Our Lord the Flayed One, and the Husk of the Seed

Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, is one of the oldest and most widely worshipped gods of Mesoamerica, a deity of spring, renewal, agricultural fertility and, later, of goldsmiths. His defining image is deliberately disturbing: he is shown wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim, its slack hands hanging at his wrists, symbolizing the earth that sheds its dry husk as new growth appears and the seed that splits its coat as it germinates. His festival Tlacaxipehualiztli, described in the Florentine Codex and other colonial sources, involved gladiatorial sacrifice and the wearing of victims' skins by devotees for twenty days, until the skins rotted and were cast off, dramatizing the renewal of vegetation in spring. In 2019 archaeologists reported the first temple positively identified with his cult, at Ndachjian-Tehuacan in Puebla, giving material confirmation of a deity previously known largely from images and texts.