Centeotl is the maize god, the personification of the ripened ear that sustained central Mexican life, and the fourth of the nine Lords of the Night. Sahagun's Florentine Codex treats Centeotl as young and vigorous, closely tied to Xilonen, the goddess of the young green maize, and to Chicomecoatl, seven serpent, the older and more matronly grain goddess, the three figures together tracing maize through its life from tender shoot to harvested ear, though the sources vary on whether Centeotl is read as male, as gender was not always kept sharply apart in maize deity iconography.
The great agricultural festivals of the Mexica ritual year, Hueytozoztli in the growing season and the harvest observances folded into Ochpaniztli, centred on maize deities of this cluster, and Centeotl's cult reflects how completely the crop underwrote Mexica subsistence, since a poor maize year was a crisis reaching every household rather than an abstract concern.
In the parentage myth recorded in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, Centeotl is the child of Piltzintecuhtli and Xochiquetzal, the night lord immediately before him in the nine fold sequence, so that dawn and flower together are read as bringing forth the grain, a lineage that ties three consecutive night lords into a single family story even though Sahagun's calendar chapters record the nine simply as a list with no explicit narrative connecting them.
Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex ChimalpopocaJohn Bierhorst (trans.)