Xolotl

Also Known As: Nahuatl *xolotl*, glossed by Molina in 1571 under *xolo*, “page, servant, attendant”; the same word carries the sense of a doubled or twinned thing, as in *mexolotl*, the double maguey, and *axolotl*, the water *xolotl*
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Xolotl governs twinning, doubling and bodily difference, and he is the star that walks the sun down into the dark.
Role in Mythos: He is the canine double of Quetzalcoatl, evening star to his brother’s morning star, and the guide who takes the dead and the sun alike through the underworld.
Relation to Humans: The Mexica made him patron of twins and of people born with physical differences, at a time when twins were read as an ill omen and the unusual body was treated as a mark of supernatural power. Ordinary households met him through their dogs, which were buried with the dead to lead them across the waters of Mictlan.

Dig into the floor of a Mexica house and you may find a dog. Small, often hairless, curled near the hip of the person it was buried with, put into the ground so the dead would have company at the water’s edge. The Mexica bred dogs for meat and considered them unclean, and buried them with their beloved anyway. Behind that contradiction stands a god with a dog’s head and a face full of creases, and he has been running from something for a very long time.

His name is a small trap for translators. Alonso de Molina, compiling his Nahuatl vocabulary in 1571, sent readers looking up *xolotl* over to *xolo*, which he glossed as page, boy, servant, slave. But *xolochaui* means to wrinkle or to fold double, and the god is drawn with deep grooves cut into the skin of his muzzle. The same root turns up in *mexolotl*, the maguey that grows doubled from one base, and in *axolotl*, the salamander of the lake basin whose name breaks down to water and *xolotl*, roughly a water twin. The word gathers up everything that comes two-at-once, or comes out folded, or comes out other than expected. Then it becomes a god’s name.

That is not an accident of language. Xolotl was patron of twins, who were regarded with unease across Mesoamerica, and of people born with bodies that did not match the ordinary pattern. Such people were called *xolome*, and the word for them shaded into the word for the pages and attendants who served in the palaces, some of whom stood close enough to the throne of Motecuhzoma II to advise him. Miller and Taube note that in Olmec art dwarves and hunchbacks are everywhere, and that far from being mocked they are shown holding real supernatural authority. The Protoclassical potters of West Mexico made the same association with their two-headed dogs and their small crooked figures. In this part of the world an unusual body was not a defect to be pitied. It was proof of contact with something.

The codices give him a body to match. The Codex Fejérváry-Mayer sets him upright in a temple, fully anthropomorphic, a lean figure in human dress under a canine head. Elsewhere he is thinner still, the ribs showing, the jaw long, one ear torn to a ragged edge as though something had already had a go at him. The eye sockets are empty. In several images his feet are reversed, heels forward, so that his tracks lead the wrong way. Around his neck hangs the *ehecailacacozcatl*, the wind jewel, a conch sliced crosswise into a spiral disc, which belongs properly to Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. He is wearing his brother’s insignia. That is the whole point of him.

Quetzalcoatl rises at dawn as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Lord of the Dawn, the morning star climbing ahead of the sun. Xolotl is the same planet on its other track, the evening star that appears when the light is already failing and follows the sun down over the rim of the world. One of them announces the day. The other closes the door behind it and stays down there through the night, keeping the sun company in the dark until it can be got up again. In the codices he holds the position that dogs hold in ordinary life: the one who goes with you into places you cannot go alone.

There is a story about how the current people were made. Quetzalcoatl went down to Mictlan to ask the lord and lady of the dead for the bones of the previous world, blew a conch that had no fingerholes until worms and bees made it sound, and was granted the bones on a condition he had no intention of keeping. The messengers of Mictlan dug a pit in his path. Quail startled him, he fell into it, and the precious bones scattered across the ground where the quail gnawed at them. He gathered up the broken pieces, carried them to Tamoanchan, and Quilaztli, who is Cihuacoatl, ground them in a bowl while he opened a vein over the meal. Handbooks and modern retellings put Xolotl at his side for all of this. The oldest surviving Nahuatl account, the manuscript of 1558 known as the Leyenda de los Soles, never names him. It says only that Quetzalcoatl spoke to his *nahualli*, his double, and that the double answered him. Whether that double is the dog god or simply a shadow of the feathered serpent is a question the text does not settle, and the confidence with which it is usually settled elsewhere is not earned.

