The “crisis of evangelicalism” that arose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, who was supported by 80 percent of American evangelicals, provides a case study in the challenge of determining who counts as a “true evangelical” or a “true Christian.” The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Christianity helps to clarify much of the controversy. The anxieties of modernity have forced all Christians, liberal and conservative, to explore new approaches to prescriptivism.

This glossary emphasizes Nahuatl terminology; terms in Spanish are identified. Organized chapter by chapter, terms only appear in the listing for the chapter in which they first appear.

A spiritually enveloping, time-consuming, and value-creating set of activities, Aztecs centered their religion on powerful spiritual beings. Ceremony and time were fundamental parts of everyday life. From the smallest household to the largest city, rituals of offering to the gods took place every day as Aztecs sought water, food, the survival of human life, and balance in what they perceived to be a chaotic spiritual and material world. In their dynamic universe, deities and their human embodiments and priests and priestesses manifested great power. Ceremonies conducted for those beings, the offerings presented to them, and exchanged or distributed provide examples of the power and energy that offerings, including living humans, provided. Time-keeping focused on the notion of progressive ages, the idea of cyclical time, and two calendar systems. Their calendars used two ways of keeping track of days and months for ceremonies, agriculture, and war. Aztecs drew blood for human and plant fertility, purification, and to nourish and repay their debt to the creator deities. Yet the greatest offering human beings could give was to provide human lives, offering hearts and blood, though they did not do so in the numbers often suggested.

The Aztecs represent a complex, class-based civilization, characterized by culturally diverse practices encompassed by the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Basin of Mexico region and its surrounding areas. The subject of much misinformation, the clash between Aztec peoples and Spaniards, provoked by the Spanish invasion, gave rise to an immense number of written sources. Native-authored, hybrid, and Spanish-authored texts all must be carefully considered, but the translation of a still-growing number of texts in the Nahuatl language has provided insights Spanish-language texts cannot. Other kinds of evidence about the Aztecs and how their ideas and identities survived also exist, including material remains and ethnographic evidence. While the word “Aztec” is used in several ways, I use “Mexica” in this book for the peoples of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, either “Excan tlatoloyan” (Tribunal of three) or “Triple Alliance” for the expansive confederation of the late Postclassic period, and “Aztec” for the linguistically and culturally related peoples of the Basin of Mexico region to highlight the variety of ethnicities that constituted Aztec peoples. A brief early history from the time of the migrations into the Basin of Mexico to the founding of Tenochtitlan by the Mexica, guided by their deity Huitzilopochtli, also is covered.

Aztec rulers, Mexica and others, used their authority to develop, expand, and defend the Excan tlatoloyan and other confederations in or near the Basin of Mexico. That region contained about sixty political units, each called an altepetl. The largest, most militarily and economically powerful was Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital city. The most common translations, city-state or kingdom, capture something essential. They had urban cores, and they were each ruled by supreme rulers, the tlatoani. As important as the altepetl was, localities that constituted them, known as tlaxilacalli or calpolli, smaller units that in many ways constituted communities unto themselves, were also important. Violence was a key part of Aztec political culture and state and confederation building in the late Postclassic period. War practices relied upon structure and discipline, weaponry, the pursuit of captives, and the vanquishing of enemies who produced material wealth in the form of everyday and luxury items paid as tribute to the imperial powers. Whether through elite marriages or wars, inter-altepetl relations took place within a context in which the Excan tlatoloyan sought aggressively to enlarge its domain of control by becoming an expansive confederation that can be considered a hegemonic empire.

Aztecs were brilliant scientists, writers, and artists. Medicine is an example of their scientific activities. They developed ideas about the causes of illness, practical and supernatural. Priests and priestesses were involved in curing, but Aztecs had an array of healers. The most commonly used term by Aztecs for a doctor – someone with specific and practical knowledge about healing – was “ticitl,” female and male. That Aztecs wrote is not widely recognized. They used writing to name people, titles, places, and deities. Not merely pictography, their writing is complex and developed from the late prehispanic period into the colonial period. Their books recorded calendars, history, tribute payments, and succession to rulerships. They also created a rich oral literature, often expressed through songs. Many were ancient, others composed in the early colonial period. Those that became written in alphabetized Nahuatl dealt with deities, temples, flowers, lords, war, sexuality, even conquest and Christian worship. Also great artists, they were influenced by the art of earlier peoples and the Mixteca-Puebla style and worked in several media: architecture; monumental and small-scale stone sculptures; books; precious stones and gold work; textiles; dough sculptures; and paper. This art expressed an official ideology as well as resistance to it.