The ancient Americans, like most primitive societies, worshipped and feared a huge pantheon of powerful beings who controlled every aspect of their lives. If a thing was worth bothering about there was a god for it, including Huix-tocihuatl, goddess of salt and Tlatolteotl, goddess of licentious-ness! There was even a special goddess of the maguey!
     The four cardinal points, each with its special color, animals and gods, represented the four previous creations as symbolized by earth, air, fire and water. Our present, and frighteningly temporary, world is the fifth sun. Only Tezcatlipoca appears in all quadrants, though oddly at variance with the usual color associations. He is black in the white north, blue in the yellow west and white in the black south. Only in the red east does he deign to wear the right color. Deities associated with the south, gods and goddesses of the dance, drinking, pleasure, beauty and flowers, seem, on the whole, the most attractive lot.
     Since pagan beliefs were much the same world-wide it is hardly surprising that many pre-Columbian deities have their counterparts in old-world mythologies. Nor was it a unique concept that the world had been destroyed four times, twice by flood, and would be destroyed again by cataclysmic earthquake at the end of some 52-year cycle. Concepts of afterlife, including 13 heavens and 9 hells, are startlingly similar. They even believed, like the Norse, in a “Valhalla” reserved for those who died in battle or childbirth. All others were required to spend at least some time in purgatory, though suicides were doomed there for all eternity. Tlalocan was a special paradise reserved for those sacrificed to Tlaloc or killed by lightning and, oddly, those who died of dropsy or skin diseases. Good souls rejoiced forever in the shade of the heavenly tree, Yaxche; bad ones suffered eternal torment in Mitnal. The rest awaited rebirth in Mictlan.......
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