The Hidden Rites
Prayers, Spells and Ceremonies of the Nahua, Recorded in Secret in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A century after the conquest, the Aztec gods were still worshipped in secret. This is the record of what was hidden, in its first English translation.

“I am the priest, the very war, for whom everything is a joke and a laughing matter.” In the villages of seventeenth-century Mexico the old religion had gone underground. Families kept their idols wrapped in baskets with offerings of copal. People fed the fire at midnight before the Christian feast at dawn, counted the sacred days, and consulted the divine seeds and herbs. Farmers spoke to the maize, hunters to the deer, fishermen to the water and porters to the mountain road, in words handed down from the elders. A priest of the cathedral of Mexico set out to record every rite and every spell so that they could be rooted out. His book preserved them instead.

Jacinto de la Serna’s Manual for Ministers of the Indians (1656), with Pedro Ponce’s Brief Account of the Gods and Rites of the Heathen. With a translator’s introduction, notes, glossary and index.

Ancient Americas Classics, Volume I. Translated from the Spanish, with an introduction, notes, glossary, bibliography and index, by Rob Newton M.D.