Metztli

Metztli is a Nahua word for the moon, but the figure behind the name is not sharply drawn in the surviving sources, and the moon's mythology in central Mexico is distributed among several deities rather than gathered into one clearly defined lunar god. Much of the lunar symbolism attaches to the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui, struck down by Huitzilopochtli, and the moon was also read in the rabbit the Mexica saw in its face, tied through the pulque-and-rabbit imagery to the gods of drink; the word metztli itself also names the month in the Nahua calendar. Because the record for a distinct deity named Metztli is limited, care is needed not to over-systematize a lunar god that the sources leave largely undelineated, the honest statement is that Metztli names the moon and its associations more than it names a well-attested personal deity. What can be verified about Metztli rests almost entirely on Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, the great sixteenth-century compilation of Nahua testimony, where the ordinary word for the moon and its waning is recorded directly, as in the phrase noting that when the moon had wholly vanished "it was said: the moon hath died."

The earlier missionary Alonso de Molina's 1571 Nahuatl dictionary likewise glosses metztli simply as moon or month, with no separate entry marking out a distinct deity, which is consistent with, and helps explain, the thinness of Metztli as a personal god noted above: the documentary record preserves the word far more securely than it preserves a personality.

The lunar associations gathered loosely under the name Metztli find their most vivid and best documented expression not in a myth about Metztli directly but in the archaeological rediscovery of the goddess most closely tied to the moon in the Mexica pantheon, Coyolxauhqui. In February 1978, electrical utility workers in Mexico City struck a massive carved stone disc, eventually identified as a monumental relief of the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, and the find led directly to the systematic excavation of the Templo Mayor, the principal temple of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, buried beneath the modern city center since the Spanish conquest.

The stone shows the goddess decapitated and dismembered, matching the myth in which her brother Huitzilopochtli, born fully armed, defeats and dismembers her at the hill of Coatepec after she leads an attack on their mother; placed at the base of the temple's stairway, the carving meant that anyone climbing to the war god's shrine symbolically re-enacted his victory with every step upward, walking over the fallen moon goddess's broken body. This discovery transformed Aztec archaeology, turning what had been a scattered set of colonial-era manuscript references into a monumental, in-place confirmation of how central lunar mythology was to the physical and ritual heart of the Mexica capital, even though, as with Metztli specifically, the surviving evidence distributes the moon's story across several named figures rather than concentrating it in one clearly defined deity.