Huitzilopochtli

Much of what is known about Huitzilopochtli's cult became concrete only in 1978, when electrical workers in Mexico City struck a massive carved stone disc showing a dismembered female figure, later identified as Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess whom myth says Huitzilopochtli defeated at the moment of his birth. The find, lying close to where the myth places her fallen body at the foot of his temple, triggered the major excavation of the Templo Mayor that has since recovered thousands of offerings and confirmed how closely Mexica religious architecture was built to stage the god's own origin story in stone.

His principal festival, Panquetzaliztli, the raising of banners, fell in the Mexica solar calendar and re-enacted his birth and victory with processions, banner-raising, ritual races and sacrifice, as described in colonial-era accounts gathered by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun from Nahua informants after the conquest. Spanish chroniclers who saw the god's cult in person, including the conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, described his image atop the Templo Mayor as covered in gold, pearls and precious stones; the temple and its idols were destroyed in 1521, so that the archaeological record recovered since 1978 is now the primary surviving evidence for a cult otherwise known mainly through conquest-era description rather than surviving objects.

In Mexica theology Huitzilopochtli was identified with the sun at the height of its strength and with war, and his myth of birth set the pattern. Born fully armed from the earth-goddess Coatlicue on the hill of Coatepec, he defended his mother against the assault of his sister Coyolxauhqui, the moon, and his brothers the Centzon Huitznahua, the countless stars of the southern sky, striking Coyolxauhqui down and dismembering her, a cosmic battle of day against night that the sources report was re-enacted at the Templo Mayor, at whose foot a great carved disc of the dismembered Coyolxauhqui was uncovered in 1978.

The Mexica understood the sun's daily course as needing to be sustained, and the Florentine Codex and related accounts describe the offerings, including human sacrifice, made to him. These descriptions, compiled after the conquest by Spanish friars from indigenous informants, remain a principal and much-debated source for Mexica religion and must be read with that colonial filter in mind.