Mixcoatl

They burned the woman, and she burst open five times. A blue flint knife came out of the ashes first, then a white one, then yellow, then red, then black. Only the white one was picked up. Somebody wrapped it in a cloth, and Mixcoatl took the bundle, worshipped it as a god, hoisted it onto his back and walked off to start a war with a knife on his shoulders that had been a woman an hour earlier.

That is the sort of story he lives inside. The Nahuatl name means Cloud Serpent, which is what the Milky Way looked like to the people who watched it come up over the dry central plateau, a long pale coil of smoke lying across the sky in the cold months. His body carries the same information. In the painted books he wears red and white stripes running down his limbs, the black bandit’s mask across his eyes that marks a star god, sometimes points of light spattered across his face, and always the hunting kit: bow, arrows, a carrying net for whatever he brings down. On the gilded handle of an Aztec spearthrower now in the British Museum he wears a fanged mask and ear ornaments cut in the shape of deer hooves, an eagle-feather headdress on his head, and he is fighting a rattlesnake.

He was born in a year called One Flint, which was tidy of him. The oldest surviving account says that Iztac Chalchiuhtlicue bore four hundred cloud serpents, the Mimixcoa, and that afterwards, inside a cave, she bore five more. Mixcoatl was the second of the five. The others were Cuauhtliicohuauh, an elder sister called Cuetlachcihuatl, Tlotepetl and Apanteuctli. As soon as they were born they went down into the water, and when they came up again a being named Mecitli gave them milk. The text pauses there to make a point about names that still gets argued over in Mexico: we are not Mexica, it says, we are Mecitin, the ones Mecitli suckled.

The Sun handed the four hundred elder brothers arrows fletched with quetzal and heron and roseate spoonbill, gave them shields, told them their mother was the earth herself, and said plainly what the arrows were for. Feed me. Give me something to drink. The four hundred went out and shot birds. They shot so many birds that the place got named after it. When they did bring down a jaguar they kept it, plastered themselves with down feathers, lay about in the feathers, slept with women, drank cactus wine and stayed drunk.

So the Sun called the five younger ones, gave them arrows tipped with cactus spine and shields that would hold, and told them to kill their brothers.

The four hundred gathered up in a mesquite tree with their gear in netted crates and looked down at the five, and asked each other who these were who were the same as themselves. It was the last thing they had time to wonder about. Cuauhtliicohuauh had already gone inside the tree they were sitting in. Mixcoatl had gone under the ground. Tlotepetl was inside a hill, Apanteuctli was standing in the water, and their sister was waiting in the ball court. When the four hundred closed the circle there was nobody in the crates. Then the mesquite cracked and came apart on top of them and Cuauhtliicohuauh stepped out of the wood, and the earth shook and Mixcoatl came up out of it, and the hill burst and Tlotepetl walked out of the rubble, and the water boiled and Apanteuctli rose through it. The survivors begged for terms and were sent away to the seven caves at Chicomoztoc. The Sun got its meal.

Afterwards he goes on the road with his flint knife, and the road is where he is easiest to picture. He arrives at Comallan carrying the wrapped stone, and the people of Comallan come out to meet him and set food in front of him, and that is enough. They feed him and he leaves them alone. The next town does the same. The three after that do not, and he fights all three.

Then he came to Huitznahuac and met a woman named Chimalman, who put her shield on the ground, threw down her arrows and her spearthrower, and stood in front of him with nothing on. He shot at her four times. The first arrow went over her head and she leaned aside. The second went past her ribs and she bent the shaft in her fingers. The third she caught in her hand. The fourth she drew out from between her legs. He turned around and went home. When he came back armed again she had hidden in a cave in the big ravine, so he took it out on the other women of Huitznahuac until they went and fetched her, and told her that her sisters were being hurt on her account. She came back and did exactly the same thing again, four arrows, the same four answers, and this time he took her. Their son was Ce Acatl Topiltzin, who tormented her for four days getting born and killed her doing it. A different telling has Mixcoatl turn himself into a deer for the encounter.

