Black Tonatiuh — Reversing the Aztec Sun Through Image and Process

This photo composition was the last one I completed in 2025, and it expresses a certain heaviness that we can attribute to the burdens of the past. I called it Black Tonatiuh, because it symbolizes the quiet space just before something turns—before dawn breaks, before a mask is fully removed, before the calendar resets and language catches up to feeling. It's an image that tells the story of thresholds.

Once again, I have created an image that tells the stories of the Aztec deities from ancient Mexica myths through my own lens of what I call my Aztec multiverse. In this image, it is the aspects of Tonatiuh, reversed, that begin to radiate forth.

I named the piece Black Tonatiuh because that moment of anticipation—between states—is a liminal space in which new things, like art and life, await to be born.

How I Understand the Finished Image

This image continues to also express aspects of my gender experience, which is non-binary. To this day, I am still suprrised that so many cis folks struggle to understand what non-binary identity is, but that is where art comes in. To the best of my ability, my images are telling my story, about my body, my feelings, and what I internally move through as gender. I'll also emphasize that I am not agender. I am non-binary, and I realize many of my energies may come from male and female, but I mostly feel something else, something beyond the binary, and I have always felt this way.

In my own process, this image marked the end of a long sequence of edits—photographic, conceptual, emotional. The final version is slightly psychedlic and noir, and that is by intent. The floral motifs are also direct references to Xochipilli, the central figure of my project Our Lord of the Flowers, and I hope the viewer is able to almost imagine what the flowers in this image might smell and even taste like.

Why I Named the Image Black Tonatiuh

Tonatiuh (Nahuatl: "He Who Goes Forth Shining") is the fierce and radiant sun god who governs the current era of the world, known as the Fifth Sun. In Aztec cosmology, the universe had already been created and destroyed four times, and Tonatiuh only emerged through the extreme self-sacrifice of the humble god Nanahuatzin, who threw himself into a divine pyre at Teotihuacán. Because he refused to move across the sky until the other gods gave him their own blood, Tonatiuh serves as the primary justification for the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. He is not merely a source of light, but a demanding "Sun of Movement" who must be perpetually "fed" with human hearts and blood to sustain his daily battle against the forces of darkness and forestall a predicted apocalypse by earthquakes.

In Mesoamerican art, Tonatiuh is often depicted with a blood-red body and a blonde wig—the golden color representing the sun’s rays—crowned by a magnificent eagle-feather headdress, as the eagle was his primary animal avatar. His most distinctive and visceral motif is his sacrificial flint-knife tongue protruding from an open mouth, a visual demand for the "precious water" of human blood. He is frequently shown at the center of a solar disk with ray-like triangles and agave thorns (symbols of self-sacrifice), and in codices, he often carries a shield that doubles as a sun disk, sometimes accompanied by an eagle clutching human hearts in its talons to signify the capture of life force.

As you can see, my approach to depicting aspects of Tonatiuh are much more self-referential, but ultimately, you the viewer is who decides what you see in this image, and who feels the emotions it invokes.

Calling this image Black Tonatiuh is not an act of negation. It is a deliberate inversion. Rather than depicting the sun as overwhelming presence, I wanted to reverse his meaning but without invoking the symbol of the moon. 

Tonatiuh as a Reference Point

I’m not interested in reproducing iconography beat by beat or replicating the visual art style of my ancestors. Instead, I tell the stories of the Aztec deities through my modern lens and the tools that are in front of me: my body, my camera, the digital studio, and the layers in software like Photoshop that allow me to reveal the petals of the proverbial flower that I call a piece of photo art. 

As an Aztec sun god, Tonatiuh represents continuity through motion. Time is not linear progress but cyclical return. Light is not permanent; it must pass through interruption. From that perspective, eclipse is not an anomaly but part of the system.

Mask, Body, and the Threshold Moment

Masks recur in my work not as disguises, but as interfaces. in fact, I published a whole essay about masks. They create new worlds, an in the case of black spandex masks like the ones I use in my art, they also can collapse, suffocate, or end worlds.

In this image, the mask is not a symbol of doom. Instead, it's about the quiet, liminal moment before we take flight into new higher realms. It rests. The body language and even the tattoo in this image tell their own story. They are secret stories that you too can access through your imagination if you spend enough time with it.

That in-between state—between covering and revealing, between year’s end and beginning—is where this image lives.

This Image is A Bridge in Time

This image marks the first new composition in my Winter 2025-2026 gallery. As we enter winter, it heralds the beginning of a new series of images and approaches that all tie in seamlessly into this project called Our Lord of the Flowers. With Xochipilli as its central figure, these seasonal galleries also introduce us to the rest of the Aztec goddesses and gods, as well as Sir Vitrum, the central character of the novel. You can read the original first chapter of the serial, as well as a new excerpt, if you are intersted. The paperback drops in 2026.

Ending Without Resolution

I don’t think of this photograph as a conclusion. It’s a marker. The last image of a year that required shedding and re-formation, and the first quiet note of whatever follows. And to put a fine point on it, it's an image which clearly expresses a lot of grief in my lived experience. And I'm not too shy to admit that.

Black Tonatiuh stands in contrast to the sun as spectacle. It favors proximity over proclamation. It suggests that renewal doesn’t always arrive in brightness—sometimes it comes through pause, eclipse, and the patience of staying still long enough to let form return.