lannan, I wrote this (https://tinyurl.com/aztecexceptionalism) blog post a while ago now, and it's more pertinent than I could have ever imagined.
A religious colleague of mine told me today that he had once emailed James Maffie, asking if his 500-page tome, "Aztec Philosophy" was meant to be a definitive work of historical scholarship or speculative conjecture - and Maffie admitted it was the latter.
I am without words, because he said nothing to this effect anywhere in the book... /