ABSTRACT
Early Spanish chroniclers attempting to describe Mexican cosmology were confronted by a bewildering array of supernatural entities. Relying on their medieval, male mindsets, sixteenth-century Catholic priests integrated pre-Columbian religious beliefs into categories that they did understand and thus constructed a Classical pantheon of gods and goddesses who controlled different elements of the natural world. While this undoubtedly captured some sense of pre-Columbian religious ideology, it also tended to rigidify what in fact was a very fluid system with deities sharing attributes and assuming other roles depending on ritual context.
