Aztec Mythology

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**Aztec Mythology** (アステカ神話, *Asuteka Shinwa*?) is the mythology of the Aztec civilization, which dominated Central Mexico before the Spanish colonization in the early 16th century.

In *Toaru Majutsu no Index*, Aztec mythology is used as a base for Magic, mostly by Magicians originating from Central America.

## Principles

Aztec mythology is a polytheistic system, with a pantheon of various deities. It also describes the earlier Toltecs as the origin of their culture and their intellectual predecessors.

Among a number of creation myths is that of the Five Suns, which concerns a cycle of creation and destruction with four worlds having preceded the current world, each having ended due to a catastrophe and being named after an element of their end. At the start of the current, fifth age, the gods gathered to choose who would sacrifice themselves to become the new sun. Proud Tecuciztecatl was meant to sacrifice himself, though when the time came he couldn't walk into the fire. Nanahuatl, the smallest and humblest of the gods, jumped into the flames instead, sacrificing himself to set the sun in motion. Shamed, Tecuciztecatl followed him into the fire and became the moon.

Human sacrifices play a key role in Aztec culture, as offerings to the gods, who sacrificed themselves to give the world life, and to ensure the survival of the sun and the world.

## Background

Mexico's central highlands had been the dominant cultural region of central Mesoamerica since the beginning of the common era, when the great imperial capital of Teotihuacán had been established thirty miles north of where the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (today Mexico City) would later rise. The mythologies of successive cultures—the Toltecs and the Aztecs most prominent among them—looked back to Teotihuacán as their symbolic place of origin and as the source for the legitimacy of their political authority.

As such, the Aztec derived much of their religious ideology from the earlier cultures of Mesoamerica or from their contemporaries, with the Aztec religious tradition combining and transforming a number of ritual, mythic, and cosmic elements from the heterogeneous cultural groups who inhabited the central plateau of Mesoamerica between the 14th and 16th century CE. Moreover, as the Aztec empire expanded and the Aztecs evolved into a heterogeneous community, the religious needs correspondingly changed from those of a simple agrarian society. The ruling class, particularly, demanded a more intellectual and philosophical ideology.

## Chronology

During the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire of the early 16th century, the Aztecs created the Magic God Tezcatlipoca in order to fight against the conquistador Hernán Cortés, originally mistaken for the original Quetzalcoatl. What happened isn't known, but the plan was presumably a failure and the Aztec empire fell to the Spanish, with Tezcatlipoca joining the true Gremlin.

## Uses of Aztec Mythology within the story

 **Mixcoatl** | The god of the hunt, war and the Milky Way.
 **Ocelot** | Jaguars (and jaguar warriors who style themselves after them), associated with Tezcatlipoca who commanded them to eat the first humanity following to loss of the first sun.
 **Tezcatlipoca** | A major deity associated with, among other things, obsidian, the night, jaguars, sorcery and strife. After cooperating with Quetzalcoatl to create the world, he served as the First Sun, but after being knocked from the sky, he destroyed the world in anger, and caused the ends of the three suns and worlds which followed before the current one.
 **Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli** | The god of the morning star, the planet Venus.
 **Xiuhcoatl** | A fire deity in the form of a serpent.