Sacred Bundles, Divine Migration

Question: Why were the Mexica so keen on looting the gods of other people? And in the Scion-verse, how were they integrated into the Aztlanti?

Ooh, Mesoamerican politics! Everyone strap in!

While we love to talk about the mighty and gigantic Aztec empire, and it was indeed enormously powerful and widespread in its time, the empire of the Mexica was the youngest Mesoamerican power by far (and also one of the youngest cultures in the entire world of Scion). The Mexica began their rise to power in Tenochtitlan in the early fourteenth century - around the same time that, across the Atlantic, the Ottoman Empire was being born, the bubonic plague was decimating Europe, and England and France were gearing up for the Hundred Years' War. In historical terms, they were something of a brand-new empire, and they were very aware of the fact.

So, like many other empires throughout history, they compensated by plundering the cultures that came before them. Mesoamerican had a rich tradition of city-states, empires and related cultures trading and warring with one another, and the Mexica, once looked down upon for being penniless nomads and mercenaries for hire, took full advantage of those who had come before them. For context, here's a very simplified graph of the time periods of various Mesoamerican civilizations (click to enlarge):

See how the Aztecs are that skinny little bar near the end, while the Maya and Zapotecs are stretching on for millennia and change more? The Aztecs had basically gotten everything they had through hardship and adversity, so they went for broke when it came to conquering the cities of those other cultures that were left and taking whatever they had to offer. They were the power in the Valley of Mexico now, so rather than continue to be the somewhat rootless Nahua people who had been looked down upon, they legitimized themselves by conquering and absorbing the territories and trappings of the peoples who had preceded them. They were especially fond of the Toltecs, whom they considered the sort of royally excellent ancestral race that they had inherited the land from (in fact, they created such elaborate cultural myths around the Toltecs that scholars today have trouble disentangling what the Toltecs actually were from what things the Aztecs were just fond of saying about them), but Mixtec, Zapotec and Huastec were also prime targets for cultural pillaging. They were in essence wandering mercenaries who had to suddenly build a giant urban culture from scratch, so they borrowed whatever they liked from those who had already done so.

The Mexica actually make a very striking contrast to the earlier empires of peoples like the Maya; where the Maya considered themselves legitimate rulers because of their unbroken divine bloodlines and royal precedent, the Mexica came up from nothing and therefore considered themselves legitimate rulers because they had the strength to take and hold their territories and bully other cities into alliances. When your whole model of running a kingdom is based on being the best at warfare, conquest and might, stealing other peoples' culture isn't just part of the pillaging process; it's the literal proof that your way of doing things works and you have a right to be here.

I also want to mention here a very important concept in Mesoamerican religions that plays a large role here: the idea of the sacred bundle. Sacred bundles, called tlaquimilolli by the Mexica, were small bundles of magical or religiously significant items, usually related to a god; sometimes they contained an actual cult statue of a god, while other times merely relics purported to be associated with them or items known to be linked to them. Sacred bundles happen all across different Mesoamerican cultures, and they act as very literal, tangible examples of the gods with humanity. People who carry a sacred bundle dedicated to a god are very physically carrying that god with them; they knew that to bring the sacred bundle was to bring the god, and there are several stories in Aztec myth that involve the bundle, including the images of Huitzilopochtli's bundle being carried by the Mexica as they went to found Tenochtitlan or Itzpapalotl's bundle being taken as a trophy by her son Mixcoatl.

And since carrying the bundle is, at least symbolically, also carrying the god with you, stealing the bundle from someone else is sort of stealing their god and making it your own. The Mexica carried Huitzilopochtli with them so that he would protect, provide for and guide them; when they became a power in their own right, they took the gods of other cities in order that their pantheon would be that much fuller and their religious backing from the gods that much stronger. It can be confusing when Aztec myths talk about the Mexica busting into someone's temple and "stealing their god" or "stealing their statue" - it doesn't really make any sense to us that someone could steal a god, nor does it seem like stealing a statue or representation of a god would really do anything helpful (other than annoying everyone). But what they're really doing is using that idea of the sacred bundle and its connection to the divine; the Mexica took the gods of others to unite other tribes under their rule and legitimize themselves by having a whole pantheon backing them up.

(Incidentally, if you want to read an awesome scholarly essay on Aztec sacred bundles by Guilhelm Olivier, complete with images of bundles from the codices, Harvard's got your back. The essay also appears in the book Cave, City and Eagle's Nest collected by David Carrasco, along with other scholarly awesomeness.)

So now, with all of that in mind: how does this all shake out in Scion? As a young culture that came from older kingdoms but made its own way, the Mexica have gods who once belonged to other cultures but have become something new when interpreted under the Aztec lens. Some gods (most obviously Quetzalcoatl) were already part of previous pantheons, but were far too important to the Aztecs to be excluded from the Aztlanti roster; others are purely Mexica (most obviously Huitzilopochtli), yet have to get along with these other older gods as if they had been there all along. It's definitely a conundrum for writers and Storytellers to work with in Scion; the game's framework is built around single-continuum, easily-established pantheons like the Norse and Greek ones, and just isn't well-equipped to deal with this kind of layered craziness.

A lot of how that works really needs to be a call for each individual Storyteller to make; how much Mesoamerican myth from different cultures you plan to use, how familiar your players are with it and whether or not it's going to be interesting for your plot are all considerations that have to be taken into account. You might decide that people like Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc have been dabbling about in other cultures' pantheons, but were part of the Aztlanti all along. Conversely, you could decide that they are gods of previous, now-defunct pantheons who became part of the new Aztec pantheon when their old haunts expired, or that those older pantheons are still there but these gods jumped ship to the new up-and-comers. Some Storytellers decide that the Aztec pantheon conquered the others as the Aztec people conquered their neighbors, and therefore some of their gods were POWs or recruits who joined them; and some (perhaps the wisest?) don't address the issue at all if it doesn't come up in game, leaving it as an unnecessary question that doesn't need to be answered if the game doesn't deal heavily with other Mesoamerican gods or history.

The only solution I've ever seen that I don't recommend is, of course, the one the Scion books kind of use (though they don't outright say it, just imply it): don't try to say that all the Mesoamerican cultures just had the same pantheon, and therefore these are all the same gods, just in different forms. The Aztecs, Maya, Toltecs and other peoples of Mesoamerica were not the same people, and while they share many similar religious conventions and symbols, they did not always believe in the same gods or worship them in the same ways. Trying to pretend that the Maya and Aztec religions were the same would be like trying to claim that the Norse and Irish people worshiped the same gods - there are overlaps and shared concepts, definitely, but they're clearly their own separate religions. You wouldn't try to pretend that they're the same people just because they're both in Europe, so don't try to mash the Aztecs together with their predecessors just because they're all in Mesoamerica.

The Mexica, despite their status as a young people with a young empire who borrowed mercilessly from everyone who had come before them, were an empire with its own unique laws, customs and religious practices. They are a case of a whole - scalped from their own history and everyone else's - that is greater than the sum of its parts.