Xipe Totec

Also Known As: Nahuatl, “Our Lord the Flayed One”, from xipe, “the flayed one”, and totec, “our lord”; called Yopi by the Zapotec and identified in Mixtec divinatory codices as 7 Rain; also titled Yoalli Tlahuana, “Night Drinker”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He governs the violent renewal of the growing year, the shedding of a dead husk so that something living can push through it.
Role in Mythos: He is the god of spring planting, of captives taken in war, of goldsmiths and of the diseases of the eyes and skin, honoured in the second twenty-day month of the Mexica calendar.
Relation to Humans: His blessings were bought with human lives, and the men who wore the skins of the sacrificed walked the streets for twenty days collecting alms in his name. He was petitioned for rain and for the healing of sore eyes, and blamed when either failed to come.

Twenty days after the killing, the skin had gone soft and greasy and the man inside it still would not take it off. He walked the packed earth streets of Tenochtitlan with the dead man’s fingers flapping loose at his own wrists, knocking on doorways, blessing the households that let him in, sitting where they told him to sit on a mat of leaves while they hung a garland of maize cobs around his neck and handed him a bowl of pulque. The smell arrived before he did. That was the point. Xipe Totec was a god you were supposed to smell.

His name says exactly what he is. Xipe, the flayed one. Totec, our lord. Nothing in the Nahuatl softens it, and no Mexica listener would have needed the image explained, because for one month every year the explanation was walking around in front of them. The logic underneath the horror is agricultural and, on its own terms, precise. A seed does not sprout out of nothing. It germinates by feeding on the rotting hull that encloses it, splitting the husk from the inside, and the old covering has to putrefy before the green thing can stand up in the light. The earth at the end of the dry season was a husk. Xipe Totec was the god who peeled it.

In the painted books he is a figure of unsettling doubleness. The face is a man’s face seen through the holes of another man’s face, the eye holes round and empty, the nose hole a blunt triangle, the mouth slack where the lips no longer have anything to grip. Loose hands dangle past his hands. Loose feet hang at his ankles. The hide is painted yellow or a dull tawny gold and it lies thickly on him, lumped with fat, laced together up the back, and marked at the chest with the closed seam where the heart came out. Sahagun’s informants described the rest of his gear carefully: a pointed cap, plaited hair, golden ear ornaments, green feathers, and a long staff crowned with flower shapes and an arrow holder at its top. The staff was a chicahuaztli, hollow and pointed, filled with pebbles or dry seed, so that striking it against the ground produced a hard dry rattle. It was meant to shake the soil awake.

He does not seem to have started as a Mexica god at all. The Nahua elders who spoke to Sahagun said he came from the coast, from a place called Zapotlan, and his oldest images belong to the Gulf lowlands rather than to the highland capital that eventually made him famous. The Zapotec knew him as Yopi. His shrine in the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan was called Yopico, the place of the Yopi, which is an unusual thing to admit about a god in the centre of your own ceremonial city. Another account puts him at the beginning of everything, one of the four sons of the dual creator Ometeotl, the red one, keeper of the east, a sibling of Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. Both stories were told. The Mexica were rarely troubled by a god having two origins.

The month that belonged to him was Tlacaxipehualiztli, the flaying of men, falling in what we would call March. It opened with captives taken in war. Their owners sheared the hair from the crowns of their heads, walked them to the temple, and hauled them up the stairs if they resisted, which some of them did. At the top a man was bent backwards over the stone while five priests took his wrists, ankles and head, and a sixth opened his chest with a blade of obsidian. The blood was caught and carried down to the man who had captured him. The corpse went over the edge of the steps to a company of old priests waiting below, and it was they who took the skin.

