The God Who Would Not Die, and the Salamander Named for Him

One of the most vivid Xolotl stories belongs to the myth of the creation of the Fifth Sun at Teotihuacan, where the gods gather in darkness and two of their number must throw themselves into a great fire to become the new sun and moon. According to versions of the tale preserved in colonial sources, Xolotl, terrified of the sacrifice demanded of the gods as the new sun begins its first, unmoving rise and requires the death of the assembled deities to set it in motion, tries repeatedly to escape his fate, transforming himself first into a stalk of maize with two ears, then into a wide-leafed maguey plant, and finally into an aquatic salamander, diving into the water to hide, before he is eventually found and killed regardless, joining the general sacrifice of the gods that gives the newborn sun its motion. This myth is the acknowledged source of the modern Nahuatl-derived name of the actual salamander species Ambystoma mexicanum, still called the axolotl today and native to the lake system beneath Mexico City, an animal now critically endangered in the wild and well known to modern biology for its unusual ability to regenerate entire limbs and organs. The etymology, generally parsed as Xolotl's water form or water monster, ties a specific, still-living Mexican animal directly back to a specific episode in Aztec cosmogony, one of the clearer instances in which Mesoamerican mythology left a permanent mark on the modern scientific name of a real creature.