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Aztec Flora and Fauna
According to Alejandro de Avila (Flora: The Aztec Herbal), Mexico boasts one of the richest and most complex floras on the planet, with an estimated total of between 23,000 and 30,000 species.
We’re delighted to launch these pages in collaboration with Renee McGarry, doctoral candidate in art history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her dissertation, Exotic Contact: Flora and Fauna in Mexica (Aztec) Visual Culture, considers how plants and animals are represented in Aztec sculpture and painted books.
‘Why no bears in Aztec mythology?’
Read of the important links between the Aztecs and the pelican...
Hear the (brief!) sound of a hummingbird - Tlacatecco website
Plants and animals had a strong cosmomagical
meaning in the lives of the Mexica/Aztecs
In ancient Mesoamerica armadillos
were associated with fertility and abundance...
How are armadillos viewed
on the ground in La Huasteca?
The Aztecs had their own poppy
or ‘flower of the dead’
In Mesoamerica the deer
was ‘a mythological animal par excellence’
The rare and endangered axolotl
- and its cultural importance in Mexico
The rattlesnake was associated with Venus
in Mesoamerican mythology
‘Is it true an Aztec person could be killed
for cutting down a tree...?’
The sunflower - one of Mexico’s
many gifts to the world...
From Olmec to Aztec, the jaguar
prowls the art of most ancient Mexican civilisations
For the Mexica the eagle hunts like a sunbeam,
and leads the sun across the sky...
Cacti have been a source of food
and medicine for millennia
The career of dog breeder must have
been a lucrative one in pre-Hispanic Mexico
Grasshoppers
had a Jekyll & Hyde nature - so very Aztec!
The astonishing Axayacatl
nourished the growing Aztec empire
Rare, stunningly beautiful, elusive, an artist’s dream
- is the quetzal the ultimate symbol of beauty?
Molluscs were both useful
and symbolic in the Mexica empire
While frogs helped feed the Aztecs,
toads helped feed their religion...