Mayincatecs

Question: I have a "Mayincatec" question. What degree of actual overlap do the Aztec and Maya pantheons have? Does Maya myth depend on Aztec myth to support itself? And does Central American myth ever "blend" when one culture attacks another?

Good ol' Mayincatecs.

Actually, the Maya kingdoms predate the Aztec civilization at Tenochtitlan by a good thousand years or so, so it would be pretty difficult for them to depend on a religion that didn't even exist yet for their own mythology. We tend to think of the Aztecs as the big dogs of Mesoamerica, and that's because when the Europeans hit Mexico, that was true; the Mexica were the reigning military power in the Valley of Mexico and the Maya civilization as it had existed centuries before had collapsed into a loose collection of mostly isolated cities. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, their centralized power made them easier to conquer because they were all in one place, whereas more of the Maya escaped or even fended off European conquest for longer thanks to being hidden in random pockets of jungle down in the Yucatan and Central America.

And, of course, the Aztec and Maya aren't the only people in play here. The Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Olmec and Teotihuacano cultures all had their own religions, centuries of power and lasting effect on the overall religious climate of Mesoamerica. Contact between those cultures, whether through trade, alliance or warfare, inevitably caused influences to pass between them and help shape them, just as it does everywhere else in the world. Talking about just the Aztec and Maya is a bit like talking about just the Norse and Greek and ignoring everyone else in Europe; yeah, together they cover most of the influences in the area, but they're obviously not the only discrete religions happening there.

But anyway. Since I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "overlap", I'm going to have to guess a little and you'll all have to bear with me. If you mean just the gods, the only one we know for sure is the honest-to-goodness same guy is Quetzalcoatl, known to the Maya as Kulkulkan or Gukumatz. Past him, there are a lot of figures that have similarities with Aztec deities and probably influenced them, but that aren't necessarily the same - for example, the thunder gods Chaac and Tlaloc, the death gods Yum Cimil and Mictlantecuhtli or the fertility gods Tonsured Maize God and Xipe Totec. They all have a lot of features in common, but also a lot of features that differentiate them, and while they share attributes they seldom share actual myths. You can't really say they're the same guy unless you're prepared to say, for example, that Thor and Perun are the same guy; they have obvious shared roots and ideas attached to them, but they still aren't the same. Mythology all over the world is like that, and Mesoamerica is no different. There are also gods that obviously don't have counterparts between the two pantheons, including Huitzilopochtli and Tlazolteotl among the Aztecs and Kinich Ahau and the Moon Goddess among the Maya.

As for mythology, we're hampered somewhat by having lost most concrete myths from the Yucatan, so we have mostly mythology of the Guatemalan Maya to compare to mythology of the Mexican Aztecs. It's there that the differences between the two cultures' religions shine the most, because there's surprisingly little overlap. There definitely are moments - Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's creation of the earth is an echo of Gukumatz and Tepeu's, and the idea of cyclical worlds, for the Maya four and the Aztec five, are both obvious places where the basic ideas of the myths are suspiciously similar. But past those basic similarities (which it's likely were shared in some form by most religions in the Mesoamerican area), both cultures have myths that are unique to them. The Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl's descent into the underworld, Tezcatlipoca's exploding of the Toltec empire, the bat's theft of Xochiquetzal's vulva to please Mictlantecuhtli and the individual stories of each god's meltdown and destruction of the world they served as sun. The Maya have the shenanigans of the Hero Twins (both sets of them!) and their ball-playing, the creative exploits of Huracan, the story of the death god's banishment to the underworld and whatever that weird myth with the Moon Goddess and the scribal rabbit is all about.

So no; neither of those religions needs the other to support itself. The Aztecs certainly show signs of being influenced by the Maya, much as the Greeks show signs of being influenced by the Babylonians, but the long gap in time, culture and personality between the two civilizations had given rise to two distinctly different ethnic groups with distinctly different myths by the time the conquistadors started smashing up the place.

I doubt we'll see both of them represented in the Scion line proper, or at least not for a long time. But both deserve their place in the sun (fourth or fifth!).