Coyolxauhqui

The fullest telling of Coyolxauhqui's story is in the Florentine Codex, the sixteenth-century compilation made under the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun from Nahua testimony. On the mountain Coatepec, "Serpent Hill," the goddess Coatlicue is sweeping when a ball of feathers drifts down and she tucks it into her waist; by it she conceives. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui, discovering the pregnancy and taking it for a disgrace, rouses her four hundred brothers, the Centzon Huitznahua, and leads them up the mountain in arms to kill their mother.

As they climb, the child in the womb speaks to reassure Coatlicue, kept informed by one of the brothers who has turned traitor to the plot. At the moment of the attack Huitzilopochtli is born, fully grown and fully armed, carrying the fire-serpent weapon Xiuhcoatl. He strikes down Coyolxauhqui first: he beheads her and her body breaks apart as it tumbles down the slope of Coatepec, "her arms, her legs, falling each in a different place." Then he turns on the four hundred and scatters or destroys them. The myth is at once a divine birth, a family murder, and the charter of Huitzilopochtli's supremacy: and, told of the Mexica's own patron god, a statement of the war that sustains the sun.

On 21 February 1978, electric-company workers digging at the corner of the cathedral in the heart of Mexico City struck a huge carved disk. It proved to be the Coyolxauhqui Stone: a monolith about 3.25 metres across, showing the goddess naked, beheaded and dismembered, her severed limbs jointed with monster-masks, the bells of her name on her cheek. It had lain where the Mexica set it, at the very foot of the stairway on the Huitzilopochtli side of the Templo Mayor, the double pyramid at the centre of Tenochtitlan.

The find was decisive for archaeology. It fixed the location of the Templo Mayor beneath the colonial city and launched the long Templo Mayor Project under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, which has excavated the temple and thousands of buried offerings ever since. Its meaning was plain from where it lay. The pyramid was Coatepec made in stone; the shrine of Huitzilopochtli stood at the summit where he was born victorious, and the image of his defeated sister lay broken at the bottom. Victims sacrificed at the top were rolled down the steps to come to rest on her, their bodies re-enacting her dismemberment. The atlas records this monolith as the artifact anchor for the goddess: the single object through which most people now meet her.

Coyolxauhqui is usually called a moon goddess, and the label captures the dominant reading of her myth as a cosmic allegory: Huitzilopochtli is the sun, born each dawn to drive off the moon (Coyolxauhqui) and the four hundred stars of the southern sky (the Centzon Huitznahua), so that the daily victory of daylight is re-won as a battle. On the great stone her scattered body has been read as the moon dismembered, or as the disc of the full moon itself.

The reading is not the whole of her. She is also, and perhaps first, a warrior, the leader who takes up arms and loses, and her identity overlaps with, without simply equalling, that of Metztli, the plain lunar deity. Scholars from Miller and Taube to Matos Moctezuma treat "moon goddess" as a useful shorthand for a figure whose real force in Mexica religion is as the defeated sibling whose fall the temple staged again and again. This atlas files her under the Aztec pantheon with a lunar domain, marks her not as a dark or underworld deity but as a slain celestial one, and leaves the fuller ambiguity (warrior, moon, sister, victim), to the myth and the stone that carry it.