At the top of the Mexica arrangement is a duality rather than a king. Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, the lord and lady of the place of duality, stand at the origin of everything and receive almost no cult, and from them descend the four Tezcatlipocas who divide the world between the directions and colours. Sovereignty here is paired at the source and quartered immediately below it.
Time is organised as a series of destroyed worlds. Four suns preceded the present one, each presided over by a different god and each ended by a different catastrophe, and the fifth is understood to be provisional. Power in this pantheon is therefore not inherited but recurrently lost. The gods themselves are shown sacrificing at Teotihuacan to set the current sun moving, which establishes the reciprocal obligation that runs through the whole system.
The roster grew by conquest. Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica tribal god, was elevated to the summit of the state cult as the Mexica rose, and captured deities of subject peoples were housed in the sacred precinct rather than suppressed. Absorption was the policy.
Mortals could cross the line, though rarely and by extremity. Nanahuatzin, the humblest of the gods' company, throws himself into the fire and becomes the sun. Warriors who died in battle and women who died in childbirth accompanied the sun on its daily passage, which is a distinguished afterlife rather than divinity, and the two should not be confused.