Coyolxauhqui, the dismembered goddess of the Templo Mayor and Coatepec
Coyolxauhqui in Aztec religion: the Coatepec myth in the Florentine Codex, the great stone found in Mexico City in 1978 and the debate over her lunar role.
On 21 February 1978, in the centre of Mexico City, some workers from the electricity company were digging to lay cables when they struck a large carved stone. It was a disc about three metres across bearing the image of a beheaded and dismembered woman. That chance discovery led to the systematic excavation of the Templo Mayor, the great temple of Tenochtitlan, and brought back to light one of the most dramatic figures of Aztec mythology: Coyolxauhqui.
The myth of Coatepec
The story has come down to us mainly through the Florentine Codex, the encyclopedia of Nahua culture compiled in the sixteenth century under the direction of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún with the help of indigenous informants. On Mount Coatepec, «serpent mountain», the goddess Coatlicue was sweeping when a ball of feathers fell from the sky. She picked it up and tucked it into her bosom, and from that moment she found herself pregnant.
Her children, the Centzon Huitznahua, the «four hundred southerners», led by their sister Coyolxauhqui, felt dishonoured and resolved to kill their mother. But at the very moment they reached the top of the mountain, Huitzilopochtli was born, the god of war and of the Sun, already grown and armed with the fire serpent. The god beheaded Coyolxauhqui and her body rolled down the slope, breaking into pieces, and then he put her brothers to flight.
The stone of the Templo Mayor
The Templo Mayor was conceived as a reproduction of Mount Coatepec. Its southern half, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, had at the foot of its staircase precisely the disc of Coyolxauhqui, as if the goddess had just fallen from the summit. The relief shows the body with severed limbs, the bells on the cheeks from which her name derives, «she who has bells on her face», and elaborate ornaments on the head.
Spanish sources report that during the festival of Panquetzaliztli, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the bodies of victims sacrificed at the top of the temple were rolled down the steps. Many scholars see in this a ritual repetition of the myth, with the stone of Coyolxauhqui marking the spot where the goddess had fallen. The original disc is now kept in the Museo del Templo Mayor, beside the archaeological site.
Was she really the Moon?
For much of the twentieth century Coyolxauhqui was interpreted as a lunar deity, and the myth as the image of the rising Sun defeating the Moon and the stars, represented by the four hundred brothers. This reading, proposed by German scholars of the early twentieth century and widely popularised, has one limitation: Sahagún's text does not say explicitly that Coyolxauhqui is the Moon. Some researchers therefore consider the identification possible but unproven.
Whatever her astral meaning, the story of Coyolxauhqui remains a founding myth for the Mexica, who recognised Huitzilopochtli as their patron god. The stone of 1978, with its broken body yet composed in a perfectly balanced design, has become one of the symbols of ancient Mexico and an extraordinary example of Aztec sculpture from the second half of the fifteenth century.