to). They were bloodthirsty (flower wars etc), but the spanish catholics were far worse in my view.

The conquistadors were not set on carrying out genocide, and did not carry out genocide. They were just vastly more advanced than the nations they encountered and consequently were able to conquer many of them.

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.

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.

That's not the apocalypse I meant, I was talking about the one that Produced Tenochtitlan. The deaths from smallpox and the vanishing of the cities they're now finding evidence of happened before the Spanish conquests.

The first know case of smallpox in Mexico was in 1520. It's REALLY unlikely that small pox reached anywhere near Tenochtitlan before Cortés, after all he arrived there in 1521, a mere 29 years after Columbus' initial landing. Cortés was part of the first wave of explorers in Mexico. Tenochtitlan was founded in the 1320, a full 500 years after the collapse of the Mayan city states. Teotihuacan which was near Tenochtitlan also collapsed during that period. When the Mexica arrived at lake Texcoco, there were already several thriving city states, that didn't collapse and two of them became part of the Triple Alliance with the Mexica.

I've never seen evidence of smallpox preceding the Spanish in Mexico, as it did above the RIo Grande.

This period is well recorded. Cortes made it to Tenochtitlan the first time before small pox. Cortes and company were driven from the city and nearly killed. The Spaniards regrouped and were reinforced while small pox devastated the Aztec population - including Tenochtitlan.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m pointing to.

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

But it would be exciting to see big new discoveries!

> 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.

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.

Amazing work! I'd just like the final table to be interactive as soon as it becomes visible, but it's a great site.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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).

I’ll post this great documentary about the rise and fall of the Aztec empire. This is the first part https://youtu.be/f8JVdpWCKeM

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.

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)?

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?

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.

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

What JS library is used to produce this scrolling effect?

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

Perhaps scrollyteller.

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.

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

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.

Thank you!!

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

Things I didn't even know I needed.

And a brilliant way to present the info

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.

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.

The images are amazing an are SVG.

What are the best editors for creating images like this?

Inkscape is a good place to start.

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?

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.

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

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.

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