The most theatrical of the killings came on the round stone. A captive who had fought well was tethered at the waist to a temalacatl, a wide cylinder carved with solar motifs, and given a club whose blades had been replaced with feathers. Against him came four warriors in sequence, two of the eagle order and two of the jaguar, fully armed. He could move as far as his rope and no further. The stone was hot underfoot by mid morning and the crowd was close enough to hear the feathered club whistling as it missed. The outcome was not really in doubt. One captive, Tlahuicole, is remembered because he survived the ordeal under Moctezuma the Younger and was offered his freedom, and refused it, and asked for the knife instead.

Afterwards came the strangest part of the festival, and the part that made it his. Young men called tototecti pulled the skins on, and so did the god’s living image, and for twenty days they were Xipe Totec. They staged running mock battles with unskinned youths through the streets, taking prisoners and ransoming them for trinkets. They begged from house to house and were fed. Then, when the hides had rotted to the point of being unbearable, the wearers stripped them off and the skins were carried down into the sunken chamber at Yopico and put into the earth like seed corn. The men who emerged were washed clean. Spring came.

What he could do followed directly from that. He broke the dry crust of the year and let the maize through. Rain fell for him in the dark, which is why a hymn preserved from the old sacred songs calls him the Night Drinker and thanks him for turning aside the drought. Because his covering shone yellow, the goldsmiths took him as their patron and the metal that could be beaten into a skin thin enough to wrap an object belonged to him. He healed the eyes and the skin, the two afflictions closest to his own iconography, and he sent them too, so a man with a rash or a clouding eye had to reckon with the possibility that he had already offended the god who could lift it. He made boys into warriors: a youth who brought his first captive to Yopico had earned the right to the regalia of a fighting man.

His limits were built into him just as tightly. He worked on a calendar, not on demand, and his gifts had to be bought with a body every year without exception. The skin that made him a god was also a garment that spoiled, and the whole apparatus of the festival was a countdown to the moment it had to be taken off and buried. He was fed with people. When the empire that fed him fell, the month of Tlacaxipehualiztli stopped and he had nowhere to be, and for centuries afterwards not one building raised in his name had ever been identified.

That changed in 2019. At Ndachjian-Tehuacan in Puebla, archaeologists working for Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History announced a temple built by the Popoloca between roughly 1000 and 1260, with two circular altars set before a pyramid, one for the killing and one for the flaying. They found a stone torso with the loose hide carved down its back, and two stone heads, each about seventy centimetres tall and weighing something near two hundred kilograms, with the small round holes where the eyes look out through a face that is not their own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xipe Totec?

Xipe Totec is the Aztec god of spring planting, war captives, goldsmiths and the diseases of the eyes and skin. His name means “Our Lord the Flayed One” in Nahuatl, and he is shown wearing the skin of a sacrificed man over his own. He was also known to the Zapotec as Yopi.

Why did Xipe Totec wear human skin?

The flayed skin stood for the dead outer husk of the earth at the end of the dry season, which had to be shed before new growth could come through, in the same way a seed germinates by feeding on the rotting hull around it. Priests and young men wore the skins of sacrificed captives for twenty days during his festival, then buried them at his shrine like seed corn.

What was Tlacaxipehualiztli?

Tlacaxipehualiztli, “the flaying of men”, was the second twenty-day month of the Mexica calendar, falling around March, and it belonged to Xipe Totec. It began with the sacrifice of war captives and included a gladiatorial rite in which a tethered captive fought four fully armed eagle and jaguar warriors with a club whose blades had been replaced by feathers.

Was Xipe Totec originally an Aztec god?

Probably not. Nahua elders told the friar Bernardino de Sahagun that Xipe Totec came from the coastal region of Zapotlan, and his shrine in the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan was called Yopico, “the place of the Yopi”, after his Zapotec name. His oldest images belong to the Gulf lowlands rather than the Aztec highlands.

Has a temple to Xipe Totec ever been found?

Yes. In 2019 Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History announced the first temple positively identified as his, at Ndachjian-Tehuacan in Puebla, built by the Popoloca between about 1000 and 1260. It has two circular altars and yielded a carved stone torso and two large stone heads showing the god’s second face.