Mayahuel

Before dawn on the high plains east of the Valley of Mexico, a man walks out to a plant that has been growing since he was a boy. He has already cut out its heart and let the cavity heal. Now he scrapes the wound open again, sets a long hollow gourd against it, and draws up what pooled there overnight. The liquid comes cold and faintly sweet and smells of cut stalk and wet earth. By evening it will be cloudy, sour and slightly alive, and the men drinking it will be singing.

The plant is the maguey. The goddess is Mayahuel. Pulling the two apart is harder than it sounds, and the painters of the codices did not really try. In the Codex Borbonicus she sits inside the rosette of a great agave, and her skin is laid down in the same blue as the leaves, so that the eye reads woman and plant as one object. She holds what looks like spun cord. Her headband is cotton and bristles with spindles, the sign a Mexica painter used for a goddess of fertility and craft. A crescent ornament hangs at her nose, the yacametzli, worn by every deity connected with the fermented sap. In the Codex Ríos she is drawn with breasts beyond counting, which is either a statement about the plant’s endless milky yield or about her children, and probably both.

Her story survives in one place, and that place is stranger than the story. A French manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Histoyre du Mechique, carries the only telling. It was translated from a Spanish original that no longer exists, some time after 1546, by someone whose name is lost, for the Franciscan André Thevet, whose signature is on it. The Spanish behind it probably came from the lost researches of fray Andrés de Olmos. The translator did not know Nahuatl. It shows.

In it, the gods look at the newly made human beings and conclude that a creature with nothing to enjoy will not sing, dance or praise anyone. Ehecatl, the wind, who is also Quetzalcoatl, goes looking for something to fix this. He remembers a maiden goddess kept in the sky, guarded by her grandmother, one of the tzitzimime, the star demons who come down when the light goes. He wakes her while the old woman sleeps and carries her to earth, where the two of them put down roots and grow into a forked tree with two branches, one the plumed willow, quetzalhuexotl, the other the flower tree, xochicuahuitl.

The grandmother wakes to an empty sky. She calls the rest of the tzitzimime down, and they come. They find the tree and they know which branch is which. They break Mayahuel’s branch away and split it and eat her, and there is nothing in the account about mercy or a last word. Ehecatl gathers what bones he can find, digs, and buries them. The first maguey comes up out of that grave.

Now the difficulty. That manuscript names her exactly once, and spells it Mayauetl. It garbles the two tree names as well, into quecalhuexolt and choquicauitl, which is the kind of mangling that happens when a text passes from Nahuatl to Spanish to French through hands that read none of the first. The name reached print in French in 1905, went into Spanish through Joaquín Meade in 1961, and became famous when Ángel María Garibay put it in his Teogonía e historia de los mexicanos in 1965, where he spelled it Meyahuel. The historian Rodolfo Ramírez Rodríguez has argued that Garibay was closer, and that the real word is Meyehual, metl plus yahualli, the round of magueys, or that which encircles the maguey, meaning the divine thing that lives in the plant rather than a lady who owns it. A village in Iztapalapa still carries the name: Santa Cruz Meyehualco, the place of Meyehual.

Her name is probably wrong.

The rest of the record is thinner and more useful than the legend. Bernardino de Sahagún, gathering testimony around 1570, mentions a Mayauel twice, and never calls her a goddess of anything. At Tepeilhuitl, the thirteenth month, a woman was killed as the image of the magueys, alongside three women who stood for the mountains of Tlaxcala and a man who stood for the snakes. Elsewhere Sahagún records that among the peoples of the Gulf coast it was a woman who first knew how to bore into the magueys and draw out the honey the wine is made from, and her name was Mayauel. That is an inventor, not a deity, and the man who worked out which roots to add to make the sap ferment is named separately as Pantecatl. Diego Durán uses the now familiar spelling when he lists her among the gods honoured at Tlacaxipehualiztli. The gloss beside her portrait in the Codex Magliabechiano is blunter than all of them: the next demon was called Mayahuel, which means maguey, because the juice that comes from it was an intoxicant, and they dance.

