Xochiquetzal

Also Known As: Nahuatl Xōchiquetzal, from xōchitl “flower” and quetzalli “precious quetzal tail feather”; also called Ichpōchtli, “the maiden”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She governs flowers, sexual love, pregnancy and the handcrafts of women, and grants skill to everyone who makes beautiful things.
Role in Mythos: She is the young goddess of Tamoanchan, wife of Tlaloc until Tezcatlipoca carried her off, and the patron of weavers, embroiderers, featherworkers, goldsmiths and painters.
Relation to Humans: The Mexica approached her through craft and through the body, invoking her over the loom, at childbirth, and at the festivals where flowers were piled in the streets. Her cult also enclosed the ahuianime, the pleasure women attached to the warrior houses, so her worship reached parts of Aztec life the Spanish friars preferred not to record plainly.

Every eight years the Mexica built a house of flowers behind the temple precinct and filled it with trees that had never grown out of soil. Young men climbed the false branches dressed as hummingbirds and butterflies and pushed their painted beaks into blossoms that smelled of nothing at all. Below them, dancers shuffled in the costumes of flies, beetles, beggars and the diseased. The whole city had spent days eating tamales boiled in plain water, no salt and no chilli, and the hunger made the colours louder than they were. At the centre of the flowering house a woman sat at a loom, and for the length of the festival she was not a woman. She was Xochiquetzal.

Her name is two words shoved together. Xōchitl is flower. Quetzalli is the tail feather of the quetzal, the single most valuable object a Mesoamerican lord could hang on his body, worth more than gold and traded up from the cloud forests of the south. Flower Quetzal Feather. Precious Flower Plume. The Nahua also called her Ichpōchtli, the maiden, and among the great female powers of central Mexico she is the one who never ages. Coatlicue wears her skirt of serpents. Ilamatecuhtli is the old woman with the drooping face. Xochiquetzal stays young in every manuscript that draws her, a girl in a stiff embroidered huipil with two quetzal plumes standing straight up from her headband, flowers gripped in both fists, birds circling her the way flies circle ripe fruit.

She belonged to Tamoanchan, which the colonial manuscripts describe as a garden where the gods were made. Growing in it was a tree the sources call Xochitlicacan, the flowering tree, whose blossoms were forbidden and whose every bloom worked as a charm for love. In the Codex Telleriano-Remensis the painter shows what happened to it. The trunk is severed clean through the middle, the broken edges scalloped red and yellow, and blood is coming out of the cut in spurts tipped with green. Somebody picked the flowers. The accounts cannot agree whose hand did it, some laying it on the assembled gods and some naming Xochiquetzal directly, but they agree on the consequence: the lords of Tamoanchan turned everyone out, and the paradise closed behind them.

Before that, in the drawing Sahagún’s informants made for the Primeros Memoriales, she is simply working. Her backstrap loom is tied off against a flowering tree loaded with birds, the warp pulled tight by the weight of her own body leaning back, and the gods are coming toward her across the page. Tezcatlipoca walks at the head of them.

That is the version of the story with the fewest words in it and the most trouble. Tezcatlipoca is the smoking mirror, the night wind, the god who breaks things because breaking them is his prerogative. In the account the friars recorded, Xochiquetzal was married to Tlaloc, and Tezcatlipoca took her for her beauty and set her up in his own house as the goddess of love, which is a phrase doing an enormous amount of work. Tlaloc, whose business is rain and drowning and the mountains where the water is kept, went after her. The rain god’s grief is not usually the part people remember.

The codices are cheerfully inconsistent about who she was married to. The Codex Ríos gives her Tlaloc and then Tezcatlipoca. The Codex Zumárraga pairs her with Piltzintecuhtli, and their child is Cinteotl, the young maize god, born out of that union. The Florentine Codex sets her beside Xiuhtecuhtli, lord of fire. Read them together and a pattern surfaces that has nothing to do with fidelity: she is the fertile principle that every other power in the pantheon wants standing next to it. The eight-year festival of Atamalcualiztli, the one with the artificial trees and the unsalted tamales, was understood as a reenactment of that conception and of Cinteotl’s birth. Maize came out of it. So did everything else worth having.

