At the highest reach of the heavens lies Omeyocan, the Place of Duality. It is counted as the thirteenth and most distant of the celestial regions, beyond the courses of the Moon, the Sun, the stars, and the other powers that move above the earth. Unlike the heavens through which visible celestial bodies travel, Omeyocan belongs to the first ordering of existence and to the divine principle from which generation begins.
There dwell Ometecuhtli, the Two-Lord, and Omecihuatl, the Two-Lady. They are remembered as a primordial pair, father and mother at the furthest height of creation. In sacred speeches recorded among the Nahua, a newborn child could be described as having been formed in the Place of Duality by this heavenly father and mother before being sent into the mortal world.
Their place within religion differs from that of gods such as Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, or Huitzilopochtli. Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl are not chiefly known through great public festivals, martial cults, or the daily petitions of farmers and merchants. They belong instead to the remote beginning of things: conception, generation, birth, and the union of complementary powers.
Some traditions and later interpretations refer to the divine principle represented by this pair as Ometeotl, usually translated as Two-God or understood as a divinity of duality. Priests and philosophers have never spoken of this matter in exactly the same way. Some regard Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl as two aspects of a single generative power. Others speak of them as a paired lord and lady. Still others use different names for closely related creator beings, including Tonacatecuhtli, the Lord of Our Sustenance, and Tonacacihuatl, the Lady of Our Sustenance. The distinctions between these names belong to theology rather than ordinary worship, and different traditions do not always agree on whether they describe separate gods, different manifestations, or different ways of naming the same primordial powers.
What remains consistent is the importance of duality.
The ordering of the world depends upon paired forces. Male and female, heat and cold, light and darkness, dryness and moisture, sky and earth, life and death are not understood simply as enemies. They define and complete one another. Creation occurs through their interaction. Neither side alone describes the whole.
This principle appears repeatedly throughout the cosmos. The year alternates between seasons of dryness and rain. The Sun rises from one side of the world and disappears into another. Maize must be buried before it grows. Human beings enter life through birth and eventually return to the earth through death. Fire consumes what sustains it, while sacrifice gives something up so that something else may continue.
For this reason the earliest state of existence is not remembered as a completed world ruled by a single solitary creator. The cosmos emerges through relationships among divine powers, and those powers frequently possess several names, forms, and associations.
From the primordial divine order came the gods who took a more active part in shaping the world.
Among them were Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, and Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Other creator gods appear beside them in different accounts, and their parentage and ordering vary among surviving traditions. The gods themselves cannot always be arranged into a single simple genealogy. A deity may appear under several names, share attributes with another, or be described differently by the priesthoods of separate cities.
Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca are especially important because they repeatedly appear at moments when the structure of the world changes. They can act together as creators and oppose one another as rivals. Their relationship is not a simple struggle between a benevolent god and a malevolent one. Both participate in creation, destruction, and the succession of cosmic ages.
Before their work was completed, however, there was still no mortal world in its present form.
The heavens had not yet been firmly separated from the earth. Mountains had not risen into their later shapes. The valleys, caves, springs, forests, and cultivated lands known to the people of the Fifth Sun did not yet exist. Humanity had not been created.
The earliest creation accounts instead describe primordial water, and upon or within those waters existed the being from whose body the earth would eventually be formed.
Different traditions preserve different names and descriptions for this being. One of the most important is Tlaltecuhtli, the Earth Lord, a vast earth deity whose monstrous body was associated with mouths, teeth, and an unending appetite. Other traditions preserve the name Cipactli, a primordial crocodilian being connected with the surface of the earth and the first day of the ritual calendar. The two figures overlap closely in later descriptions of creation, although they should not always be assumed to have been identical in every tradition.
The world familiar to mortals therefore did not begin as empty land waiting to be inhabited.
The land itself had first to be made.
Its making would require the gods to seize the primordial being of the waters, divide its body, and transform what remained into the earth and sky.
The creation of Tlalticpac, the earthly surface upon which mortals now live, begins there.