Social Form

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Aztec Religion Hymns gathers three of the atlas's twenty sacred Nahuatl hymns that the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun recorded from Nahua informants in the sixteenth century, preserved as an appendix to Book II of the Florentine Codex, and counted among the hardest Nahuatl texts to read, their language archaic and allusive enough that even Sahagun's own annotators found parts obscure.

The Hymn to Huitzilopochtli is the first of the twenty and the principal surviving record of Aztec liturgical song. The Hymn of Tlaloc is the third, addressed to the rain and storm deity whose favor was invoked for the maize harvest. The Hymn of Xipe Totec, also known by its internal epithet Yoallauana, the nightly drinker, addresses the patron deity of goldsmiths and silversmiths whose spring festival Tlacaxipehualiztli was marked by the flaying of sacrificial victims and the wearing of their skins by priests, a rite read as an agricultural metaphor for the earth shedding its old skin at planting time.

All three come to the atlas through a Franciscan missionary compiling material about the religion he was working to end, a constraint on the evidence the atlas records rather than a reason to discard it.