‘Gods’ of the Month: Ometeotl

My biggest doubt here is, being nahuatl such a rich spoken language, which prioritized mostly the speaking more than the writing, is kinda nonsense we cant find any single chaint, or is there any? The “is just we don’t need to recognize it verbally” sounds more like a very sketchy justification, but even if we can accept it as a fact, I don’t think them saw it as a deity, but as a more complex concept, a philosophical axis, a philosophical resource to observate and interpretate world and its own culture and history

I would like to say that Ometeolt is indeed a real and and important deity (supreme creator) to my people, the Mexica. We have never needed to build temples for Ometeolt because we believe that our bodies are temples for them. Instead of saying Amen to finish our prayers we say Ometeolt. To invoke their energy and witness over the prayer or truth being spoken. Ometeolt has a balance of perfect masculine and feminine energy, reflects duality. In our culture, transgender people/gay people were considered medicine people. Healers, because they represented a perfect fluidity between feminine and masculine. Regardless of their birth gender, in ceremony they could choose to be with either the men or the women.

Ometeotl is a fabrication, much like the supposed Hunab Ku of Yucatan. For evidence I suggest searching online for an article called “Ometeotl: The God that didn’t exist” by Calmecac Anahuac. The concept of duality is obviously present in the Aztec deity-couples and sibling pairs, in motifs and legends having to do with the rising and setting of the sun and of venus but there’s no conclusive evidence they worshipped a hermaphrodite deity. Modern nahuas have no deity whose exact office / identity is that of a dual sexed creator, there are supreme deities who are said to transcend gender or deities who are embodiments of creator couples, but no ometeotl. I think it would be very fruitful to bring this to the attention of people who study mesoamerican religion on the academic level, and ammend this article if warranted.

Ometeotl is the dual goddes, also known as T’amari, Mari, Mary, Mari-a a virgin goddess with two sides, north and south. Noth America was known as T’amari Mehi.
Mehi translates to Mesi, and messiah. Now days Mexi-Khan
Yahweh created the heavens and the virgin T’amari, he then put the messiah/mehi/mexi/israelites on virgin T’amari.
The 10 tribes are the Mehi
South America was known as T’amari AmeruucaPana.
And from Peru/Herusalem we have the huaca/pyramid of the Sol/sun and Moon.
The temples of SOLOMON, Soul of Men.
The sea of Cortez used to be known as THE RED SEA, the Mehika tribe had the same story of a promised land and wondered the continent in search of it, led by a priest that also parted a red sea.
I can go on and on and on.

I felt the need to chime in on this discussion as a “Chicano” (I use the term as a political identifier not as a racial, ethnic or nationalist term. I do, however, regard Chicanos as Indigenous people to the Southwestern U.S.).
I have to agree with Magnus that your post, pulling from Curly Tlapoyawa, is merely one opinion and not the general opinion of those Chicana/os that have an opinion on the matter (Not all Chicanos participate in Danza Azteca from which much of this thought originates). There seems to be an movement of some Chicanos participating in Danza away from Christian/Catholic religious dogma and therefore a reimagining of the divine. A very common phrase in danza (especially in Mexico) is “El es Dios”. It could be argued that this is a poor spanish translation of Ometeotl for the verb “to be” is imbedded in Nahuatl and Ometeotl could then be translated as “S/he is god.” Because Spanish is gendered in a rigid way with a tendency toward the masculine, then “He is God” (El es Dios) is the result. A Chicano movement away from the Spanish expression to a gender neutral and away from patriarchy results in the use of Ometeotl with frequency. Still, it begs the question, where does the term come from. León-Portilla (LP) uses the word frequently. In my studies of the codices and manuscripts of the sixteenth century, I have done my best to find any reference at all to the term Ometeotl with little success.
LP, in his book Filosofia Nahuatl, (p 149) translates from Nahuatl a passage from Cantares Mexicanos (folio 35, v.):
Can ompa nonyaz huiya can ompa no[n]yaz aya ome i[h]cac yohui yohui ye[h]huan Dios huiya a[hmach temochi[y]a ompa ximo[hu]aya[n] a[h]ilhtl i[h]tec i zannican i ye[h]hua yece[n] ximo[hu]aya[n] in tl[altic]p[a]c.
LP’s translation reads: ¿A dónde iré? ¿a dónde iré? El camino del dios de la dualidad. ¿Por ventura es tu casa en el lugar de los descarnados? ¿acaso en el interior de cielo?, ¿o solamente aquí en la tierra es el lugar de los descarnados?
LP goes on to say “Pretenden saber los tlamaninime cuál es el camino que lleva a Ometéotl (dios de la dualidad), como aquí explícitament es designado.” It is at this point that LP is pulling from old texts to assert the idea of Ometeotl. But that is not what the passage says.
It could be argued that the passaged as pulled from Cantares Mexicanos, which was penned about 100 years after the arrival of the invaders could thusly be interpreted. The question is, does “dios” mean the same thing as “teotl”? Originally, no. But after 100 years of colonization and colonialism, teotl came to mean dios, which came to mean teotl i.e., the idea of the sacred in a singular loan word. However, there is a good chance that the Nahua concept of the divine was also assigned to the new term “dios” so the idea of duality, both a masculine and feminine nature, could have also been ascribed to the newly adopted loan word “dios”. Was León-Portilla, then, justified in translating, “ome i[h]cac yohui yohui ye[h]huan Dios”, as “El camino del dios de la dualidad”? I invite others, at this point, to translate the passage and comment.
From an Indigenous point of view, ideas, like everything else in the universe, are alive. Because ideas are alive they are, like everything else, in flux, constantly changing. Ometeotl may be a relatively “new” term but it is a term that is very much alive in the psyche of the Chicano and some Mexicanos who refer to themselves as Mexica. The term and idea are ever changing and growing to accommodate a need for those that have been colonized for 500 years.

