Ehecatl

Also Known As: Classical Nahuatl Ehēcatl, “wind”; also written Ecatl; Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl or Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl as the wind aspect of the Feathered Serpent; calendar name 9 Wind; Otomi Edähi
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Ehecatl is the wind itself, the breath that clears the road for the rain and that first pushed the sun and moon into motion across the sky.
Role in Mythos: He is the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl and one of the creator gods, who set the fifth sun moving at Teotihuacan and brought the maguey plant into the world.
Relation to Humans: Farmers knew Ehecatl as the gust that sweeps ahead of the rains their maize depended on, and they read a rising dust storm as his anger. The Aztecs built him round temples with conical roofs, and they owed him the maguey and the pulque brewed from it.

Before the summer rain reaches the Valley of Mexico, the wind arrives. It lifts the dust off the dry fields in a brown wall, rattles the maize stalks, slams whatever is loose, and fills the air with a hissing, crackling roar. Then the first heavy drops fall. The Aztecs watched this happen every year and gave the first part of it a name. The wind that ran ahead of the storm was Ehecatl, and his job was to sweep the road clean for the gods of rain.

That image comes from the Nahua elders who described their gods to the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in the sixteenth century. They told him the wind was Quetzalcoatl, guide and road sweeper of the rain lords, and that when the dust rose and the noise began, people said the god was angry. Ehecatl is the name for that side of him. The word simply means wind. The great Feathered Serpent had many faces, as priest, as morning star, as maker of humankind, and this was the one a farmer met most often.

He is easy to pick out in the painted books. The body is black. On the head sits a tall cone of a cap. Over the lower face, where a mouth should be, juts a red mask like the bill of a duck, sometimes with fangs at the corners, and it is through this beak that he blows. On his chest hangs the wind jewel, a conch shell sliced crosswise so that its inner spiral shows, a whirlwind fixed in shell. A stone figure of him from Calixtlahuaca, in the Toluca Valley, stands 1.76 metres tall, stiff and bare, the beak pushed forward as if he had just drawn breath.

His temples were unlike any others. Most Aztec shrines sat on square, stepped platforms. His were round, with cone roofs, and some had a doorway carved as the open jaws of a serpent. The usual explanation is that a round wall gives the wind nothing to catch on. The Spanish saw one standing in front of the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan. Others survive at Calixtlahuaca and at Tlatelolco, and one small round shrine was found during the digging of the Mexico City metro and now sits in a passage of Pino Suárez station, where thousands of commuters walk past the wind god every morning. Few of them stop.

His birth is tied to the calendar. He is called 9 Wind after the day on which he came into being, born, the tradition says, from a flint. The second of the twenty day signs carries his name and his beaked face.

The story in which he matters most is set at Teotihuacan, at the making of the present age. The world was dark. The gods built a great fire, and two of them, the humble Nanahuatzin and the proud Tecciztecatl, threw themselves into it and rose in the east as the sun and the moon. Then nothing happened. The two lights hung at the horizon and would not move. The gods understood that the sun wanted their lives, and it fell to Ehecatl to kill them one by one. Even that was not enough. So he blew. He put the whole force of the wind against the sun until it lurched forward and began to climb, and later he did the same for the moon, which is why the two travel at different hours.

Wind had ended a world before it started this one. The second of the four earlier ages was called 4 Wind, and it finished in hurricanes that carried off houses, trees and people. The few who lived through it were turned into monkeys, and the spider monkey has been his animal ever since.

Another story shows him gentler, and it ends badly anyway. In the sky lived a young goddess named Mayahuel, kept under guard by a fearsome grandmother, one of the star demons called Tzitzimime. Ehecatl found her asleep, woke her, and talked her into coming down to earth with him. There the two of them became a single forked tree, one branch each. The grandmother woke, found the girl missing, and came down with her sisters in a fury. The tree split. They knew Mayahuel’s branch, tore it to pieces and ate it. Ehecatl’s branch they left alone. When they had gone, he took his own shape again, gathered what was left of her and buried it. From that grave grew the first maguey, the plant that gives the sap for pulque.

In his creator’s guise he also went down to the land of the dead for the bones of earlier peoples, and was set the task of sounding a conch that had no holes. Worms bored it through and bees flew inside to make it roar. That shell is the one he wears.

His powers are the wind’s own. He carries the rain in, sets heavy things moving, brings breath and so brings life, and when he chooses he flattens a world. His limits are the wind’s as well. He prepares the way for the rain but is not the rain, and without the water gods behind him he delivers only dust. He could shift the sun, yet he could not save one girl from her grandmother. And he cannot be still. A wind that stops is no longer anything at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ehecatl in Aztec mythology?

Ehecatl is the Aztec god of wind. He is usually understood as the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, and is often called Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. His name is the Nahuatl word for wind.

Are Ehecatl and Quetzalcoatl the same god?

Ehecatl is one form of Quetzalcoatl, not a fully separate god. The Nahua elders who spoke to Bernardino de Sahagún said that Quetzalcoatl was the wind and the road sweeper of the rain gods. Ehecatl is the name and the image used for that windy side of him, with its own mask, temples and stories.

What does Ehecatl look like?

Ehecatl is shown as a man with a black body, a tall conical cap and a red mask like a duck’s bill over his mouth, through which he blows the wind. He wears a cut conch shell on his chest called the wind jewel. A stone statue of him from Calixtlahuaca stands 1.76 metres tall.

How did Ehecatl make the sun move?

When the fifth sun and the moon first rose at Teotihuacan, they hung still at the horizon. Ehecatl killed the other gods as a sacrifice, and when the sun still did not move he blew on it with the full force of the wind until it began to travel. He then did the same for the moon.

Why are the temples of Ehecatl round?

The temples of Ehecatl were built round with conical roofs, unlike the square platforms of most Aztec temples. The usual explanation is that a round building offers no corners to block the wind. Examples survive at Calixtlahuaca, at Tlatelolco and inside Pino Suárez metro station in Mexico City.