Xolotl

Xolotl is the Mexica god of lightning, twins, monsters and the evening, the canine-headed companion and twin of Quetzalcoatl. Where Quetzalcoatl is the planet Venus as the morning star, Xolotl is Venus as the evening star that sinks into the underworld, and he serves as a psychopomp, guiding the sun on its nightly passage through the land of the dead. In the myth of the making of the present humankind it is Xolotl, or Quetzalcoatl (the sources vary), who descends to Mictlan to recover the bones of a former race from which people are re-created. His association with the xoloitzcuintli, the native hairless dog buried with the dead to guide them across the underworld's waters, ties him to death and to the dog as companion of souls, and he is linked besides with deformity, the doubled or monstrous, and the ballgame.

Xolotl's clearest surviving image is in the sixteenth-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis, where he is painted as a dog-headed man in bicolour purple and gold, wearing an ear ornament shaped like a claw, a detail the scholar Eloise Quinones Keber reads as marking his association with Quetzalcoatl. On the same folio he also wears a cotton headband with a spindle and thread, an attribute elsewhere linked to the goddess Tlazolteotl, so that a single painted page ties Xolotl's iconography to two quite different deities at once, evidence of how tightly interwoven the underworld, Venus and purification themes of central Mexican religion could become in a single figure's imagery.

One of the most vivid Xolotl stories belongs to the myth of the creation of the Fifth Sun at Teotihuacan, where the gods gather in darkness and two of their number must throw themselves into a great fire to become the new sun and moon. According to versions of the tale preserved in colonial sources, Xolotl, terrified of the sacrifice demanded of the gods as the new sun begins its first, unmoving rise and requires the death of the assembled deities to set it in motion, tries repeatedly to escape his fate, transforming himself first into a stalk of maize with two ears, then into a wide-leafed maguey plant, and finally into an aquatic salamander, diving into the water to hide, before he is eventually found and killed regardless, joining the general sacrifice of the gods that gives the newborn sun its motion. This myth is the acknowledged source of the modern Nahuatl-derived name of the actual salamander species Ambystoma mexicanum, still called the axolotl today and native to the lake system beneath Mexico City, an animal now critically endangered in the wild and well known to modern biology for its unusual ability to regenerate entire limbs and organs. The etymology, generally parsed as Xolotl's water form or water monster, ties a specific, still-living Mexican animal directly back to a specific episode in Aztec cosmogony, one of the clearer instances in which Mesoamerican mythology left a permanent mark on the modern scientific name of a real creature.