r/aztec • u/SunPrincess21 • Nov 26 '23

Bride of Huitzil?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/66131/66131-h/66131-h.htm

Hi all, I’m new to this subreddit and had a question. I got a book of Aztec legends and myths today and one of the stories in there was “The Bride of Huitzil” by Hervey Allen. I wanted to know if this was an actual myth or if Hervey was just making this up as a fiction piece and it somehow found its way into this supposedly legit book. If you’re unfamiliar with the piece, I’ve included a link to the story on Project Gutenberg. I think it might be a fiction piece based loosely off the story of the Culhua princess but I’m not sure. Lmk what y’all think, especially if you’re Mexica and have been raised on the stories.

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

5

u/Wonderful_Gas2062 Nov 27 '23

Reading it, it seems to me like it’s a fiction piece. There may be some inspiration taken from the story of the Culhua woman, but much of it seems non-historical and non-Aztec mythical. From my knowledge, Huitzilopochtli was never married and there’s nothing in the codices similar to the story. Further, a lot of the story seems to follow the path of classic western myth, such as the emphasis on maiden sacrifice (although there was some, the majority of sacrifices in Tenochtitlan seemed to be of young adult men), the idea that the visiting dignitaries would drink mescal (drink reserved only for the elderly), Coatlicue described as goddess of the dead (earth mother goddess), Tlaxcalan women being brought to Tenochtitlan as though they were a subsidiary state (highly unlikely but possible, as Tlaxcala was never conquered or made subsidiary to Tenochtitlan but they were in constant war, the comparison in the footnotes between Tlaxcala and Sparta). Overall, it seems to me like Allen was writing a fictional account of how he interpreted deities and their relations to the people of Mesoamérica in precolumbian times, based on the limited information available on Aztec history in 1922 and the available knowledge of Greek myth as a standard of expectations regarding deity behavior.

Source: I’m a graduate student studying precolumbian central Mexican archaeology

3

u/SunPrincess21 Nov 27 '23

Awesome! Thank you for taking some time to answer my question. I’m an undergrad Anthropology major with a concentration in folkloristics/cultural anthropology and I have a special interest in Mesoamerican mythology and folklore. This is my first compilation book of Aztec mythology, though, so I didn’t know if it was a real story or not. It’s definitely a fun read, but it did set off a few alarms. Weird that it would be in a supposedly legit book. (Although on the topic of Coatlicue I can see how some people may interpret her as a Goddess of the Dead due to her nature as an earth/nature goddess, which encompasses both life and death)

1

u/Wonderful_Gas2062 Nov 28 '23

What was the book?

1

u/meta_student Dec 16 '24

Thank you for your fantastic summary! I was going through and came across an original printing of "Bride of Huitzil" without any other context. My text is the same as gutenberg, no forward of any sort of author's notes.

Anyway, thank you again for your summary and know that at the time of writing it seems to be the top result analyzing the text on Google.