Aztec Creation Myth

Author: Traditional Aztec

Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE

Country or Culture: Mesoamerica

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

Before the current version of the universe was created, the universe was created and destroyed on four separate occasions by disasters that included fires, winds, and floods. According to Aztec culture, this fifth universe will eventually be destroyed as well, in keeping with the natural cosmic balance of creation and obliteration.

The current universe begins with the sky father, Citlalatonac, and the earth mother, Citlalicue. Citlalicue gives birth to a flint knife, which falls to the ground and splinters into sixteen hundred earth gods. The earth gods are unhappy because they have to forage for their own food and petition the earth mother to create a race of individuals to serve them. Citlalicue tells the earth gods how to accomplish this task.

The earth god Xolotl (or, in other versions, the feathered serpent Quetzalcóatl) travels to the realm of the dead, Mictlampa (or Mictlan), and meets Mictlantecuhtli, the skull-headed lord of the underworld. Mictlantecuhtli tells Xolotl that a new race of giants could be created by mixing a bone from the ancient giants that once roamed the earth with a drop of blood from each of the earth gods. Xolotl knows that although Mictlantecuhtli purports to be helping the earth gods, he secretly plans to trap Xolotl in the underworld. Xolotl steals the bone fragment and attempts to flee but is injured by Mictlantecuhtli’s owl guardians in the process, dropping the bone, which breaks into thousands of shards.

Once he escapes, Xolotl and the other earth gods follow Mictlantecuhtli’s instructions and mix their blood with the fragments of bone. After four days, the mixture bubbles and produces a male infant. Four days later, the brew bubbles again and produces a female infant. The earth gods nurture the children, who eventually marry and give rise to the race of humans that now occupy the earth. Because Xolotl dropped the giant bone he stole from Mictlampa, the resulting fragments are of irregular sizes and shapes, thus giving rise to humans who are also of irregular sizes.

The world inhabited by the original humans does not have a sun, moon, or stars. It is determined that two of the earth gods must sacrifice themselves to be resurrected as luminaries. After a ceremony involving a traditional human sacrifice, two of the gods throw themselves into ceremonial fires and are destroyed, returning four days later in the form of the sun and the moon. At first, the sun and moon are of equal brightness, but one of the earth gods hurls a rabbit toward the moon, which dims the light from the moon and creates a pattern of shadows on its face. The sun and moon determine then that the rest of the earth gods must be sacrificed, and they conjure a great wind that destroys the remaining gods and transforms them into the stars. This same wind pushes the sun, causing it to move across the sky each day.

SIGNIFICANCE

The Aztecs envisioned the world as the result of ancient and ongoing struggles between powerful deities that represent the primal forces of nature and the universe. The role of humanity was ultimately to appease the gods, and thus to appease the primal forces that dominated their lives, including climatic patterns and the patterns of famine and bounty that affected their agricultural and hunting success.

The myth of the creation of men and women explains the diversity observed in humanity as an artifact of humanity’s magical origins, with each person having originated from a fragment of bone. As was clearly observable to the Aztecs, who often fashioned items using bone, a shattered fragment would tend to produce pieces with unique characteristics in terms of size and shape. This is the phenomenon that was chosen to symbolize the differences between individuals. The myth also establishes humans as descendants of the earth gods, having been created through a combination of the blood of earth gods and the bone of an ancient earth race. In this way, the myth establishes a primary order of being and emphasizes that humans are the children of the earth gods and are therefore bound to the earth. This facet of Aztec mythology reflects an ancient ecological impulse within Aztec spirituality.

The origin of the sun, moon, and stars represents the belief that the sun and moon exist primarily to provide light to those living on the earth. This type of belief is common in cultures that consider the earth to be the central point in the celestial environment. The myth also explains the observed luminosity of the sun and the moon by relating the creation of these bodies to the ceremonial fires used to sacrifice the earth gods. To the Aztecs, whose only other source of light was fire, the light of the sun and moon were naturally seen as bearing a relationship to this primary element.

Interestingly, the Aztecs attributed the relative brightness of the moon and the patterns of shadows observed on its surface to the presence of a rabbit flung onto the surface of the moon. The Aztecs were not the only culture to envision the shape of a rabbit on the surface of the moon, and similar myths have been discovered in ancient East Asian and African folklore. While some cultures saw the shape of a rabbit on the moon, many other cultures envisioned the shape of a face among the craters, giving rise to the preponderance of myths about a man in the moon in various cultures. In many ancient cultures, it was common to explain complex visual features by relating them to more familiar shapes. A similar process motivated the invention of constellations from patterns of stars in the night sky.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Carrasco, David, and Scott Sessions. Daily Life of the Aztecs. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Print.

Clendennin, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Colum, Pádraic. “The Gods of the Azteca.” Orpheus: Myths of the World. New York: Macmillan, 1930. 302–5. Print.

Dils, Lorna. “Aztec Mythology.” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale U, 2013. Web. 29 May 2013.

León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind. Trans. Jack Emory Davis. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. Print.