His own end is short and squalid. The surviving four hundred were the boy’s uncles, they hated his father, and they killed him and buried him in the sand. Ce Acatl went looking and a vulture told him where the body was. He dug his father up and carried him into the temple he had built, the Mixcoatepetl, the Cloud Serpent Hill, and then took the uncles apart one by one. The record allows Mixcoatl thirty-nine years.

Living hunters kept his memory in the most practical way available. The fourteenth month of the year was Quecholli, and it belonged to him. For five days people drew blood from their own ears and smeared it on their temples, and said outright that they were doing penance in order to be allowed to hunt deer. They made arrows, tied them in bundles of twenty, and offered them. Then everyone went up Zacatepetl, the hill outside the city, dressed as the god, and hunted. At the end a man and a woman died for him in his temple, the woman killed the way you kill an animal, her head knocked against a rock until she stopped struggling; and prisoners of war were carried up the temple stairs tied hand and foot, like deer.

What he can do follows from all of that. He is the patron of hunting and of the north, of lightning and thunder, of the pale band of stars; he fathered the southern stars as well, the four hundred Huitznahua. One old chronicle says the first fire in the world was his, that Tezcatlipoca took the name Mixcoatl and taught people to strike flame out of flint, and that when he hit a rock with his staff four hundred Chichimecs came out of it and populated the country. The Chichimecs and the Otomi took him for their own god. At Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco, under the name Camaxtli, he was the chief god there was.

His limits are the interesting part. He can be bought off with dinner. He can be ambushed and killed by his own relatives and left in a sandbank. He belongs to hunters and to people who came down from the northern deserts, and once the Mexica settled into a city and a war economy they quietly promoted Huitzilopochtli over him and kept Mixcoatl for the autumn deer drive. There is also a suspicion, going back a long way, that he began as a man: the Toltec chronicles name a chieftain called Ce Tecpatl Mixcoatl who led his people out of the northwest to Culhuacan and fathered a son on a local woman, and that son grew up to be called Quetzalcoatl and to rule Tollan. Whether the god was made out of the warlord or the warlord was named for the god, the sources do not say, and they were written down by people who were no longer sure themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mixcoatl in Aztec mythology?

Mixcoatl is the Aztec god of the hunt, of war, of the north, and of the Milky Way, whose name means “Cloud Serpent”. He was the patron god of the Chichimec and Otomi peoples of central Mexico, and under the name Camaxtli he was the principal god of Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco. He is best known as the father of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.

What does the name Mixcoatl mean?

Mixcoatl comes from the Nahuatl words mixtli, meaning cloud, and coatl, meaning serpent, so it translates as “Cloud Serpent”. The name describes the Milky Way, which Mesoamerican peoples pictured as a long serpent of cloud lying across the night sky. Mixcoatl is accordingly a star god as well as a hunting god, and is often painted with stars on his face.

Who were the four hundred Mimixcoa and what happened to them?

The Centzon Mimixcoa were four hundred cloud serpents born before Mixcoatl, whom the Sun armed and ordered to provide it with food and drink. They shot birds instead, kept what they caught, drank cactus wine and neglected their duty, so the Sun sent Mixcoatl and his four younger siblings to destroy them. The five ambushed the four hundred at a mesquite tree by hiding inside a tree, underground, inside a hill, in the water and in the ball court.

How did Mixcoatl die?

Mixcoatl was murdered by the surviving four hundred Mimixcoa, who were his brothers and the uncles of his son, and they buried his body in sand. His son Ce Acatl Topiltzin learned where the body lay from a vulture, dug his father up, and reburied him inside his own temple, the Mixcoatepetl. He then killed the uncles responsible.

What was the festival of Quecholli?

Quecholli was the fourteenth month of the Aztec year and the great festival of Mixcoatl. People drew blood from their ears for five days as penance, made arrows and offered them in bundles of twenty, then went out in the god’s costume for a communal deer hunt on the hill of Zacatepetl. The festival ended with human sacrifices in Mixcoatl’s temple, including captives carried up the temple steps bound like deer.

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Quetzalcoatl, Itzpapalotl, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaltecuhtli, Chalchiuhtlicue, Cōātlīcue, Huitzilopochtli, Coyolxauhqui, Tzitzimitl, Xiuhtecuhtli, Feathered Serpent, Xolotl