The Hymn to Huitzilopochtli is the first of twenty sacred hymns (teocuicatl, songs of the gods) that the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun collected from Nahua informants in the sixteenth century and preserved, in the Nahuatl language, within his great compilation on the culture of central Mexico. Huitzilopochtli, the tribal and solar-warrior god of the Mexica (Aztecs) who led them, in their migration legend, to found their city, was among the most important deities of their world, and the hymn hails him as a warrior and calls upon his power. The songs are difficult and allusive, composed in an archaic and esoteric ritual language, and Sahagun's Nahua assistants themselves found them hard to explain, so that their interpretation remains uncertain; they are nonetheless among the very few Aztec religious hymns to survive, recorded from native testimony in the decades after the Spanish conquest. As such they are a precious and rare witness to the ritual poetry of a religious world that was rapidly being dismantled, preserved through the ethnographic effort of a missionary.
Sahagun collected the twenty hymns as part of a broader project, later called the Florentine Codex, that aimed to document Nahua religion and culture in the informants' own words, partly so that Spanish missionaries could recognize and suppress surviving traditional practice, an uncomfortable origin for a text now treasured as one of the only firsthand windows onto Aztec religious poetry. The difficulty of the hymns' language, layered with allusions the Nahua elders themselves struggled to gloss for Sahagun's scribes, has led modern scholars to offer substantially different interpretations of individual passages.