The concept of teotl: a complex approach to the principal religious category of pre-Hispanic Central Mexico

Since the 16th century, the polymorphous and overlapping identities of Nahua (Aztec) deities have puzzled, first, the friars carrying out their evangelization project in New Spain, and later, throngs of researchers eager to better understand the pre-Hispanic Nahua system of beliefs.

Background

Despite many scholarly efforts, today, we are still far from satisfactorily apprehending the various intricacies of the concept of teotl. Rendering the Nahuatl term teotl as “god,” helpful as it was in the process of cultural translation, neither reflects its full semantic scope nor explains the ontological and cosmological implications of this notion.

Nevertheless, up to this date, no one has attempted to embrace this problem by bringing together multiple yet complementary perspectives integrated by an innovative set of analytical tools.

Project Overview

The project TEOTL aims at unfolding the underlying notions of this pre-Hispanic Nahua key religious concept by combining its four crucial aspects. These are:

1. “Nahua pantheon”
2. Teotl in relation to other important religious categories, such as tonalli, nahualli, or ixiptla
3. Philological analysis of the term teotl in collocations, compounds, and the discourse of Nahuatl texts
4. Appropriation of the notion of teotl in colonial Nahuatl Christian discourse

Methodology

Using the heterogeneous textual and iconographic dataset derived from the well-known source base, TEOTL will employ a novel combination of research methods at the intersection of traditional (ethnohistory, religious studies, art history, philology, linguistics) and digital humanities (network analysis in historical sciences).

This unexplored research path will lead to a reconceptualization of our approach towards the Nahua notion of the sacred and its decolonization.

Implications

Also, the obtained results may be applicable outside of Mesoamerican studies as a model for approaching similar non-Western cultural and religious phenomena.