religion and cosmology: The Americas 831 old as well as symbols connected with the Pueblo kachina cult A stepped-mountain design called the tableta represents clouds and human breath Possible depictions of later Hopi mythic beings appear in 15th-century Anasazi kiva paintings at Awatovi in present-day Arizona These include Squash Maiden, an agricultural spirit, and Kokopelli, a trickster and fertility spirit portrayed as a hump-backed flute player In kiva murals from the same period at Pottery Mound and Kuaua in modern-day New Mexico, lightning, raindrops, rainbows, and plants feature prominently, underlining the importance of rain in Anasazi religion Male and female ritual specialists are illustrated, carrying staffs and prayer sticks like those still used by the Pueblos Mesoamerica At the time of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) the Aztec and related peoples in the highlands of central Mexico shared a basic system of cosmology and ritual practices, with some local variations Unlike the paucity of information on cultures in North America and the Southwest, in Aztec Mexico detailed written accounts by 16th-century Spanish conquistadors and missionaries like Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún and their native informants have been found describing the beliefs and practices of the conquered peoples and fleshing out the picture derived from archaeology Still, care must be taken in interpreting these sources Because most were intended to justify conquest and forced conversions to Christianity, they are heavily biased against the native religion The primary goal of even the most detailed records was not understanding but eradicating Aztec beliefs and bringing the Aztec into the Catholic fold The records also feature misunderstandings created by differences between indigenous and European concepts of the sacred For example, the Spanish, with their knowledge of the classical Greeks and Romans, assumed that the supernatural beings venerated by the Aztec were a pantheon of distinct gods, each with its own distinct role, personality, and image In fact, the Aztec conceived of their deities as cosmic forces that could overlap and exchange identities among each other, forming a mythology far less rigid than that of the classical Greeks or Romans Some modern scholars have even denied that the Aztec believed in separate “gods” at all Like the Mississippians, the Aztec divided the universe into three basic levels: the underworld; this world, or the middle level; and the upper world of the sky The upper world was further subdivided into 13 heavens, with the highest presided over by the creator gods, and the underworld into nine levels The cosmos was divided into four quadrants based on the four cardinal directions, with a central vertical axis connecting the three worlds Like the Mississippian peoples, the Head of a deity; tuffa stone, Aztec culture, Mexico, 1100–1400 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phil Berg Collection, Photograph © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA [M.71.73.180]) Aztec represented this central axis as a gigantic tree, but it was also symbolized by mountains In addition, mountains were viewed as the hollow repositories of water and plenty and as entrances to the realm of the rain god For the Aztec the center of the world and juncture of the levels was the great pyramid temple at the center of their capital city, Tenochtitlán Each cardinal direction had its own symbolic color and significance East, placed at the top of Aztec maps, was positive, the direction of the rising sun, while west, where the sun sets into the underworld, had negative connotations After death most people went to Mictlan, a dreary place of decay located in the north—in the underworld More positive placement in the afterlife was not the result of moral virtue in life but the manner of death Those who died of drowning, by being struck by lightning, or from water-related diseases went to Tlalocan, the paradise of the rain god Warriors killed in battle accompanied the sun in its journey across the sky and returned to earth as hummingbirds or butterflies Women who died in childbirth, seen as analogous to fallen warriors, assisted the sun in its nightly descent The present universe, called by the calendrical name Four Earthquake, was only the most recent in a series of successive creations followed by world destructions The first world, Four Jaguar, had been populated by giant humans who