Centeotl

Also Known As: Nahuatl Centeōtl, also written Cinteotl and Cinteōtl; from centli or cintli, the dried ear of maize, and teotl, god; called Tlazopilli, the beloved lord
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Centeotl is the dried maize ear made divine, a young god whose buried body turned into cotton, seeds, sweet potato and corn.
Role in Mythos: He is the maize god of the Mexica, born to the earth and honoured in the planting and harvest feasts of the ritual year.
Relation to Humans: People ate him every day, since tortillas, tamales and gruel were all made of his substance. In return they carried seed ears to his temple each spring and kept them in the granary as its heart.

A girl walks up the causeway into Tenochtitlan in the fourth month of the year with seven ears of dried maize tied on her back. The ears are wrapped in paper and spotted with drops of liquid rubber. They rattle a little as she climbs. She is carrying a god to his temple, and she will carry him home again before dark.

The god is Centeotl, and his name says exactly what he is. Centli is the Nahuatl word for the dried ear of maize, the hard one that hangs in the rafters and rasps against the palm when the kernels are thumbed off. Teotl is god. The Mexica had other maize powers for other moments of the plant. Xilonen was the tender green ear with its silk still wet. Chicomecoatl, Seven Serpent, was sustenance itself and the mistress of the storehouse. Centeotl was the ear that had ripened, dried and come indoors, the one that would be both next year’s seed and tonight’s supper.

The screenfold books paint him young. His skin is yellow, the colour of the ripe grain, and ears of maize stand up out of his headdress, sometimes with their leaves still on. One mark sets him apart from every other youthful god on the page: a broken black line that drops from the eyebrow, crosses the cheek and ends at the jaw. Painters far to the east gave their own maize god much the same stripe. He is nearly always a man. Not quite always, because the friar Bernardino de Sahagún, writing down what Nahua elders told him in the middle of the sixteenth century, sometimes calls Centeotl a goddess and lets the name slide into Chicomecoatl’s. The two shared a temple, the Cinteopan, and the Mexica do not seem to have lost sleep over the overlap.

His birth is told more than one way. A page of the Codex Borbonicus shows the earth goddess Tlazolteotl in the act of delivering him, and a tradition recorded by Sahagún makes his father Piltzintecuhtli, the young prince of the sun. A hymn sung for him places the birth in Tamoanchan, the misty home of the gods, on the day One Flower. The fullest telling survives only in a French translation of a lost Spanish manuscript from the 1540s, known as the Histoyre du Mechique. There the gods go down into a cave, where Piltzintecuhtli lies with Xochiquetzal, the goddess of flowers. Their son is Centeotl.

What the child does next is the whole point of him. He puts himself under the ground. Out of his hair comes cotton. One ear gives an edible seed and the other ear gives a second kind. Chia grows from his nose, sweet potato from his fingers, and from his fingernails a long variety of maize. The rest of his body turns into more fruits than the text troubles to list. The cave smells of turned soil and the dark is warm, and every plant that a farmer in the Valley of Mexico put into a field is suddenly pushing up through it. For this the gods called him Tlazopilli, the beloved lord. He fed the world by being buried in it.

A second story explains how the grain reached people, and Centeotl has no part in it. In that telling the maize was locked inside the Mountain of Sustenance until Quetzalcoatl turned himself into an ant and carried kernels out. The Mexica kept both accounts and did not try to make them agree.

His year had two great turns. The first was Huey Tozoztli, the Great Vigil, the fourth of the eighteen months. Families went out to their plots and brought back young maize stalks, dressed them with flowers and stood them up indoors as gods, with food set in front of them. Then the girls made their walk to the Cinteopan with the bundles of seven ears. The priests blessed the maize and the girls took it home, where it went to the bottom of the bin and was called the heart of the granary. When the rains came it was the first seed in the ground.

The second turn was darker. In Ochpaniztli, the month of sweeping, a woman who had lived for days as the earth mother Toci was killed at midnight and flayed. A priest put on her skin. The skin of one thigh was cut away separately and carried to a second man, who wore it over his face as a mask, and that man was Centeotl, her son. The mask was cold and damp, and it tightened as it dried. On his head he wore a tall cap that curled over backward with a notched edge, the cap of Itztlacoliuhqui, the lord of frost. He stood beside his mother while the city acted out his birth, and later he watched the warriors parade. When the feast ended, a party of fighting men ran the mask out to hostile country at the edge of Mexica lands and left it there on a wooden frame. Men died on that errand.

The powers follow from the burial in the cave. Centeotl is food, and so he is life in the plainest sense the Mexica had. He ruled the days numbered seven in the divinatory count, and he sat fourth among the nine Lords of the Night who took turns governing the hours of darkness. A child born under him could expect to eat. His reach extended past the grain to everything else his body became: the cotton for cloth, the chia, the roots.

The limits are just as plain. He cannot water himself, and without Tlaloc’s rain he is a dry stalk. He wears frost on his own head every autumn, and frost is the thing that kills young maize. He has no wars, no cunning and no adventures. His one great act is to lie down in the earth, and every year he has to do it again.

The Spanish, hearing the name, sometimes took its first syllable for the Nahuatl word for one and wrote him down as the One God, which must have confused everybody. He outlasted the mistake. A Nahua story collected in 1968 still speaks of an owner of the maize, and calls him Sindiopi.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Centeotl?

Centeotl is the Aztec god of maize, and his name means dried maize ear god in Nahuatl. He is shown as a young man with a yellow body and ears of maize in his headdress. He is also called Tlazopilli, the beloved lord.

Who are Centeotl’s parents?

The accounts of Centeotl’s parents differ. One tradition makes him the son of the earth goddess Tlazolteotl and Piltzintecuhtli, and the Codex Borbonicus shows Tlazolteotl giving birth to him. The Histoyre du Mechique names his parents as Piltzintecuhtli and the flower goddess Xochiquetzal, and in the festival of Ochpaniztli he is the son of Toci.

How did Centeotl create food plants?

In the Histoyre du Mechique, Centeotl put himself under the ground after his birth in a cave. Cotton grew from his hair, edible seeds from his ears, chia from his nose, sweet potato from his fingers and maize from his fingernails. The rest of his body became many other fruits.

What festivals honoured Centeotl?

Centeotl was honoured in Huey Tozoztli, the fourth month, when girls carried bundles of seven maize ears to his temple, the Cinteopan, to be blessed as seed. He also appeared in Ochpaniztli, the month of sweeping, when a priest playing Centeotl wore a mask made from the thigh skin of the woman sacrificed as Toci.

Is Centeotl male or female?

Centeotl is usually male and is painted as a young man. Bernardino de Sahagún sometimes calls Centeotl a goddess, and the name overlaps with the maize goddess Chicomecoatl, who shared the Cinteopan temple with him.