TEOTL ERC PROJECT

The Nahua (Aztec) religious categories have challenged European authors since the sixteenth century, when the first missionaries tried to describe and translate them.

The main problems have been the fluid and overlapping identities of Nahua gods and the meaning of the term teotl, which, although usually translated as “god,” does not fit well into Western vocabularies and cosmologies.

The TEOTL project seeks to address this long-standing gap by examining the notion of teotl through four interconnected angles: the structure of the Nahua “pantheon”; the relationship of teotl to other central religious categories (such as tonalli, nahualli, and ixiptla); the philological analysis of teotl in Nahuatl textual discourse; and the transformation and appropriation of the term in colonial Christian contexts.

Together, these components create a coherent analytical lens capable of capturing the full complexity of this concept.