Chimalman

The first arrow passes over her head. She only has to dip a little to let it go. The second comes in at her side and she bends away from it. The third she takes out of the air with her hand. The fourth goes between her legs and rattles off into the scrub. Then the hunter lowers his bow, looks at her for a moment, and leaves.

That is how Chimalman enters the record, in a Nahuatl manuscript written down in 1558 and known today as the Leyenda de los Soles. The hunter is Mixcoatl, Cloud Serpent, a god of the chase and of the northern wilds, and he has come south on a run of conquests. At a place called Huitznahuac a woman walks out to meet him. She sets her shield on the ground. She sets her arrows and her spear-thrower beside it. Then she stands in front of him with no skirt and no blouse, nothing between her and the bowstring but dry air.

It is hard to read this as anything but a dare.

After the four arrows she goes and hides in a cave in a great ravine. Mixcoatl comes back to Huitznahuac looking for her and cannot find her, so he takes his temper out on the other women of the place. They decide, reasonably, that she should deal with him herself, and they fetch her out. The meeting is played a second time, exactly as before. Shield down, weapons down, bare skin, four shots, four misses. Only then does he put the bow aside and lie with her, and she conceives.

The pregnancy ends badly. Her labour lasts four days. The child is born alive and is given the calendar name Ce Acatl, One Reed. His mother does not survive the birth. The boy is handed to the goddess Quilaztli, also called Cihuacoatl, and raised by her. He grows up to bury his murdered father, avenge him, and become Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the priest-king of Tollan whose fall the Nahuas were still mourning when the Spanish arrived. Chimalman is gone from the story before her son can walk.

Not everyone told it that way. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan, a history compiled around 1570 and bound in the same manuscript, gives the birth in the year One Reed and names the same mother, but there are no arrows in it. She swallows a piece of jade, and the child is set in her womb by the stone. The Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta heard a homelier version late in the sixteenth century. In his telling she is sweeping when she finds the green stone, and she puts it in her mouth. A woman with a broom, a bead the colour of new maize, a moment’s impulse. A god is on the way. Nahua listeners would have known the pattern. Coatlicue is sweeping too, on her hill, when the ball of feathers drifts down that makes her the mother of Huitzilopochtli.

The friar Motolinía has one more variant. He was told of an old man of the Seven Caves, Iztac Mixcoatl, whose first wife bore the founders of the nations and whose second wife, Chimalma, bore him Quetzalcoatl alone.

Then there is the other Chimalman, who may or may not be the same woman. The Codex Boturini is a long strip of bark paper painted in Mexico City in the first decades after the conquest, and it shows the Mexica leaving their island home of Aztlán. Across the opening pages four figures walk in single file, footprints trailing behind them. Three are men. The first carries the bundle of Huitzilopochtli on his back, the god’s head peering out of it from a hummingbird’s beak. The fourth, bringing up the rear, is a woman in a white blouse with her own load tied in a carrying cloth. A line joins her to a small round shield. That is her name. The Codex Aubin and the Codex Azcatitlan show her as well, and the Nahua historian Chimalpahin, writing in the early 1600s, says in so many words that the people who came out of Aztlán brought with them a woman named Chimalman. The god-bearers heard Huitzilopochtli speak and passed on his orders. For one of the four to be a woman is unusual, and the painters gave no reason.

The books leave the two Chimalmans side by side and do not join them. One belongs to the Toltec past and dies in childbed. The other walks through the Mexica migration with a god’s goods on her back. The name is the link. In 1629 the priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, collecting Nahuatl spells in the hills of Guerrero, noted Chimalman as the wife of Mixcoatl and mother of Quetzalcoatl, and took the word to mean one who has lain spread like a shield. Others take the ending as the word for hand, which fits a woman who catches arrows. Sahagún’s informants simply listed it among the names given to girls.

What she can do is stated in one scene and never explained. Weapons do not find her, though she takes no trouble to guard herself and carries nothing to guard herself with. She is the shield. It is a narrow gift. It works against a hunter with a bow. It does nothing for her in the birthing house four days into labour, where the Nahuas held that every woman fought as a warrior fights, and where she lost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chimalman in Aztec mythology?

Chimalman is the mother of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the priest-king of Tollan, in the Nahua histories of central Mexico. The father is the hunter god Mixcoatl. A woman of the same name also appears in the Mexica migration histories as one of the four god-bearers who left Aztlán carrying the sacred bundle.

What does the name Chimalman mean?

The name Chimalman comes from the Nahuatl word chimalli, meaning shield. It is read either as “shield hand” or as “she who lies spread like a shield”, and the 1629 writer Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón gave the second meaning. Sahagún’s informants listed Chimalman among the names given to girls.

How did Chimalman become the mother of Quetzalcoatl?

The sources give two accounts. In the Leyenda de los Soles of 1558, Mixcoatl shoots four arrows at Chimalman on two separate occasions, misses every time, and then lies with her. In the Anales de Cuauhtitlan and in Mendieta’s version she swallows a piece of jade and becomes pregnant from the stone.

How did Chimalman die?

Chimalman dies giving birth to Ce Acatl after four days of labour, according to the Leyenda de los Soles. The child survives and is raised by the goddess Quilaztli, also called Cihuacoatl. He later becomes Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.

Is Chimalman in the Codex Boturini?

A woman named Chimalman is painted in the Codex Boturini as the fourth of the four god-bearers who lead the Mexica out of Aztlán. She is the only woman among them and is identified by a round shield name sign. The Codex Aubin, the Codex Azcatitlan and the historian Chimalpahin also record her, and the sources do not say whether she is the same figure as the mother of Quetzalcoatl.

Related Entries

Mixcoatl, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Aztlán, Cōātlīcue, Coyolxauhqui, Itzpapalotl, Cihuateteo