Mesoamerican Pantheons

Mesoamerican religion is the group of indigenous polytheistic traditions practiced by the civilizations of pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America, most widely represented by the Aztec and Maya pantheons grouped here. These traditions shared a common Mesoamerican cultural sphere built on intensive maize agriculture, a ritual calendar combining a 260-day and a 365-day cycle, monumental step-pyramid temple architecture, and a cosmology of layered heavens and underworlds bound together by recurring cycles of cosmic destruction and renewal. The Aztec pantheon, centered on deities such as Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, and the Maya pantheon, centered on close counterparts such as Chaac and Kukulkan, developed independently across different city-states and centuries yet drew on the same deeper Mesoamerican religious substrate of maize gods, rain gods and feathered-serpent creator figures that spread through the region by trade and conquest. Grouping these two pantheons together follows the region and culture-area classification long used in comparative religion and archaeology, not an invented convenience label.