Centzon Mimixcoa

Also Known As: also Centzonmimixcoa, Centzon Mimixcoah; Nahuatl for “the Four Hundred Cloud Serpents”, where four hundred stands for a number past counting; singular Mixcoatl
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The Four Hundred are divine hunters armed by the Sun who became the first warriors ever killed to feed him, and later tradition sets them among the stars of the northern sky.
Role in Mythos: Their slaughter by five younger siblings is the first war of the present age and the model for every sacrifice of a captive that followed.
Relation to Humans: The wandering Chichimec hunters of the north were counted as their descendants, and one colonial annal has the Four Hundred walking ahead of those peoples as guides. Captives marked for the sacrificial stone were painted in their stripes, so that each one died as a Cloud Serpent.

Four hundred hunters lie asleep in the thorn country, sour cactus wine drying in their gourds and bright feathers stuck to their arms. Their arrows, fletched with quetzal and heron and troupial plumes, lean unused against the rocks. Overhead the newly made Sun waits to be fed. Nobody below is in any condition to do it.

These are the Centzon Mimixcoa, the Four Hundred Cloud Serpents. The number is a figure of speech, since in Nahuatl four hundred does the work that “countless” does in English. A Nahuatl manuscript written down in 1558, the Legend of the Suns, says they were born in a year called One Flint to the white form of Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of standing and running water, and that the Sun counted them as his own. He summoned them, handed each a shield and a sheaf of those costly arrows, and explained the arrangement. They were to hunt and to make war, and what they took was to be given as food and drink to him and to Tlaltecuhtli, the earth beneath them.

They kept the weapons and forgot the terms. They shot birds for sport. They brought down a jaguar and kept it. They pasted themselves with feathers, lay with women, and drank the fermented juice of a spiny desert plant until the days ran together. For a while the high desert must have sounded like one long festival, with gourds passing from hand to hand and bowstrings twanging at nothing in particular. The Sun got none of it.

So their mother went into a cave and bore five more. The text names them: Cuauhtlicoauh, Mixcoatl, Tlotepe, Apantecuhtli, and a sister, Cuitlachcihuatl, the Wolf Woman. They spent their first four days in water, and after that the earth itself nursed them. Then the Sun called these five in their turn and gave them plainer gear, arrows tipped with cactus thorn and a shield of rank, along with a short instruction to destroy their elder brothers.

The Four Hundred first saw the five perched together in a mesquite tree and wondered aloud who these strangers were that looked so much like themselves. By the time they came for them, the five had gone to ground. One was inside the tree trunk, Mixcoatl was under the soil, one was in the body of a hill, one in the water, and the sister stood in a ballcourt. What followed was less a battle than a landscape turning on its guests. The tree split and fell on them. The ground shook. The hill slid. The water boiled. Out of each of these came a sibling with a weapon in hand, and when it was over the Four Hundred were dead and the Sun had his first drink. A handful of survivors begged for their lives and offered the five their own home in exchange, the cave of Chicomoztoc.

That is the Nahuatl account. A Spanish text from the 1530s, the History of the Mexicans as Told by Their Paintings, tells it another way. There the hunter god Camaxtli, who is Mixcoatl under his Tlaxcalan name, strikes a rock with his staff and four hundred Chichimecs step out of it. He makes maguey wine and they drink themselves useless, and five beings who had been raised in the treetops and fed by eagles come down and kill them. Three escape: Xiuhnel, Mimich, and Camaxtli himself. The disagreement over whether the god of the hunt was among the killers or among the killed never gets settled, and in a sense it does not need to be. A hunter who can stand in for his own prey is very nearly the point of the whole cycle.

Xiuhnel and Mimich have a sequel. Two deer with two heads apiece come down from the sky, and the pair chase them through a night and a day until the animals turn into women who call the hunters over to eat and drink. Xiuhnel accepts, and the woman kills and eats him. Mimich lights a fire and runs through it, and she follows him until a barrel cactus drops from above and catches her. He shoots her where she lies. She is Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly, and when her body is burned it bursts into flints of five colors. Mixcoatl wraps the white one in a bundle and carries it as his god. The Annals of Cuauhtitlan, another colonial text, has Itzpapalotl devour all four hundred at once, with only the youngest Mixcoatl escaping to shoot her and call his brothers back. Afterwards they smear her ashes around their eyes, which is where the black mask comes from.

The rest of their appearance is just as legible. The red and white stripes are the paint of someone about to be sacrificed. In the hunting month of Quecholli, captives were carried up the temple steps bound hand and foot like deer, and war prisoners in general went to the stone wearing the striped body paint of the Cloud Serpents. The first beings to die for the Sun lent their likeness to all the rest.

Their power, then, is an odd one. They hold the bow before anyone else does, they father the hunting peoples of the north, and readers of the old books have long placed them in the night sky as the crowded stars of the north, a count past counting. Their limits are spelled out with unusual frankness. They are not undone by a stronger enemy. They are undone by a jaguar they did not hand over, a debt they treated as a gift, and a great deal of cactus wine. They were given everything and they wasted it. Against anything that hid inside the land itself they had no defense at all, and the two who outlived the ambush fared little better against a deer that had learned to speak.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Centzon Mimixcoa in Aztec mythology?

The Centzon Mimixcoa are the Four Hundred Cloud Serpents, a host of divine hunters created at the start of the present age to feed the Sun. They failed in that duty and were killed by five younger siblings. Their deaths are the first war and the first sacrifice of warriors in Aztec tradition.

What does Centzon Mimixcoa mean?

Centzon Mimixcoa is Nahuatl for “four hundred cloud serpents”. The number four hundred was used in Nahuatl to mean an uncountable multitude, so the name describes a host too large to count. The singular form is Mixcoatl, which is also the name of the Aztec god of the hunt.

Why were the Centzon Mimixcoa killed?

The Centzon Mimixcoa were killed because they did not feed the Sun. According to the Legend of the Suns, written down in 1558, the Sun gave them arrows and shields so they could bring him food and drink. They hunted for sport, kept a jaguar for themselves, drank cactus wine and slept with women, so the Sun armed five younger siblings to destroy them.

Who killed the Centzon Mimixcoa?

Five later-born siblings killed the Centzon Mimixcoa: Cuauhtlicoauh, Mixcoatl, Tlotepe, Apantecuhtli and their sister Cuitlachcihuatl. They hid inside a tree, the earth, a hill, the water and a ballcourt, then burst out and slaughtered the Four Hundred. A second account, from the 1530s, says that Xiuhnel, Mimich and the god Camaxtli were the only three to escape.

What do the Mimixcoa look like?

Painted manuscripts show a Cloud Serpent as a hunter with red and white stripes down the body, a black mask across the eyes and white down in the hair. The stripes are the body paint of a sacrificial victim. Captives going to sacrifice were painted the same way, so that they died in the likeness of the Mimixcoa.