Can You Tell I'm Thinking About This a Lot While I Work on the Maya Pantheon?

Question: So Huitzilopochtli is exclusively a Mexica god. Are there any other gods in the Aztlanti which also are like that, or are everybody else in the pantheon gods the Mexica got from other people?

You know, we've been talking a lot lately about Mexica expansionism and religious syncretism, and I have the feeling that some people may have gotten the mistaken impression that the Aztecs didn't actually have their own religion or gods and just worshiped a random assortment of things they'd conquered. This isn't the case at all, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about it some!

Huitzilopochtli is indeed as Mexica a god as they come; he was the totem and protector deity of their people, the warrior that led them in war, the guidance that led them through the wilderness and the power they believed made them strong. In the era of Tenochtitlan, everything begins and ends with Huitzilopochtli, who not only fulfills the earthly function of protecting and supporting his people but also the all-important celestial function of shepherding the sun to stave off disaster.

He is not, however, the only Aztec god that is uniquely suited to and springing from their people. Tlazolteotl/Toci is also very Aztec, having been created in a specific myth in which Huitzilopochtli instructed the traveling Mexica to flay a foreign princess they'd captured so that he could deify her to aid them. Tezcatlipoca does not appear in all his insane one-footed obsidian-mirrored glory anywhere but the Valley of Mexico, where to the Aztecs he was the patron of nobility and one of the most important deities in existence. The fire-god Xiuhtecuhtli, lord of the end of the year and the ever-burning flame, is as thoroughly Mexica as all the rest, while on the other end of the spectrum the water-goddess Chalchiuhtlicue is unique in Mesoamerican myth with her stint as the sun and her tears of flooding compassion. Xolotl, the dog-headed psychopomp, appears only in Aztec codices and doesn't seem to have any real analogues outside them. And, of course, the massive antagonistic front of the heavens, most notably including the tzitzimime, Coyolxauhqui, Itzpapalotl and others is a strongly Aztec mythological setup, directly at odds with many of the other myths in the area.

But the idea that the Aztecs share and borrow a lot of myth from others around them isn't a mistaken one; it's all a matter of perspective, and also defining what exactly "borrowed" means. There are some gods the unquestionably appear in other Mesoamerican cultures that predate the Aztecs; the most obvious is Quetzalcoatl, who was a major patron of the Toltecs, as Kulkulkan/Gukumatz was revered by the Maya, and appears in art all the way back to the Olmec and Teotihuacan civilizations. The Feathered Serpent has been around pretty much as long as Mesoamerican religions have, and the Aztecs aren't the first to revere him. Similarly, thunder-gods that share marked similarities with Tlaloc also exist in the Maya and Zapotec cultures, and scary skeletal death gods definitely didn't start with Mictlantecuhtli.

But the key here is that, while these gods all share similar imagery, associations and ideas, they are still not actually the same. In fact, the Aztec versions of those gods differ in important ways that are unique to their pantheon, just as the Zapotec version of a god would have differed importantly from a Maya one and so on all the way back to the pre-Olmec era. The Gukumatz of Maya myth has no story of rescuing humanity from the underworld the way the Quetzalcoatl of Aztec myth does, and while Chaac and Cocijo look rather similar to Tlaloc as reptilian storm gods, neither of them ever functioned as the sun, and Chaac was never the personification of the earth of the Valley of Mexico just as Tlaloc never bore Chaac's iconic lightning-axe. It's possible that Tezcatlipoca is represented by Huracan among the Maya, who also has a missing foot and aids the Feathered Serpent in creation, but the two barely show any resemblance beyond that. They are most definitely related gods, obviously sprung from the same root, but they have also become different personalities and figures in their own right, each sculpted to the needs of the culture that held them in such high esteem.

And that kind of borrowing isn't unique to Mesoamerica at all. All of the Indo-European storm gods theoretically sprang from the same original primordial figure, but claiming that Zeus is merely a god that the Greeks "stole" from Indra would be silly, because Zeus and Indra have grown apart so far and become so entrenched in their home cultures that they are obviously not the same god anymore. The same gods have spanned across Asia for time immemorial, but that doesn't mean anyone needs to stop and tell everyone that because Avalokitesvara is originaly Hindu, that means that the Tibetan and Chinese and Japanese cultures that revere Arya Tara, Guanyin or Kannon aren't really real religions of their own. Dionysus, Osiris and Adonis aren't the same god just because they may have all come from the same dying fertility god root, and Aphrodite, Ishtar and Astarte need not be called the same simply because they all came from the same ancient Mediterranean idea of a love goddess. Gods were carried across different places by people who conquered other people, by the conquered peoples themselves, by trade and reputation and prophecy; this is something that happens all over the world, not just among the Mexican and South American cultures.

