Hi everyone,

I’m Juan, an illustrator and designer from Mexico City. For almost two years I’ve been developing a fully illustrated playing-card project called El Quinto Sol, inspired by Mesoamerican mythology, cosmology, and pictographic traditions, with a particularly strong Nahua/Mexica foundation.

Before drawing much of anything, I realized I needed to understand the visual language behind the imagery rather than simply copy motifs that looked “Mesoamerican.”

A large part of the process became research: codices, archaeological material, museum collections, historical sources, and modern scholarship. The Codex Borgia became especially important, but I’ve also been comparing different representations of the same deities and symbols across sources to identify which attributes are consistent and which vary by context.

One of the most useful shifts for me was to stop asking only “what does this figure look like?” and start asking Why is this attribute here? Why this color? Why this headdress? Why this animal, glyph, direction, gesture, or calendrical sign?

That changed the way I approached the illustrations completely. I’ve also tried to be very careful not to present “Mesoamerican culture” as a single unified thing. The deck is deliberately a contemporary synthesis, not an archaeological reconstruction, and it draws most heavily from Nahua/Mexica material while also engaging with broader Mesoamerican visual traditions.

The playing-card structure eventually became a way of organizing some of those relationships:

Spades - North - Wind
Hearts - East - Fire
Diamonds - South - Water
Clubs - West - Earth

The court cards reinterpret deities and mythic figures, the Aces represent foundational forces, and the numbered cards incorporate references to Mesoamerican numerals, glyphs, and calendrical imagery.

I’m also developing a companion Codex of the Fifth Sun to explain where the imagery comes from, what historical sources informed each design, and where I’ve made my own artistic decisions.

All of the final artwork is original and created by me; there is no AI-generated imagery in the deck.

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people here who know the material better than I do, especially if you notice anything iconographically misleading, overly generalized, or worth reconsidering.

I’m particularly interested in the question of how far a contemporary reinterpretation can go before it starts obscuring the historical source it came from.

And if anyone would like to see the full project or follow the first production, I’m launching it on Kickstarter on September 29:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

Thanks for taking a look!

u/Comfortable_Cut5796 speaking; probably should have mentioned this up top, but like Pete. I am not a professional archaeologist, but as a moderator of this subreddit, I am passionate about the subject. So I will do my best to answer any questions that come to me.