The Miraculous Birth of the War God

Coatlicue's central myth, recorded by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun from Nahua informants, tells of the conception of Huitzilopochtli. As Coatlicue was sweeping at the temple on the sacred hill of Coatepec, a ball of feathers drifted down from the sky, and she tucked it into her waistband; by it she became pregnant. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui and her four hundred sons, taking their mother's mysterious pregnancy as a dishonour, resolved to kill her, and armed themselves and advanced upon the hill. But at the moment of the attack Huitzilopochtli was born from his mother fully grown and fully armed, wielding the fire-serpent Xiuhcoatl; he struck down Coyolxauhqui, cut off her head and hurled her dismembered body down the slope of Coatepec, and scattered and defeated the four hundred. This myth was enacted in the very architecture of the Aztec capital: the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan was Coatepec made stone, and at the foot of the stairway of Huitzilopochtli's shrine lay a great round carving of the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, so that the goddess her son had cast down lay broken at the bottom of the temple. Coatlicue thus stands at the origin of the war god of the Mexica, the earth-mother out of whom the sun-and-war god is born to defeat the moon and the stars each day, a cosmic drama of the dawn re-enacted at the heart of the Aztec state.