The four sacred elements

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of the four sacred elements. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

• Los cuatro
• El aire
• El fuego
• La tierra
• El agua

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.