Recorded by the Friar Whose Project Nearly Preserved It All

Bernardino de Sahagun, the Franciscan friar responsible for compiling the Florentine Codex, worked with Nahua informants and Nahua-trained scribes using a methodology scholars regard as remarkably systematic for its sixteenth-century context, cross-checking accounts and organizing material topically across the codex's twelve books, though his underlying missionary purpose, better understanding Aztec religion partly in order to more effectively work against it, means even this valuable and relatively careful source passed through significant colonial-era mediation before reaching its surviving written form.

The prayer's communal voice, speaking on behalf of the entire afflicted population rather than a single individual petitioner, situates it within public ritual response to crisis rather than private devotion, a pattern also visible in other ancient communal crisis prayers catalogued in this atlas, including the Hittite Plague Prayers of Mursili II, though the two traditions developed entirely independently on opposite sides of the ancient world. Whether the specific wording of this prayer as recorded by Sahagun's project precisely reflects pre-conquest liturgical practice or was shaped by the recording context remains, as with most Florentine Codex material, a matter requiring appropriate scholarly caution rather than unqualified confidence.