Coatlicue, She of the Serpent Skirt, is an Aztec earth and mother goddess, at once the devouring and the generative ground from which life springs and to which it returns. She is the mother of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, of the four hundred star-gods called the Centzon Huitznahua, and of the war god and patron of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli.
The most powerful surviving image of her is a colossal stone statue, one of the great masterpieces of Aztec sculpture: it shows a figure whose head is two great serpents facing each other (for she has been decapitated, and twin streams of blood, rendered as snakes, rise from her neck), who wears a skirt woven of writhing serpents and a necklace of severed human hands and hearts with a skull at its centre, and whose hands and feet end in claws. It is an uncompromising vision of the earth as the power that both brings forth life and consumes it in death.