Aztec Religion Historical Prayer Corpus

The great majority of surviving Aztec religious prayer, including the twenty sacred hymns catalogued individually elsewhere in this atlas and material such as the Prayer to Tezcatlipoca in Time of Plague, comes from the Florentine Codex and the related Primeros Memoriales, an enormous encyclopedic project compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun working with Nahua informants and Nahua-trained scribes in the decades following the Spanish conquest, using a methodology remarkably systematic for its time, interviewing indigenous elders and cross-checking their accounts, but still fundamentally shaped by its colonial context and its author's ultimately missionary purpose of understanding Aztec religion partly in order to more effectively work against it. This means that even the most extensive and valuable surviving source for Aztec religious language passed through translation, transcription by scribes trained in a colonial mission school, and the specific interests and limitations of a single Spanish friar's project, a mediated transmission comparable in kind, though not in specific detail, to the Christian-mediated transmission of Norse pagan material discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Scholars of Mesoamerican religion generally treat the material Sahagun's project preserved as genuinely valuable evidence of pre-conquest Aztec religious language and practice, since his informants were themselves members of the pre-conquest generation recalling practice from direct memory or close inherited knowledge, while still exercising appropriate caution about how the material's recording context, decades after conquest, in a colonial mission setting, using an alphabet and documentary format entirely foreign to pre-conquest Aztec religious transmission, may have shaped what was recorded and how.

Beyond the Florentine Codex material, considerably less Aztec religious text survives through other channels, since pre-conquest Aztec writing used a partially pictographic and logographic system not well suited to recording extended verbal text in the way alphabetic writing is, meaning most surviving pre-conquest Aztec codices concern calendrical, historical and divinatory content rather than extended prayer texts comparable to what Sahagun's later alphabetic transcription preserved. This entry records the corpus as a whole and the specific colonial transmission history that shapes how directly any of its constituent texts, including those catalogued separately elsewhere in this atlas, can be read as unmediated pre-conquest religious evidence.