The Aztec god family tree in two colonial sources

The two texts that this Aztec god family tree follows were both made after the Spanish conquest, by or for Spanish churchmen, from what Nahua painters, lords and elders told them. Neither is a sacred book of the Aztecs themselves.

The first source is the History of the Mexicans as Told by Their Paintings. Its translator, Henry Phillips, explains that it “was prepared shortly after the Conquest” by the orders of Ramírez de Fuenleal, Bishop of Cuenca and President of the Chancelleria.⁴ Its author says he worked from the narrations of the lords and from books “anointed with human blood,” and adds that each community called the gods by different names.¹

The second source is the Florentine Codex, the work of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent thirty years recording Aztec life “in Spanish as well as Nahuatl” with his students and native elders. It is kept in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.⁶ Book 3 tells the birth of Huitzilopochtli, and its translators note several places where the Nahuatl can be read more than one way.⁵

The History begins with “one god named Tonacatecli, who took for wife Tonacaçiguatl.” The pair “created themselves, and were perpetual inhabitants of the thirteenth heaven.”¹ This Aztec god family tree spells them in the modern way, Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl.

Four sons were born to them. The eldest, the red Tezcatlipoca, was “born of a ruddy color all over,” and the people of Huexotzinco and Tlaxcala worshipped him as Camaxtle. The second, Tezcatlipoca, was “the greatest and the worst,” and “totally black at birth.” The third was Quetzalcoatl.¹

The fourth and smallest was called Omitecuhtli and Maquizcoatl, “whom the Mexicans termed” Huitzilopochtli, and whom they took as their chief god and god of war. He “was born without flesh, but only bones,” and so lived for six hundred years, while the gods did nothing.¹ The four sons then made the fire, a half sun, the first man and woman and the days of the calendar.²

The Florentine Codex tells another birth. At Coatepec there lived a woman named Coatlicue, “mother of the Centzon Huitznahua,” whose elder sister was Coyolxauhqui.⁵ While she swept, a ball of feathers fell, and “Coatlicue snatched it up and placed it in her bosom.” Then “Coatlicue conceived.”⁵

Her children took the pregnancy as a disgrace. Coyolxauhqui told the Centzon Huitznahua, the four hundred brothers, “we must slay our mother, the wicked one who is already with child.”⁵ As they came, Huitzilopochtli was born, and the translators note that he “appears to have been born filthy but fully armed,” with his shield, darts and dart thrower.⁵

He “pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then he quickly struck off her head,” and her body “went crashing in pieces” below the hill. Then “Huitzilopochtli then arose and pursued the Centzon Huitznahua.”⁵ Jordan notes that scholars disagree whether she was cut apart or broke in the fall, and whether the places of the story are the hills around or parts of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan.⁵

Not every god in the History has parents. “To create the god and goddess of water, all the four divinities joined themselves together, and made Tlalocatecli, and his wife Chalchiutlique.”² On this Aztec god family tree Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue therefore hang from the four sons by thin lines of Created by, not by lines of birth.

The same chapter has the four sons make the lords of the underworld, Mictlantecuhtli and his wife, and a first man and woman, Oxomoco and Cipactonal.² Their son Piltzintecuhtli was given a wife made from the hair of Xochiquetzal.³ They are left off the chart, which keeps to the gods with a family line.