Coatlicue

Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Earth and mother goddess who embodies birth, death, and the endless regeneration of living things.
Role in Mythos: The primordial mother who bore the sun, moon, and stars, and the ground from which the order of the cosmos proceeds.
Relation to Humans: Coatlicue governed childbirth and the fertility of the soil while also drawing the dead back down into the earth, so she stood at both the source and the end of every human life. The Mexica brought her offerings and feared her in equal measure, because the ground that fed the living was the same ground that would swallow them.

In the summer of 1790, workers cutting a drainage trench beneath the central square of Mexico City struck stone that would not give. They cleared the soil away and found themselves looking at a face that was not a face. Two serpents rose from the figure’s neck and turned to meet each other, fang to fang, where a head belonged. Around its throat hung a necklace of human hearts and severed hands, a skull resting flat against the breastbone. The skirt was a thick weave of snakes. The hands and feet curved into claws. The block stood nearly nine feet of dark andesite, and the colonial authorities, after a short look, ordered it buried again. They did not like what it did to the people who came to see it.

The statue was Coatlicue, and the sculptors who made her had not intended her to be easy company. Her name means snakes-her-skirt, from the Nahuatl words for serpent and skirt, and the garment is the whole point of her. She was the earth itself, the great mother of the Mexica, the womb that pushed life upward into the sun and the grave that took it back. The Aztecs did not separate those two functions. The same goddess who quickened a field of maize received the bodies that fell on it, and she wore the evidence around her neck.

She is sometimes called by other names, Toci, our grandmother, and Cihuacoatl, snake woman, the patron of mothers who die giving birth. They are aspects of the same power, the earth understood as a body that creates and consumes without preference. Her hearts and hands and claws tie her to Tlaltecuhtli, the earth lord whose hungry mouths open at every joint. To picture Coatlicue is to picture appetite and abundance carved into one shape.

Her own origin is the origin of the world, so the stories do not so much explain her as describe what she was already doing. The central myth finds her on Coatepec, Serpent Mountain, sweeping the temple. She was past childbearing, an old woman with the broom, and the work was ordinary. A ball of soft down feathers drifted down out of the air, and she caught it and tucked it against her belly to keep it. When she reached for it later it was gone, and she was carrying a child.

Her children took the pregnancy as an insult. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui, she of the golden bells, gathered her four hundred brothers, the Centzon Huitznahua, the stars of the southern sky, and turned them into an army. They put on war paint and marched up the mountain to kill their mother for the shame of it. Coatlicue was afraid. The child inside her spoke and told her to be calm.

What happened on the slope happened fast. As the warriors reached the summit, Coatlicue gave birth, and the child came out fully grown and dressed for battle. This was Huitzilopochtli, the sun and the war god, born armed with a fire serpent called Xiuhcoatl. He struck Coyolxauhqui first. He cut off her head and let her body come apart as it fell, and her pieces rolled down the mountain and scattered at the bottom, arms and legs and torso separated by the drop. He drove the four hundred others into the dark, where they became the scattered stars he puts out every dawn. The Mexica carved that fallen sister into a great round stone at the foot of their main temple, dismembered, her severed limbs arranged around her, so that every body sacrificed at the summit fell toward her the way she had fallen.

There is a quieter, harder reading of the colossal statue itself. The two serpents at Coatlicue’s neck are blood, jets of it, sculpted as snakes the way the Mexica drew spurting blood. In that reading the figure is not simply fearsome. She has been decapitated. The stories disagree on whose death the stone records, hers or her daughter’s, and the sculptors left no caption. What the stone insists on is the moment of the cut, the body still standing after the head is gone.

The plain fact under all of it is this. The earth that fed them would also eat them, and they built a goddess who admitted it.

Her power was generation on the largest possible scale. She brought forth the sun, the moon, and the stars, and below them the green things and the grain. Everything that grew was an extension of her body, and everything that grew was owed back to her in time. Her weakness, if it can be called that, was the same as her strength. She could not give without taking. She was bound to the cycle she was, the turning of life into death and death into the next harvest, and there was no part of that wheel she could refuse to turn. Even her hunger was honest. She asked for hearts and hands because those were what she had always taken, and the people who carved her in stone made sure no one looking at her could pretend otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Coatlicue?

Coatlicue is the Aztec earth and mother goddess, whose name means “serpent skirt.” She is the great mother of the Mexica gods, the source of fertility and life as well as the earth that receives the dead, and she gave birth to the sun god Huitzilopochtli, the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, and the stars.

What does Coatlicue look like?

Coatlicue is depicted as a monumental figure wearing a skirt of intertwined serpents and a necklace of human hearts and severed hands with a skull pendant at the chest. Her hands and feet end in claws like eagle talons, and in her most famous statue two serpents rise from her neck to form a face where her head has been removed.

How did Coatlicue become pregnant with Huitzilopochtli?

While Coatlicue was sweeping the temple on the mountain of Coatepec, a ball of down feathers fell from the sky, and she tucked it into her waistband, which made her pregnant. Her existing children were enraged by this and plotted to kill her, but the unborn Huitzilopochtli was born fully armed and defended her.

Why was Coyolxauhqui killed in the myth?

Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue’s daughter, led her four hundred brothers in an attack on their mother over the shameful pregnancy. When Huitzilopochtli was born, he beheaded Coyolxauhqui and dismembered her body, which tumbled down Coatepec, an event the Aztecs commemorated in a great carved stone at the base of the Templo Mayor.

What was Coatlicue the goddess of?

Coatlicue was the goddess of the earth, fertility, childbirth, life, and death. The Aztecs saw her as both the womb that brings forth all living things and the ground that consumes them again, making her a deity of regeneration and the unbroken cycle between life and death.