Other candidates for the maguey’s owner were on the table. Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc, writing in 1598, gives the god of the maguey as Meteotl. Michel Graulich preferred Mecitli, the maguey hare, a moon goddess who suckled Mixcoatl and several of the drink gods. Katarzyna Mikulska has traced Mayahuel’s functions across Tlazolteotl, Xochiquetzal and Cihuacoatl, which is a polite way of saying she never had a clean edge.

What she does have is an appetite for descendants. The four hundred rabbits, the Centzon Totochtin, are hers, and four hundred in Nahuatl is less a number than a shrug meaning more than you can count. Each rabbit is a different drunk. Tepoztecatl is one, Ometochtli another, and between them they cover every way a person can be altered by the sap of a plant, from the loosened tongue to the collapse in the doorway. The tonalpohualli gave Mayahuel the eighth thirteen day run, the trecena beginning 1 Malinalli, and that stretch was understood as a time of excess and appetite, a licence with an expiry date printed on it.

Her power is simply provision, and it is total. The maguey gave the highlands food, sweet sap, vinegar, fibre for rope and cloth and nets, needles from its spine tips, thorns for the bloodletting that fed the gods, beams and troughs and roof tiles from the dried stalk, paper for the books that recorded all of it. No other single plant in Mesoamerica came close, which is why the goddess who is the plant ends up filed under fertility, nourishment and abundance all at once, and why the drink she yields sat at the centre of public ritual rather than off to one side of it.

Her limitation is built into the same fact. She cannot give without being opened. The maguey that is tapped never flowers and never seeds. Its heart is cut out at the moment it prepares to bloom, and it is bled every day for months until it dies empty. That is the myth acted out in a field: a body taken apart, consumed, and yielding for years afterwards. The tzitzimime who ate her were not doing anything the tlachiquero does not do every morning with a scraper and a gourd, and the story is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mayahuel?

Mayahuel is the Aztec goddess of the maguey, the agave plant of central Mexico. She is treated in the codices as the plant itself given a body, painted the same blue as its leaves and shown seated inside its rosette. She is best known from the myth in which she is torn apart and the first maguey grows from her buried bones.

How did Mayahuel die?

According to the Histoyre du Mechique, Ehecatl carried Mayahuel down from the sky and the two of them took root as a forked tree. Her grandmother, one of the tzitzimime, brought the other star demons down to find her, and they broke away the branch that was Mayahuel, split it and devoured her. Ehecatl buried her bones, and the first maguey plant grew from the grave.

Is Mayahuel the goddess of pulque?

Not exactly. Mayahuel is tied to the maguey plant that produces the sap, while the fermented drink itself belongs to a crowd of other gods, including Patecatl, who is credited with discovering the roots that make it ferment, and the four hundred rabbits. The Aztec sources describe her as the image of the maguey, and the reading of her as a goddess of drunkenness came later.

Who are the four hundred rabbits?

The Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbits, are Mayahuel’s children and the gods of intoxication, each one representing a different kind of drunkenness. Four hundred in Nahuatl functions as a word for an uncountable number rather than a literal tally. The Codex Ríos shows Mayahuel with a great many breasts, understood as her means of feeding them all.

Is Mayahuel her real name?

Possibly not. The name appears exactly once in the manuscript that preserves her myth, spelled Mayauetl in a French text translated from a lost Spanish original by someone who did not read Nahuatl. Some scholars argue the correct form is Meyahuel or Meyehual, from metl and yahualli, meaning the round of magueys or that which surrounds the maguey, a form preserved in the name of the Mexico City village of Santa Cruz Meyehualco.

Related Entries

Quetzalcoatl, Tzitzimitl, Xochiquetzal, Tlazolteotl, Cōātlīcue, Tlaltecuhtli, Chalchiuhtlicue, Xipe Totec, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Ilamatecuhtli, Moon rabbit, Dionysus, Silenus, Soma