What she actually gave people was skill. Sahagún records her as the patron of the weavers and the embroiderers, and of the goldsmiths, the featherworkers and the painters, invoked by everyone who worked with their hands to make something beautiful, because the secret of that work had come from her. Every 260 days the sign 7 Flower came round in the divinatory count and belonged to her. Craftsmen fasted on it. The connection is not decorative. Weaving in the Nahua world was the female act, the thing a girl was given a spindle for on the day she was born, and the goddess who taught it also governed what the loom was a metaphor for.

Her festivals were not gentle. The colonial sources describe a young woman chosen as her ixiptla, her living image, kept in the goddess’s ornaments and then killed and flayed at the feast of the weavers. A man put her skin on. Wearing it, he sat down at a loom in front of the temple and wove, while her devotees danced around him and made their confessions to her image. A male body doing female work inside a female skin, in front of a goddess who was worshipped by people the Spanish called sinners. It is one of the strangest surviving pictures of Aztec religion, and it is not an aberration. It is the whole logic of the cult compressed into one afternoon.

Her powers run along a single line. She makes things fertile and she makes things skilled, and in Nahua thinking those are the same faculty pointed at two materials. Flowers answer to her, and so does the desire that flowers stand for. Pregnancy and childbirth fall under her protection, and the women who died in labour become their own dangerous class of spirit. She grants the hand its cunning at the loom, the mould and the feather mosaic. The blooms of her tree could bind love to a person whether they wanted it or not.

Her limits are the other half of the same shape. Everything that happens to her in the myths happens to her: she is taken, she is enthroned, she is passed between husbands across four manuscripts. The paradise she came from was shut in her face and the tree that made her charms was cut through and left bleeding. Beauty of her kind attracts the attention of powers that do not ask, and the Mexica knew it, which is why her most solemn rite ended with a man sitting in her skin, weaving, in front of a crowd.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xochiquetzal?

Xochiquetzal is the Aztec goddess of flowers, sexual love, pregnancy and the handcrafts practised by women. Her name combines the Nahuatl words for flower and quetzal feather, and she was also known as Ichpochtli, “the maiden.” Unlike other Aztec female deities she is always shown as a young woman, richly dressed and surrounded by flowers, birds and butterflies.

What was Xochiquetzal the goddess of?

Xochiquetzal governed flowers, desire, pregnancy and childbirth, and above all skilled handwork. Sahagún records her as the patron of weavers, embroiderers, goldsmiths, featherworkers and painters, invoked by anyone who made beautiful things with their hands. The divinatory day sign 7 Flower belonged to her, and craftsmen fasted on it.

Why did Tezcatlipoca abduct Xochiquetzal?

According to the accounts recorded by the Spanish friars, Tezcatlipoca carried Xochiquetzal off for her beauty while she was married to the rain god Tlaloc, and installed her in his own realm as a goddess of love. Tlaloc pursued her. The codices disagree about her husbands more broadly, variously pairing her with Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca, Piltzintecuhtli and Xiuhtecuhtli.

What was the Atamalcualiztli festival?

Atamalcualiztli was an Aztec festival held every eight years and associated with Xochiquetzal and the birth of the maize god Cinteotl. A house of artificial flowering trees was built behind the temple, participants dressed as birds, butterflies, insects and the poor, and the city fasted on unseasoned tamales soaked in water. A woman representing Xochiquetzal sat weaving at the centre of it.

Where did Xochiquetzal live?

Xochiquetzal lived in Tamoanchan, the paradise of the Aztec gods, where the forbidden flowering tree Xochitlicacan grew and every one of its blooms worked as a love charm. The Codex Telleriano-Remensis shows that tree severed and bleeding after its flowers were picked, an act that ended with the gods being expelled from the garden.