Myths and Legends of the Aztecs

The book presents a large-scale picture of the mythology of the Aztecs and related Nahua ethnic groups in Central Mexico based on written sources from the mid-16th to the early 21st centuries: anonymous manuscripts containing fragments of ritual calendars tonalpoualli, chronicles, historical records written by descendants of the local nobility and Catholic missionaries from the Franciscan and Dominican orders, as well as materials from field ethnographic research among the descendants of the Aztecs in the mid-20th to the early 21st centuries, including the author’s own work in the Sierra Norte de Puebla in December 2004. Aztec mythology is examined from a cross-cultural perspective. The main mythological motifs—the creation of the world from the body of the primordial being, the emergence of the ancestors from the earth (from a cave), the origin of the Sun and the Moon—are compared with similar motifs in the mythology of the peoples of Europe, East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Central Andes.