Moon, Night, and the Meaning of Her Defeat

Coyolxauhqui is usually called a moon goddess, and the label captures the dominant reading of her myth as a cosmic allegory: Huitzilopochtli is the sun, born each dawn to drive off the moon (Coyolxauhqui) and the four hundred stars of the southern sky (the Centzon Huitznahua), so that the daily victory of daylight is re-won as a battle. On the great stone her scattered body has been read as the moon dismembered, or as the disc of the full moon itself.

The reading is not the whole of her. She is also, and perhaps first, a warrior, the leader who takes up arms and loses, and her identity overlaps with, without simply equalling, that of Metztli, the plain lunar deity. Scholars from Miller and Taube to Matos Moctezuma treat "moon goddess" as a useful shorthand for a figure whose real force in Mexica religion is as the defeated sibling whose fall the temple staged again and again. This atlas files her under the Aztec pantheon with a lunar domain, marks her not as a dark or underworld deity but as a slain celestial one, and leaves the fuller ambiguity (warrior, moon, sister, victim), to the myth and the stone that carry it.