INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVENahual
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Mexico and northern Central America · Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, and widely among mestizos
Nahual
nahualli (Nahuatl) · nagual · nahualismo, the belief system
Shapeshifters
AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph Stories of naguales, people said to be able to change their form, are told in the Mexican countryside and on the edges of the capital, by children and teenagers, and in sensational comics and newspapers. Martínez González writes that scholars have left behind the old definition of nahualismo as "the belief in the transforming witch", because it varies from one people and period to another. For the Mexica, he names as the main references the definition of the nahualli in Book X of Sahagún's sixteenth-century Historia general and Florentine Codex.
A living belief: historian Roberto Martínez González (UNAM, 2011) opens his study by saying that belief in the nahualli "continúa sumamente vigente" (remains very much alive), a structural part of Indigenous thought that also reaches most mestizos. It is a belief system with a long scholarly literature, not a monster, and is presented here from that scholarship.
Earliest written source not verified
Roberto Martínez González, El nahualismo (UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2011), "Para estudiar el nahualismo" (archived)
Tradition · not evidence