Aztec Mythology - Blog Posts

Us as Chalchiuhtlicue

Chalchiuhtlicue, "Jade Skirt", is the goddess of lakes, rivers, and the sea. She's known for being the second wife of the rain god Tlaloc, and she's most commonly the Fourth Sun in the five sun legend.

Chalchiutlicue will often be depicted sitting on a throne with a stream of water flowing from her skirt.

Now, water looks like this in some Aztec codices. These are taken from Codex Mendoza, I was able to find these and the glyphs further down this post in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs online!

So water is parted like this, and it has these circle and tear-drop shaped shells on each end.

Here are some representations of Chalchiuhtlicue with water illustrated in the same way. Note that she also tends to have people swimming in there, and other objects.

I thought the strands of water looked similar to Us' tentacles from their bioship. They also use these tentacles to hold the others' ships in ep3, much like Chalchiuhtlicue has people inside her streams of water.

The way their limbs look in their physical form resembles the way the goddess' water flows, too

Another reference to water could be the design of Beebs' guitar. It has an ocean wave on it.

Beebs' god is Xipe Totec, and as far as I know he has no relation to the sea or water, but Us' does! The guitar belongs to Beebs, yes, but it's the fact that he uses it to communicate with Us, and the instrument becomes associated with Us, that it makes me think it's a reference to Chalchiuhtlicue, since she is the goddess of bodies of water.

Speaking of, in Beebs' post I said his guitar could be a reference to Xipe's rattlestaff, the chicahuaztli. This is an object that both Xipe and Chalchiuhtlicue can be seen carrying, along with a couple other gods.

Us makes a certain sound in Scratch's flashback, like that of a rattle (21:00) But it might be me going crazy.

I also considered Them to be designed to resemble a chicahuaztli, but that is a stretch, too.

Another important element of Chalchiuhtlicue's iconography is that she has a pair of tassels on the sides of her head, and her dress is also adorned with small tassels. This can be seen in codices as well as in statues of her.

Us has these drops of a black liquid beneath their cap, hanging by on the sides of their head. This is because they're based on an actual mushroom, the inky cap mushroom!

These drops could be a reference to the tassels perhaps?

—

Next I wanna talk about this symbol on the cap of Us' bioship

This is an example of a quincunx, it's a geometric pattern consisting of five elements: four of them form a square, and the fifth one is placed in the middle.

Symbols like this one appear in monkey wrench, from subtle places like the dice in the casino

To the decorations in the bar and the restaurant, as well as the inside of Beebs' arm!

Why am I bringing this up? The Mexica used the quincunx a lot, in a variety of ways, but also with circles like we see in the show, so we're gonna focus on those here

They also used very similar circles for a couple of glyphs, such as these

I wanna bring attention to that fourth one. Chalchiuhtlicue's name consists of two words: chalchihuitl, "jade", and cueitl, "skirt". The symbol for jade looks the most similar to Us' eyes, with the texture of a jade in the middle.

—

Lastly there is one more thing that Us and Chalchiuhtlicue have in common, thematically.

In the Legend Of The Suns, Chalchiuhtlicue is the Fourth Sun (although other versions exist). The way that her era ended was that Tezcatlipoca accused her of faking her love for humans to get praise. She cried for hundreds of years, flooding the whole world, and the humans that lived there turned into fish.

Us is the first and so far the only character to cry in the series, in a non-comical way. It's in this scene that the show takes a more serious tone.

Us is, arguably, a somber and sad character, especially after the loss of Them. Both Us and the goddess also seem to have strong reactions to their circumstances, seeing how Us was willing to join Them when they accepted that there was no help for their friend.

It is also worth mentioning that their bioship and their phantom form move like a jellyfish, like a sea creature.

List

I looked it up because I couldn’t remember if I knew off the top of my head

W-

Why is safe search on

- Us being based on an "inky cap" mushroom

- Shrike being a squid, an animal known for producing ink

- "Ink Stations"

- Agent K being pure black, possibly named after the K in CMYK

So many references to ink! But surely this is a worldbuilding element not related to the five sun theory whatsoever! It's not like there's an Aztec god of ink or something

...

YIPPE E you are braver than I

i tried animating (kinda??) nana and tecciz in capcut and it got SO. LAGGY. I COULD COUNT THE FRAMES I FELT LIKE MY PHONE WAS ABOUT TO STOP WORKING ALTOGETHER and its too laggy to make anything better than this i fear but i had fun... (i think)

oh well. practice makes perfect, and i wanted to practice. im only posting this bc i havent rly posted much abt aztec gods in a while and its not too embarrassing (i think)

i had so much issues with getting tecciztecatls hair right in capcut oh my god. the boing was fun to make tho (i think)

So I found out the lobster was one of Tezcatlipoca’s animals

Thank you randomly generated posts machine.

Diversity win! Tezcatipoltca is obvious plant

Tezcatlipoca: Hey Tlaloc, Xochiquetzal is my comfort character so I need you to divorce her so I can marry her.

Tlaloc: What, no.

Xochiquetzal: I'm his comfort character, you have to. Also we're unleashing a social media mob on you.

*Tlaloc wakes up in a cold sweat in Tlalocan*

Tlaloc: Right, it was just a dream. I'm going to go cause a drought to cope.

Aztec mythology headcanons two!