I would like to note my own reasons for doubting the existence, or at least the significance, of this proposed deity.

1. I do not trust León-Portilla’s or Garibay’s translations of religious concepts (see e.g. Payàs, G. (2004). Translation in historiography: The Garibay/León-Portilla complex and the making of a pre-hispanic past. Meta: Journal des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 49(3), 544-561). Garibay and León Portilla have been instrumental in promoting interest in Aztec language, religion and ethos. But from the outset they have done so within a particular intellectual program based in Mexican nationalism and a kind of cultural apologetics. Part of this has been to make a representation of Aztec thought that is more palatable to a European tradition - including suggesting that Aztec intellectuals were moving away from human sacrifice and towards monotheism. I keep this in mind when I read León Portilla’s arguments about Ometeotl. Furthermore several of his arguments are so lacking in rigour that to my mind it undermines the credibility of the entire argument - for example that the absence of references to the deity is because it was conceived as abstract and undepictable is spurious, and so is the claim that the use of diphrasisms or gender paralellism should be indirect references to Ometeotl. As Levi-Strauss has shown, dual organization of concepts is almost a semiotic imperative, and they are found to varying degrees in all cultures, to me there is little reason to consider that Aztecs or Mesoamericans were more dualistic than other of the world’s peoples.
2. There are very few mentions of Ometeotl of any significance in the sources. Several examples claimed by León-Portilla to be significant mentions might just as well be mentions or epithets of other deities, e.g. the bonelords of Mictlan as suggested by Haly, or a squash-maguey deity. Certainly the total absence of Ometeotl in descriptions of Aztec ritual life speaks strongly against the idea that this deity should be as central to Aztec religion as Leon-Portilla suggests. Certainly I think Haly is completely right in suggesting that bones and not duality is the central element in the Aztec view of life and vitality.
3. The creator couple of course exists as a general Mesoamerican concept, but the creator couple is not Ometeotl. The Aztec creator couple is named in several myths - but Ometeotl is not mentioned in those myths. Furthermore the idea that Aztec cosmology included the notion of a layered universe has recently been challenged by Nielsen and Reunert (2009), who demonstrates that the layered model with the creator couple on top is likely an introduction from rennaissance Europe. [Nielsen, J., & Reunert, T. S. (2009). Dante’s heritage: questioning the multi-layered model of the Mesoamerican universe. Antiquity, 83(320), 399-413.]
I do not exclude the possibility that there was an Ometeotl in Aztec religion, but I think it would have been a minor esoteric deity (and I agree with Boas that esoteric concepts are developments of exoteric ones, not the other way round) and not a major organizing principle.

My Huichol friends all agree that there is a supreme or highest god that is a duality which is male and female.

I’m actually in the middle translating the Hymn in which Miguel León-Portilla describes as one of the oldest prayers to Ometeotl.
“The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca” by don Alonso de Castañeda.
Nowhere in the hymn does ometeotl show up. The only word that looks remotely like it, is “ayometeotl” which means “juicy sacred maguey”.
In fact I don’t believe that was a mistake on Miguel’s part because the whole poem is mistranslated.
He deliberately altered words from the historia! The fact that Richard Haly was the only one to challenge him on this more than 20 years ago is insane.
This is not just a small mistake, it’s a huge error which is responsible for the bulk of what we know about the Aztecs in academia.
Need I remind you that Miguel also “Translated” thousands of Aztec “poems” and documents, no doubt with huge errors.
Yet scholars and experts tip toe around the subject, and continue to have this pseudo history taught in schools and read in textbooks.
If you need evidence, just search for the “Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca”, PDF online, to folio.33. And see for yourself. There is no “Ometeotl”.

Kurly Tlapoyawa is the website owner to mexika.org, for the external link article on Ometeotl, the god that isn’t.
My friend, Itztli, is the one who wrote the article.

Great article. I believe Dr. Miguel Portilla has already written a rebuttal to Halys critique. But to me, the argument on “Ometeotl” should be focused on the dominant use of the name. Only once, in Vaticanus A Rios, do we see the name “Ometeotl” ( Hometeule) in the primary sources. I find it very curious that in the monumental “Florentine Codex “ and in Durans “Book of the Calendar and Rites” we never see the use of that title/name. It appears that the name of “Ometeotl” was less frequently used to denote “our father, our mother”, at least compared to other names/titles.

Also, I noticed you sourced Kurly. I’ll be sending his this article.

Based on the writings and primary sources that I read, I believe OmeTeotl lives in the mind of Miguel Portilla.