Durán’s Accounts of Aztec Portents

Record summary

Dominican friar Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España records Indigenous and colonial traditions concerning signs associated with the arrival of the Spaniards, including celestial or atmospheric portents. Modern ancient-astronaut writers sometimes isolate such passages as evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. The source is more usefully studied as a sixteenth-century chronicle with layered oral, pictorial, and Christian interpretive influences. Its relevance lies in how conquest narratives become transformed into encounter claims, while the original genre and transmission history resist literal modern equivalence.