Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales and Nahua origin traditions

Record summary

The Primeros Memoriales preserves Nahuatl accounts gathered during Bernardino de Sahagún’s early investigations, including deity lists, cosmology, ritual, sacred places, and narratives relevant to movement between human and divine domains. It predates much of the finished Florentine Codex and therefore offers a useful comparison for tracing how information changed during compilation. The manuscript reflects collaboration with Indigenous learned specialists but was elicited under missionary conditions and organized partly through European ethnographic questions. Its fragmentary coverage means that absence of a motif cannot be treated as evidence of absence.