And just as strong similarities among religions in other parts of the world - like Zeus, Hades and Poseidon being dead ringers for Baal, Mot and Yam - don't have to mean that one people didn't have a religion of their own because they were borrowing another, so it doesn't mean that in Mesoamerica, either. The question of where to draw the line between different gods and different names for the same god is one that Scion deals with all the time, but for some reason, while we're fully willing to accept that Thor and Perun are different guys, there seems to be a prevailing feeling that the Aztecs are just the Maya wearing different clothes, with maybe some Olmec and even Inca thrown in for flavor. A lot of the blame for this falls on European expansionism in the fifteen and sixteenth century; most information on the native religions of Central and South America was sent back to Europe in entirely butchered form, badly translated, interpreted through Christianity and lumped together in a large, semi-differentiated mass of "the religions of the western heathens". The Central and South American mythologies never had the renaissance of serious study in Europe that folks like the Pesedjet, Aesir and Dodekatheon did, and the result is that that narrow, flawed conception of those religions, as the savage and ignorant practices of a bunch of savage and ignorant tribes that most people couldn't be bothered trying to tell apart, has remained for a long time and leaked into much of our popular culture. People have looked me in the eye and said totally seriously that it's a shame Scion never included the Inca as part of the Aztlanti, when the two cultures have almost nothing whatosever in common and aren't even located on the same continent. There's even a TV Trope dedicated to the problem, which is how you know that shit's serious.

So for Scion, the conundrum is of course the same one it always is for every other culture: how close it too close, and is it worth it to try to split these pantheons into separate ones or are they so close they need to be lumped together? For the most part, the major religions of Mesoamerica that are identifiably different are the Aztec and the Maya, which tend to eat up the other smaller pantheons in the area - either because that's what they did historically (i.e., the Huaxtec becoming literally part of the Aztec empire after conquest) or because they're so close that it's silly to try to separate them (the K'iche myths of Guatemala, which feature gods basically identical to the Yucatan Maya deities). You could also maybe throw in a third group with the Zapotec and Mixtec deities shoehorned in between the two; neither was ever as large or widespread, but they do have a few unique concepts of their own.

I'm drifting a little here, so let's go back to the Aztecs for the finale. They absolutely used a number of practices that are widespread across Mesoamerica (blood sacrifice, deity impersonation and so forth), but if you consider that borrowing from everyone else, you'd have to also consider the same of all the European religions that use similar practices to one another (oracular question-answering, livestock sacrifice and so on) to be doing the same thing. They definitely have some gods that were probably originally imported from elsewhere, but just as the originally-Canaanite Adonis has become a firm part of Greek myth, so those gods have gained their own unique status as Aztec divinities. Most Aztec deities are indeed Aztec (and remember, the Mexica were the ruling core of the Aztec empire, but there were also plenty of Aztecs who weren't Mexica!), and most of those that probably came from elsewhere have become so thoroughly nativized that trying to claim they're just a tacked-on addition from a different religion would be like trying to say that Nezha isn't really a Chinese god because he was originally borrowed from the Hindu Nalakuvara.

So really, the answer to your question is that almost everyone in the Aztec pantheon is as legitimately Aztec as the next guy, either by way of being invented for that religion and people or becoming so thoroughly part of it that they no longer really resemble the other gods that came from the same source. That doesn't mean you can't play with the possible tensions of absorbed gods within your game - far from it! - but it's never accurate to say that the Mexica didn't have gods of their own other than Huitzilopochtli, or borrowed their religion wholesale from others. Like every other major pantheon's religion, it developed over time as a result of various cultures and ideas interacting in a unique place in the world; it's no more a borrowed religion than any other.

Except for Quetzalcoatl, because that guy has just been big-pimping it up and down the Central American area forever. Whatever he's up to, it's bound to be a big deal to pretty much everybody.