Patecatl is the Mexica god of pulque, the fermented drink of the maguey (agave), and, by extension, of healing herbs and medicine, remembered in the colonial sources as the discoverer of the roots that ferment the maguey sap, and as a lord of the substances that both intoxicate and cure. He is the husband of the maguey-goddess Mayahuel, and the two are named as parents of the Centzon Totochtin, the Four Hundred Rabbits, the innumerable gods of drunkenness whose vast number expresses the countless forms intoxication can take. Pulque was a sacred and socially regulated drink in Mexica life, freely permitted only to the old and used in ritual, and Patecatl belongs to the cluster of octli (pulque) deities marked by the lunar and rabbit imagery associated with the drink.
Patecatl and his wife Mayahuel are named together as the discoverers of maguey processing in Book Ten of Sahagun's Florentine Codex, the principal source for this whole cluster of pulque deities, which credits the pair with working out how to ferment the plant's sap into the intoxicating drink. The same textual tradition ties their marriage to the birth of the Centzon Totochtin, and Mayahuel is conventionally shown with many breasts, an image read as expressing her role as mother to that vast, unruly brood of drink-gods; Patecatl's own more sober role as discoverer of healing roots kept him distinct from his wife's fertility-heavy iconography even within a single shared myth.