Coyolxauhqui

Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A lunar goddess and warrior who commanded the southern stars and was dismembered by her newborn brother, the war and sun god.
Role in Mythos: She led her four hundred siblings in a revolt against their mother Coatlicue and, defeated at Serpent Mountain, became the moon and the broken emblem set at the foot of the Templo Mayor.
Relation to Humans: The Mexica did not so much pray to her as keep her underfoot, placing her shattered image where worshippers and the bodies of sacrificial victims would land. Her defeat was re-staged in ritual and in the very layout of the temple, a standing warning against rebellion and a charter for the war god’s supremacy.

At the foot of the great temple in Tenochtitlan lay a disk of pale, pinkish stone showing a woman come apart. Her head is severed and turned sideways, the mouth open. Her arms and legs are scattered around the stump of her torso in a slow pinwheel, each limb knotted at the joint by a serpent, each knee and elbow wearing the small fanged face of an earth creature. Bells sit on her cheeks. From her ears hang the trapeze-and-ray signs that quietly name the one who killed her. The Mexica carved her this way on purpose and set her exactly there, broken and ornate, at the base of the stairway, so that anyone climbing toward the shrine of the war god would pass over her ruin on the way up.

Her name means Bells on Her Face, for the golden discs fixed to her cheeks, and the people who told her story made those bells part of how she ended. She was the daughter of Coatlicue, the earth mother who wore a skirt of snakes, and she was the eldest and the fiercest of a vast brood. Her brothers numbered four hundred, the Centzon Huitznahua, the Southerners, who were the stars of the southern sky. Coyolxauhqui led them. Where the four hundred moved, she moved at their head.

The trouble began with a small soft thing falling out of the air. Coatlicue was sweeping the shrine on Coatepec, the hill called Serpent Mountain, doing the ordinary work of keeping a holy place clean, when a ball of feathers drifted down toward her. She caught it and tucked it against her waist to keep sweeping, and the down was gone when she looked for it again, and she was pregnant. Her children took this as filth and an insult. Coyolxauhqui put the rage into words. She convinced the four hundred that their mother had shamed them all and had to die for it, and she armed them, and she led them up the slope toward the woman who had borne them.

What none of them knew was that the child in the womb was listening. As the war party climbed, a voice from inside Coatlicue told her not to be afraid. At the moment the attackers reached the summit, Huitzilopochtli was born, and he came out grown and ready, painted for battle, carrying the xiuhcoatl, the fire serpent, as a weapon. He struck his sister first. He cut off her head, and her body went down the side of Coatepec, breaking apart as it fell, arms here and legs there, until what reached the bottom was no longer a shape that could stand. Then he turned on the four hundred and scattered them across the sky. In many tellings he flung Coyolxauhqui’s head upward, and it caught in the dark and became the moon, so that her face would hang over her brother’s enemies every night, defeated and still shining.

The carved disk that recorded all this came back into the world in a very ordinary way. In 1978 workers laying cable for the Mexico City electric company struck the edge of it underground, which is an unglamorous method of digging up a goddess. The monolith is about eleven feet across. The relief is shallow, the limbs splayed to suggest motion and fall, and the small details are precise and grim: scalloped flaps at every place where she was cut, two-headed serpents lashing the joints, a skull tied to a belt of intertwined snakes at her hips. Stone bells ride on her face. The signs at her ears echo the very serpent that took her apart.

Her power was real before it failed. She held the loyalty of four hundred warriors and the authority to turn the night sky into an army, and she was bold enough to move against the most dangerous figure in the family without hesitation. But her gifts were the wrong shape for what she met. Against a force already inside the situation, born armed at the instant of attack, command and numbers counted for nothing. The moon is no match for the sun, and the southern stars go out every dawn. That is the deeper meaning the priests built into her broken body at the bottom of the stairs. Each sunrise the war god rises and the night is scattered again, and Coyolxauhqui falls again, the same fall, in the same pieces.

She loses. Every telling ends the same way, and the Mexica wanted it that way, because a defeated rebel underfoot was more useful to them than a victorious one. The captives sacrificed at the top of the temple were rolled back down the steps to land on her image, repeating the descent of the goddess down Serpent Mountain, body after body completing the myth in flesh. The bells on her cheeks never ring in any story. They are simply there, golden and silent, on the face of a woman who reached for her mother’s life and caught her brother’s blade instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Coyolxauhqui?

Coyolxauhqui is the Aztec moon goddess and a warrior figure, the daughter of the earth mother Coatlicue and the leader of her four hundred star-brothers, the Centzon Huitznahua. She is best known for leading a revolt against her mother and being killed and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun.

How did Coyolxauhqui die?

Coyolxauhqui was killed by her brother Huitzilopochtli, who was born fully grown and armed at the moment she and her brothers attacked their mother at Serpent Mountain. He decapitated her with the xiuhcoatl, the fire serpent, and her body fell down the mountainside and broke apart, after which her four hundred brothers were scattered.

What does the name Coyolxauhqui mean?

The name Coyolxauhqui means “Bells on Her Face” or “Painted with Bells,” a reference to the golden bell discs that appear on her cheeks in Aztec art. These bells are one of her main identifying features in images such as the great stone disk found at the Templo Mayor.

What is the Coyolxauhqui Stone?

The Coyolxauhqui Stone is a large circular relief carving, about eleven feet across, that depicts the goddess decapitated and dismembered. It was discovered in 1978 by utility workers at the base of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, set at the foot of the stairway on the side of the temple dedicated to Huitzilopochtli.

Is Coyolxauhqui the moon?

Yes. In many versions of the myth, Huitzilopochtli throws Coyolxauhqui’s severed head into the sky, where it becomes the moon, and she is widely identified as the Aztec lunar deity. Her nightly presence and daily defeat were understood as a mirror of the sun overcoming the moon and stars each dawn.