Nahua

Nahua religion held that the present world is the fifth, that the four before it ended, and that this one moves only because the gods gave themselves at Teotihuacan to set the sun going. Human offering is repayment on that debt, and the Mexica state organised it at a scale the Spanish found both appalling and useful to report.

The pantheon is layered. A dual creative principle, often named Ometeotl, stands behind everything and receives no cult. Below it Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, is the arbitrary power of fate; Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent is associated with wind, with priesthood and with the recovery of the bones of an earlier humanity; Huitzilopochtli is the Mexica tribal god who led them to Tenochtitlan; and Tlaloc, far older than any of them, holds rain and the mountains. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma's excavation of the Templo Mayor found Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc sharing one pyramid with two shrines, which is the clearest statement of what the Mexica understood themselves to be doing.

Elizabeth Boone's work on the divinatory books shows how time was read. The 260 day count assigned each day a number, a sign and a patron, and the specialist consulted it for naming, for marriage, for travel and for war.

The Mexica reached the valley of Mexico late, served others as mercenaries, and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in the lake in the fourteenth century. Within a hundred years the alliance they led dominated central Mexico and drew tribute from hundreds of towns, and their capital was among the largest cities in the world when Cortes reached it in 1519. It fell in 1521 after a siege, an epidemic, and the defection of subject peoples who had reason to prefer almost any other arrangement.

What followed was not a simple replacement. The Franciscans who arrived in 1524 learned Nahuatl and produced grammars and dictionaries, and in Bernardino de Sahagun's workshop an enormous encyclopedia of Nahua life was compiled with Nahua assistants. Nahuatl became a written language of the colony, used in wills, land suits and municipal records.

The apparition of the Virgin at Tepeyac, where a shrine had stood before, produced the most important devotion in the Americas. Stafford Poole's study traces the documentary history of the Guadalupe account and finds the earliest sources considerably later and thinner than the devotion assumes, a conclusion disputed within the church. Around two million people speak Nahuatl today, and their communities maintain observances that are neither the old religion intact nor only Catholic.