Where Xolotl is beyond argument is at Teotihuacan. The fifth sun had been made, Nanahuatzin flinging his sore-covered body into the fire and rising as the sun, Tecciztecatl following him into the ash and rising as the moon. Then nothing moved. Sun and moon hung fixed and useless in a sky that would not turn, and the gods worked out that the only way to start the machine was to feed it themselves. They lined up to be killed. Sahagún’s informants recorded what happened next: Xolotl did not want to die. He bolted into the maize and hid as a stalk that had grown two ears from one stem. They found him. He bolted into the maguey field and hid as a doubled maguey, which is why the plant is called *mexolotl*. They found him again. He went into the water and became a salamander, and the salamander has carried his name ever since.

He got caught anyway.

The last detail is the one that explains his face. The god of the doubled thing kept hiding inside doubled things, which is a poor strategy for a fugitive whose signature is precisely that, and by the end of it his eyes were gone. The codices simply show the empty sockets; the story of him weeping until they fell out is the explanation that grew up around the image rather than anything the earliest sources dwell on. Either way the sockets are there in the paint, dark and open, on a god who is looking at nothing.

What he can do follows from all of this. He moves between the living world and Mictlan without being destroyed by the passage, which is a rarer power than it sounds, and he can carry others across with him. He takes the sun through the worst hours of its circuit. He turns into other living things at will, three times in a row and at speed. He holds authority over birth that comes out doubled or strange, and over the lightning and fire that the Mexica associated with him. His limits are just as clear. The transformations bought him minutes, not escape. He cannot refuse the sacrifice that every other god accepted, only delay it and lose his eyes in the delay. He has no myth cycle of his own to speak of, no great pyramid, no month in the festival calendar; he exists in the gravity of a brighter god and is defined by being the other one. And in the end the thing that gave him away was his own nature, which he could not stop performing even while running for his life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xolotl in Aztec mythology?

Xolotl is the dog-headed Mexica god of twins, bodily difference, fire and lightning, and he serves as the evening star. He is the twin or double of Quetzalcoatl and wears the wind god’s cut-conch pectoral in the codices. His main function is escorting the sun through the underworld each night and guiding the dead on the same road.

Why is Xolotl shown with a dog’s head?

Dogs in Mexica and Maya belief guided their owners into the underworld after death and were especially useful for getting across water, so a canine form suited a god whose job was the same. Dogs were buried with the dead for this reason. Xolotl appears as a dog-headed man or a skeletal canine, usually with a wrinkled muzzle and one ragged ear.

What is the connection between Xolotl and the axolotl?

When the gods gathered at Teotihuacan to sacrifice themselves so the newly made sun would move, Xolotl refused and fled, hiding first as a doubled maize plant, then as a doubled maguey, then as a salamander in the water. That salamander still carries his name: *axolotl* combines *atl*, water, with *xolotl*. He was caught and killed in that final form.

Is Xolotl an evil god?

No. Xolotl is associated with death, sickness, deformity and the descent of the sun, but the Mexica did not treat him as a malevolent figure. He is the necessary counterpart to Quetzalcoatl’s rising light, and his patronage of twins and of people with unusual bodies reflects a belief that such people were touched by supernatural power rather than cursed.

Why does Xolotl have empty eye sockets?

The codices consistently paint him with hollow sockets, along with a gaunt frame, a torn ear and sometimes backwards feet, all of which mark his connection to sickness and physical difference. The familiar explanation, that he wept until his eyes fell out while trying to avoid the sacrifice at Teotihuacan, grew up around that image rather than appearing in the earliest surviving accounts.