Coatlicue

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The thing they dug out of the main square of Mexico City in the summer of 1790 had no face. Where a head should sit, two great serpents rose and met, their jaws turned outward, so that the join read as twin streams of blood from a severed neck. Around the figure’s chest hung a necklace strung from human hearts and severed hands, with a skull for a pendant. The skirt was a mass of woven snakes. The feet ended in the curved talons of a raptor or a great cat. Carved from a single block of andesite, more than two and a half meters tall, the thing stood upright and frontal and looked at no one, because it had no eyes to look with. The workmen had been repairing a drain. What they had found was the earth itself, given a body.

This is Coatlicue, whose name the Nahuatl renders as the one with the skirt of serpents — coatl, snake, and cueitl, skirt. She is the earth-mother of the Mexica and the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico, the ground from which life is pushed up and into which the dead are pulled down, and she is rendered without softening: the womb and the open mouth in one figure. To call her terrible is not to condemn her. Within the world she belongs to, terror and tenderness are not opposites in a mother who is also the grave.

The mother of the gods

Coatlicue is one name among several for a cluster of overlapping mother-earth powers in the Nahua world, and the names slide across one another in the sources. She is called Teteoinnan, the mother of the gods, the womb the divine generations came from. She is named alongside Cihuacoatl, the woman-serpent, and Tonantzin, our revered mother — figures who share her dominion over earth, birth, and the dead, and who in the colonial record are sometimes distinguished and sometimes collapsed together. The Mexica did not hold their goddesses to the clean genealogies of a later catalog. An earth-mother could wear many faces and many names, and the writers who recorded them, working a generation or two after the conquest, often could not say where one ended and the next began.

What is constant is her place at the head of the line. Coatlicue is the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the sun-and-war god who became the patron of the Mexica and the divine guarantor of Tenochtitlan. She is the mother of Coyolxauhqui, “she of the bells on her cheeks,” who is the moon. And she is the mother of the Centzonhuitznahua, the four hundred southerners, the innumerable stars of the southern sky. The moon and the stars and the sun all came from her body. In the Nahua sky there is no light that was not first carried in the earth-mother’s womb, which is also to say that the lights of heaven are the children of the ground.

That she should be both the bearer of the heavens and the eater of corpses is the heart of her. As the World History Encyclopedia puts the iconography of the great statue, her clawed hands and feet are the implements with which she tears apart the dead before she consumes them — and the same body that consumes them is the soil that the maize rises from. The hearts and hands of the necklace are not trophies of cruelty for its own sake. They are what is owed. In the cosmology of the Fifth Sun, the present and fragile world that the Nahua reckoned themselves to live in, all life is borrowed from the powers that made it, and the debt is paid in blood and in bodies returned to the ground. Coatlicue is the creditor and the grave at once. She is fed, and she feeds.

Coatepec, and the birth of the war-god

The story that fixes her place is the story of Coatepec, the Serpent Mountain, and it is among the central narratives of the Mexica. In the version preserved by the Nahua informants of the Franciscan compiler Bernardino de Sahagún, Coatlicue was keeping the temple on the mountain, sweeping it as an act of penance, when a ball of soft down or fine feathers drifted down from the sky and she caught it and tucked it at her waist. When she looked for it again it was gone, and she found herself with child. The conception had no father a human could name. It came out of the air, out of an act of cleaning and devotion.

Her other children were appalled. Coyolxauhqui, the daughter, took it for a shame upon the household, and she gathered her four hundred brothers, the stars, and led them up the mountain to kill their mother before the new birth could come. But the child in the womb spoke to Coatlicue and told her not to be afraid. At the moment the attackers reached the summit, Huitzilopochtli was born — born grown and armed, with the fire-serpent weapon Xiuhcoatl already in his hand. He struck down Coyolxauhqui first. He cut her to pieces and her body fell and broke apart down the slope of the mountain, and he scattered the four hundred brothers across the sky. So the sun rises each day already victorious over the moon and the stars, having defeated them at the instant of his own birth, and he does it again every dawn.

Coatlicue stands at the violent root of this, the Mexica’s foundational drama, as the mother whose body is the field the war is fought over. She is the one the daughter would kill and the one the son is born to defend. The dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui was not left to the imagination. When archaeologists excavating the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan struck a great carved disk in 1978, they found the slain moon-daughter rendered exactly so — beheaded and severed at the joints, her limbs splayed around the circle. The Coyolxauhqui stone had lain at the foot of the stairway on the Huitzilopochtli side of the double temple, so that the pyramid itself was the Serpent Mountain and the platform above was the place of the god’s triumphant birth. The myth was not only told. It was built, and the city’s holiest precinct was its diagram.

The Coyolxauhqui stone, Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City — the dismembered daughter of Coatlicue. Photograph by Gary Todd, CC0 (public domain).

The earth that eats and bears

To read Coatlicue as merely a goddess of death is to read her with one eye shut. The Nahua earth was a single power with two motions, and they did not pull them apart. The dead are placed in the ground; the maize comes up out of the ground; the connection between the two is not metaphor but mechanism. The bodies and the blood are given back to the earth, and the earth, fed, grows the food the living eat. The mother who tears apart the corpse and the mother who swells the seed are the same mother, doing the same work, and the great statue shows them in one figure precisely so that no one can hold them apart.

