The Mature Counterpart to Xilonen

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Spanish-era chroniclers recording Aztec religion sometimes described Chicomecoatl and Centeotl as closely overlapping or even functionally interchangeable figures, a reading modern scholarship treats cautiously, since the two carried distinct festivals, distinct iconography and, in Centeotl's case, an association that could run male as readily as female depending on the source consulted. Chicomecoatl's more secure counterpart is Xilonen, and the pairing is explicit rather than inferred: iconographic sources sometimes show Chicomecoatl herself rendered as an old woman specifically to mark the fully aged, dried grain in contrast to Xilonen's tender, youthful ear, making the two goddesses stand for the same plant's beginning and end rather than for different plants entirely. That structure, a young and an old goddess bracketing one crop's life, recurs elsewhere in the Aztec pantheon, most notably in the pairing of Xilonen again with Ilamatecuhtli's much broader old-age and year-end associations, suggesting the culture found the young-and-aged goddess pair a productive way to represent any process, agricultural or calendrical, that had a clear beginning and a clear close.