El Quinto Sol
A fully custom playing-card deck inspired by Mesoamerican mythology, cosmology, and pictographic traditions.
I’m Juan Erazo, a Mexico City–based illustrator, director, producer, and cultural strategist with more than a decade of experience in the creative industries, spanning art, film, advertising, marketing, and international cultural projects. My work often moves between visual storytelling, research, mythology, and design, exploring how stories and symbolic systems can be reinterpreted for contemporary audiences. Alongside my work leading international partnerships and program development at Culturans, I develop personal projects under the name The Mythographer.
El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos is my first fully custom playing-card deck and the result of almost two years of research, illustration, and design inspired by Mesoamerican mythology, cosmology, and pictographic traditions, with a particularly strong Nahua/Mexica foundation.
Artwork
Photographs of the prototype deck, including its illustrated cards and tuck box.
Project video
A stop-motion film telling the story behind the deck.
The project began with my fascination for the way Mesoamerican cultures encoded ideas about time, creation, death, sacrifice, nature, and the cosmos through deities, glyphs, calendrical systems, colors, directions, animals, and ritual objects. Rather than simply borrowing the visual surface of these traditions, I wanted to understand the logic behind the imagery and build a deck in which those relationships could function as a coherent symbolic system.
My main sources of inspiration include the Codex Borgia and other surviving pictorial manuscripts, archaeological objects, museum collections, historical sources, and modern scholarship. Research visits to the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City also played an important role, allowing me to engage directly with the scale, texture, construction, and iconographic detail of original objects. Books such as Miguel León-Portilla’s De Teotihuacán a los Aztecas and Margarita Martínez del Sobral’s Geometría Mesoamericana were especially influential in shaping the historical and visual framework of the deck.
The design process began with research, visual studies, sketches, and comparisons between different historical representations of the same figures and symbols. From there, I gradually translated the imagery into a contemporary playing-card language. The traditional French-suited structure remains intact, but I built a second symbolic system beneath it: Spades correspond to North and Wind, Hearts to East and Fire, Diamonds to South and Water, and Clubs to West and Earth.
- SpadesNorth · Wind
- HeartsEast · Fire
- DiamondsSouth · Water
- ClubsWest · Earth
The court cards reinterpret deities and mythic figures, the Aces represent foundational or creative forces, and the numbered cards incorporate Mesoamerican numerals, glyphs, and calendrical references.
One of the central challenges was avoiding the idea that “Mesoamerican mythology” was a single, unified tradition. El Quinto Sol is therefore presented as a contemporary synthesis, rather than an archaeological reconstruction, with a strong Nahua/Mexica backbone and a deliberate distinction between historical source material and my own artistic interpretation.
The finished deck remains fully functional as a standard playing-card deck, while also acting as a visual map of the cosmology behind it. It is accompanied by the Codex of the Fifth Sun, a companion guide exploring the mythology, iconography, historical sources, and design decisions behind the cards.
