When the Aztecs called Spaniards teotl, they may not have meant gods
Moctezuma II and his people described Cortés and his soldiers as teotl, a word often translated as god. Many historians took this as proof the Aztecs thought the Spaniards divine. A closer reading of teotl, an abstract sacred energy rather than a deity, suggests they meant something closer to mysterious.
At the heart of Nahua thought was teotl, described as a single, dynamic, endlessly self-renewing sacred force. Scholars liken it to the Polynesian idea of mana. It was expressed in the supreme god Ometeotl and in a crowd of lesser gods and personified natural forces, a blend usually summed up as monistic pantheism. Ordinary worshippers leaned toward the mythic, many-god side, while the state promoted its own official religion.
The imperial capital, Tenochtitlan, focused on two great deities whose shrines crowned the Templo Mayor: Tlaloc, a rain and lightning god known across Mesoamerica, and Huitzilopochtli, the sun and war god who was patron of the Mexica. The Aztecs readily absorbed foreign gods. Xipe Totec, a fertility deity, came from the Yopi, or Tlapanec, people and became fully Aztec. Other gods presided over trades or over pulque, a sacred alcoholic drink. Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking Mirror, was a jaguar-linked trickster and patron of rulers, while Quetzalcoatl, associated with Venus, was patron of priests and helped create humankind. The scholar H. B. Nicholson sorted the pantheon in 1971 into three broad thematic groups.
Time and space were carefully structured. Like other Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs timed festivals, state ceremonies and even warfare to key dates in their calendar, and public ritual could include feasting, storytelling and dance. Their cosmos had thirteen heavens and nine underworld layers, with the lowest heaven and the uppermost earthly layer meeting at the Earth's surface, and each level had its own deities and heavenly bodies.
After the Spanish conquest, Aztec people were forced to become Catholics, but the old and new faiths blended. That fusion is visible in two of Mexico's best-loved customs: the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the yearly Day of the Dead.
Source: Aztec religion
