This clouds our ability to make accurate or more nuanced discussions about gods, ideas, change, iconography, and beliefs in Pre-Conquest Anahuac. For example, while Huitzilopochtli overshadows him in modern discussions, Mixcoatl is *extremely* prevalent in stories and codices.

Additionally, the significance of the Four Directions was a real "thing", but it wasn't as straightforward as Caso's version implies. Page 1 of the Codex Fejéváry-Mayer shows a spectacular, deeply complex version of this idea, featuring multiple gods, different plants, and birds.

Modern scholarship and popular imagination discussions often over-rely on written texts such as the Florentine Codex and "Historia de los Mexicanos", which are flawed in multiple ways, from spelling issues to outright changing concepts to suit a 1500's Spanish audience.

This goes hand-in-hand with problems in archaeology: as a discipline, archaeology over-relies on materials that *do not degrade* (or rather, degrade more slowly), so we often miss the things that degrade, fade, or are outright intangible.

For example, Miller and Taube describe that the Four Directions were aligned with the "Four Skybearers", who (according to their research) were Quetzalcoatl, Xiuhtecuhtli, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, and...Mictlantecuhtli himself.

These Sky Bearers were likely associated with specific constellations, so the intangibility and constant yearly changes in the night sky make this difficult to explore. Paired with modern light pollution, we often forget that the interpretation of stories and codices --

-- likely related on multiple calendrical elements: stars, the season, the ecliptic path, the movement of planets (Venus in particular), the growth of plants, the arrangement of landscapes, etc.

Caso's interpretation of the "Historia de los Mexicanos" offers a neat, well-intended idea, and it seems to provide a neat, clean way to view the pantheon and establish an analytical base upon.

But unfortunately, it isn't true.

Lastly, I just want to point out that, obviously, Olivier discusses this problem, but @JohannesC7 wrote about this topic 5 years ago on Deviantart (with cited sources and everything!!). https://www.deviantart.com/lajosjancsi/art/The-four-sons-of-the-primitive-pair-557758295

Johannes also pointed out that there is some sort of blue figure who looks like Tezcatlipoca in the Codex Fejéváry-Mayer but that this version doesn't seem related to Huitzilopochtli in the slightest (also his eyes are missing and it's slightly horrifying).