Nanahuatzin uses mobility aids

Tecciztecatl plays with the children in Tlalocan (this is actually based off of something I found in mexicolore)

(So cute)

Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl used to drag Xipe Totec into their fights when they were little to ask who was in the right (I was Xipe Totec to my niece and nephew. So much chaos)

Quetzalcoatl doesn’t pick up the cues that he’s being an asshole

Tezcatlipoca has had a chair thrown at him before

Tecciztecatl has a plushie snail somewhere. He denies it when you ask. But it’s there.

Chalchiuhtlicue gives great hugs

Last list here!

Uhhh I started researching prosthetics and I didn’t have the heart to tell my medical therapeutics teacher it was because I wanted to make something both practical and something resembling the codexes at the same time

Usually there would be a shell around the foot but the structure matched the glyph nicely so reality is going out the door

Lil doodle o made and the ref!

I just found an Etsy seller with post card of Tecciztecatl on a bike. It’s so niche. I love it.

Yep. Probably should’ve expected that

my friend started playing around with every image i sent in my gc and I thought you might want to see what happened to tecciztecatl..

HELP MEEE I ALREADY HAVE MY DISCORD PFP SAVED AS THE ORIGINAL IMAGE 😭

Plannin on making some lil homemade plushies cause I got extra felt

(Designs belong to Louise Fogerty since I love her designs)

HRHRHHRHRHRHEHHEHRHRHRHHRHRHRHHRHRHRHHHEEHHWHEHEHEHE

These are great

forgot how much fun it is to fuck around with gacha life games

Random Aztec mythos headcanons because why not

• The moon (Tecciztecatl) controls the tides because the Tlaloques begged Acuecueyotl/Chalchiuhtlicue to give him a job so that he wouldn’t feel useless. Also because they wanted their “brother” to stay in Tlalocan.

• Xolotl could absolutely devour a chicken salad BLT. I have no evidence for this. He just seems like a BLT guy.

• Tezcatlipoca drops into the animal baby voice when he thinks no one is around.

• Nanahuatzin is undiagnosed autistic because he kinda reminds me of lil undiagnosed me when I didn’t understand why I never really fit in :(

• Quetzalcoatl created Olms (olm pic for reference) and Xolotl hated them so much for copying his style that he put them all in Europe.

• Tonatiuh and Huitzilopochtli flip a coin on who wants to drive the sun that day

• Tecciztecatl is just the dad and dog meme with the moon rabbit

Wallpaper I made because uhhh fun

Feel free to use btw

The last one reminds me of how I was talking about Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca and the first thing my friend said was toxic yaoi

Same friend also said that about Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl so idk man-

POV: Tezcatlipoca is appearing before you in some of his animal manifestations to talk about how he fucked your wife.

I depend on you.

Yall what if I gave Tecciztecatl lil fangs like his dad……

XIPE TOTEC NOOOOO YOURE GONNA GET XIPE’D

this is so stupid I’m sorry

A lil test I did since I haven’t experimented with editing in a while

The Tlaloques fuck with their boss’s son/replacement older brother

Also here’s some stills

Me when people say Tezcatlipoca is the evil brother while Quetzalcoatl is pure good

BOTH OF THEM DID BAD THINGS AND BOTH OF THEM DID BENEFICIAL THINGS IT TAKES SO MUCH FROM THEM TO LABEL THEMNGOOD OR BAD

Me everytime I see a badly writen retelling that makes unecessery changes to the source matterial that add nothing and rather take away from it, and it's clear that the writter both hates and doas not understands the source matterial, or when I see a bad take that misinterprets the source matterial:

Everytime when someone potrays Demeter a bad, overbearing mother.

Or when Persephone potrayd as a cute Kawaii pink aesthetic UwU girl (thanks Rachel, we are suffering the conseqvences of you fethis comic), and Hades is potrayd as a lonely nice guy who never did anything wrong.

Or when Medusa is potrayd/talked about as a sad, lonely, tragic girlboss and held as a symbol for women's empowerment and protection who wanted revenge, when she did not do anything to help women.

Or when Perseus is potrayd as a villian, or when Andromeda potrayd as an unhappy wife.

Or when people blatently say that Romeo and Juliet is not a tragedy, ignoring that the fect that the hate between two families lead to multiple people's death, and how the only time when they realised that they unfound hatered was bad was when they children were already dead.

Or when I see people claiming that Thor was a bad husbend to Sif.

Or when the gods get declawd. This is for any mythology.

Or when Hera redused to nothing but a bitchy wife.

Whenever that happands. I think of this song.

I will probably ad more to the post when more of this comes to my mind. Feel free to add more.

Doodles I made while trying a pixel brush including a fuckass Tecciztecatl and Tonatiuh

WOOOO

IN THE BEGINNING (there was the void)

/EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM

A contemporary retelling of the Mexica creation myth of the Fifth Sun. The Five Suns is a Mexica creation myth. There were four suns before our own and different deities served the Sun at different times.

Produced at De Anza College in collaboration with Kukul Estudio

Based on the poem by @reyynas

Original soundtrack by ‪@adrikoapatzco909‬

themarianaac.com/shortfilm

Don’t remember making this it just showed up in my camera roll

I mean it fits my groupchat calling him a twink

idk about you folks, but Tezcatipoltca nukeing chansin has neuro divergent energy

(creator added: for those unacquainted this is Tezcatipoltca:)

Tezcatlipoca

I made gifs out of the legend of the fifth sun animation by Louise Fogerty because I’m going feral

(Warning there is both bottom and top frontal nudity)

Also bonus

Welp. That's the last of my aztec wb doodles