Reading Pre-Conquest Religion Through a Post-Conquest Lens

Scholars of Mesoamerican religion generally treat the material Sahagun's project preserved as genuinely valuable evidence of pre-conquest Aztec religious language and practice, since his informants were themselves members of the pre-conquest generation recalling practice from direct memory or close inherited knowledge, while still exercising appropriate caution about how the material's recording context, decades after conquest, in a colonial mission setting, using an alphabet and documentary format entirely foreign to pre-conquest Aztec religious transmission, may have shaped what was recorded and how.

Beyond the Florentine Codex material, considerably less Aztec religious text survives through other channels, since pre-conquest Aztec writing used a partially pictographic and logographic system not well suited to recording extended verbal text in the way alphabetic writing is, meaning most surviving pre-conquest Aztec codices concern calendrical, historical and divinatory content rather than extended prayer texts comparable to what Sahagun's later alphabetic transcription preserved. This entry records the corpus as a whole and the specific colonial transmission history that shapes how directly any of its constituent texts, including those catalogued separately elsewhere in this atlas, can be read as unmediated pre-conquest religious evidence.