White people at it again. The Flayed Lord’s name is Xipe Totec, he’s one of the main dieties in Aztec culture. He is primarily associated with fertility and agriculture, and is strongly connected to renewal and rebirth (the flayed aspect is supposed to symbolize how corn, a major crop, sheds it’s outer layers). Aside from that, we know *very* little about mesoamerican cultures. What we do know mainly comes from retellings and accounts from Spanish conquerors, who of course had a biased perspective. Finding a new temple is a huge deal, because when the Spanish were systematically wiping out our culture, they made a point to build churches over preexisting temples and shrines. A lot of the churches are still there, but the Mexican government considers them historical buildings, and as such no one is allowed to dig under the churches or excavate the area. There are countless temples we haven’t seen because they’re under these churches. Finding a temple we can actually study is such a big deal!

It really is a big deal! also, mesoamerican art history/anthropological research are actually very robust and rapidly growing fields of study. A big problem for what white people call “Aztec” research before the 90s was that, yes, a huge number of readable personal accounts were from the Spanish. The others were written in Maya Nahuatl which used two forms of glyphs, the iconographic type, and the logogram type. 

That was illegible up until a boy raised on Maya archaeological sites, David Stuart, was awarded a MacArthur genius grant (the youngest ever at 18) to study the glyphs. he was able to read them as well as his first language, solved several codes, and then other academics were able to easily translate codices and ruins. that was over 30 years ago, so now we are working with about 50 fully translated Nahua codices and hundreds of fragmented ones. there are many beautiful ruins and ancient sites like these all over South America, but the Spanish did make sure to build on top of many very important ones. restoring pyramids and temples that were plundered and destroyed by conquistadors and centries of war before them is crucial to ancient Mexicatl research, but the colonial churches above so many of these sites are also unfortunately historically important sites themselves. Mexico city is also an ancient city; it would be really difficult to excavate where families have built their homes for over 20 generations. 

If you need a quarantine binge one of my favorite professors at my alma mater has uploaded so many free fun lectures on Maya, Peruvian, Nahua art and visual culture here :-)

Mesoamerican deities are not the fictional “old gods” of Lovecraft that are only out to get you. They were seriously worshipped by serious people, and it’s bullshit that people reduce them to “Lovecraft but Mexico”. Like, have a ponder about why a culture would worship a god who has no skin. Real life is not fiction!