Reading Aztec Cosmology Through Colonial Sources

Nearly everything known today about Tonatiuh Ichan and the wider Aztec afterlife system comes through colonial-era documentation, chiefly Sahagun's Florentine Codex and related Spanish-supervised or Spanish-authored compilations produced after the conquest, which means the material passed through Spanish missionary interpretation, translation and selection before reaching the form scholars now study, and different codices and chroniclers do not always agree in every detail on the structure, number, or precise rules of the various Aztec afterlife destinations.

Serious scholarship on Aztec religion treats this source situation as a genuine methodological caution rather than a reason to dismiss the material entirely, cross-referencing multiple codices, archaeological evidence and comparative Mesoamerican material to build the most defensible picture available, while remaining honest that important details are less certain, and in some cases actively contested among specialists, than a single confident narrative might suggest. This atlas presents Tonatiuh Ichan on that same cautious basis, as a genuinely attested element of Aztec religious belief whose full original detail is mediated through, and to some degree shaped by, the colonial context in which it was recorded.