Aztec

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.

Almost everything known about Mexica religion was recorded after the conquest, in the course of dismantling it, and the greatest source is also a colonial project.

Bernardino de Sahagun spent decades in Mexico working with Nahua elders and with trilingual students trained at Tlatelolco, compiling what became the Florentine Codex: twelve books in Nahuatl and Spanish, covering the gods, the calendar, the ceremonies, rhetoric, natural history and the conquest itself. It is a document of extraordinary value and it exists because the Church wanted an inventory of what it was extirpating. The Nahuatl column and the Spanish column do not always say the same thing.

A small number of pre-conquest screenfold manuscripts survive, the Codex Borgia group foremost among them. They are ritual and divinatory rather than narrative, painted in a pictorial system rather than written in a script that records speech, and reading them depends on interpretive frameworks built up over a century of scholarship.

Archaeology has since supplied a check the texts cannot provide. Excavation at the Templo Mayor from the late twentieth century onward has recovered offerings in sealed context, and these confirm some textual claims, complicate others, and show a religious practice with a material logic of its own.

What is hardest to recover is proportion. The sources dwell on state ceremony in the capital, because that is what impressed and horrified their compilers, and the ordinary household religion of the wider Nahua world is comparatively faint.