The detail that perhaps says it most plainly is one no worshipper ever saw. On the underside of the colossal statue, on the flat base that rested on the ground and faced down into the soil, the sculptors carved a full relief of Tlaltecuhtli, the earth-lord — the ravenous earth-deity who is shown with a gaping mouth and clawed joints, mouth turned to swallow what falls. They cut that image into the surface that would lie against the dirt, hidden forever, facing the ground it represented. The carving was not for the eye. It was for the earth. A figure whose visible face is the devouring mother carries, pressed against the soil, a second devouring earth-mouth, so that the statue is earth top and bottom, the ground rendered as something with appetite all the way down.

This is the theology the colonial chroniclers struggled with and often recoiled from, and it is the one the Mexica themselves did not flinch at. The earth-mother is fed by death and returns it as life. The blood owed to keep the Fifth Sun moving, the bodies given over in the rites at the Templo Mayor — the scale of which the Spanish and their indigenous rivals had every reason to inflate, and which the archaeology confirms as real even where the conquistadors’ tallies read as propaganda — all of it flows finally into the same ground that yields the harvest. Coatlicue is where that circuit is made visible. She is generation and decay sealed in one body, beautiful and appalling at once, and the artists who carved her in basalt and andesite did not try to make her bearable. The point was that the truth of the earth is not bearable, and is true anyway.

The Coatlicue monolith, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. Photograph by Luidger, 2004, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The statue and its burials

The afterlife of Coatlicue in the modern world begins underground, and keeps returning there. On 13 August 1790, workmen leveling and re-paving the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City — the great square laid over the ruins of the Mexica ceremonial center — uncovered the colossal statue. Months later, in December of the same year, the same works turned up the carved basalt disk now called the Sun Stone, the Sun Stone, within a short distance of the first find. The astronomer and antiquarian Antonio de León y Gama wrote the two finds up in 1792 in a single treatise, and that small book is often taken as the opening of the modern study of Aztec art. The objects had been buried by their own makers, or buried in the wreck of the conquest, and the colonial city had paved over them. Now they came back into the light together, the calendar and the earth-mother, and the eighteenth century did not quite know what to do with either.

What it did with the Coatlicue figure is the part that has fixed her in the modern imagination. The statue was carried to the courtyard of the Royal and Pontifical University to be kept and studied. It did not stay above ground. Indigenous visitors continued to leave offerings before it and to treat it as what it was, and the university authorities, alarmed that the old worship had not died, had the thing reburied — the documentary record gives the figure of a statue too potent to be left where people could reach it. In 1803 it was dug up once more so that the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, passing through New Spain, could examine it, make drawings, and take a cast; then it was covered over again. Across the early nineteenth century, as the popular telling has it, the great earth-mother was unearthed and reinterred more than once, too frightening to display and too important to destroy, before she was finally and permanently set up in the museum. She rests now in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, where she stands at the center of the Mexica hall, and where the modern visitor meets her face-to-no-face much as the Spanish authorities once did.

The early students could not even agree on who she was. León y Gama read the figure as a war-and-death deity he called Teoyaomiqui; the identification as Coatlicue came later, in the nineteenth century, with the antiquarian Alfredo Chavero, and it is the name that has held. That the very first scholars argued over her identity is fitting for a figure who carries so many names, and whose makers seem to have meant her to be more than one thing at once.

The Coatlicue statue on display in Mexico City, photographed by the Detroit Photographic Company, c. 1897–1924. Public domain.

Tonantzin, and the hill at Tepeyac

Coatlicue’s longest afterlife is not in the museum. It runs, by a path that scholars debate and that millions take for plain truth, beneath the most beloved image in Mexican Catholicism. North of Tenochtitlan stood a hill called Tepeyac, and on it, according to the testimony gathered by Sahagún, the Nahua kept a shrine to a goddess they addressed as Tonantzin, our revered mother — one of the names of the earth-mother whose other faces include Coatlicue and Cihuacoatl. Pilgrims came to her there from far off.

After the conquest a church rose on the same hill, dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the indigenous people who came to it went on calling the figure they came to see Tonantzin. Sahagún recorded this in the late sixteenth century not with approval but with worry: writing in the Florentine Codex, the great compilation he assembled with his Nahua collaborators, he warned that the converts who climbed to Tepeyac to honor “Tonantzin” were not plainly honoring the mother of the Christian God, and that the old devotion was wearing the new name like a mask. His complaint is, by accident, one of the strongest early pieces of evidence that the continuity was felt at the time and not invented by later romantics.

How much of the dark earth-mother actually survives inside Guadalupe is a genuinely contested matter, and it should be marked as such. Some scholars read a deep and deliberate syncretism, in which the Nahua mother-goddess was carried over wholesale into the Virgin and her hill; others see the resemblance as looser, a shared site and a shared maternal address rather than a transmitted identity, and warn against flattening a complex history into a single neat substitution. The Church’s own account knows nothing of Coatlicue. What is not in doubt is the address itself: the faithful of Mexico have long called the Virgin of Guadalupe by the old word for the earth-mother, and on the hill where the Mexica honored Tonantzin there now stands the basilica that draws more pilgrims than almost any shrine on earth. Whatever passed between the two, the serpent-skirted goddess of generation and death is held by many to stand, transformed and half-hidden, behind the gentlest face their devotion knows.

That doubling is the right note to end on, because it is the note Coatlicue was carved in. She was always two things refusing to be told apart — the mother and the grave, the womb and the maw, the dawn-bringing body and the corpse-eating one. The Mexica who made her did not resolve the contradiction; they piled it up in stone and faced it the other way, into the ground. Mexico has been reburying her and digging her up ever since, and has never quite decided whether she is the thing it fears or the thing it loves. The statue, with its two serpents and no eyes, gives nothing back to a viewer who wants the matter simplified. It was carved to refuse exactly that.

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