Cihuacóatl as Warrior

Author: Traditional Aztec

Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE

Country or Culture: Mesoamerica

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The goddess Cihuacóatl has existed since the beginning of time and has taken many shapes, exhibited many characteristics—often contradictory—and been known by a variety of names in different places and eras. In ancient times, she is called Toci, Our Grandmother, or Tonatzin, Our Blessed Mother. In this form, she appears aged, sometimes with black spots on her face and sometimes with a skull head, signifying death and resurrection. She wears a headdress covered with spools of cotton to indicate her creative nature. A fertile earth mother, she carries a shield and a broom in clawlike hands to symbolize her dual nature: she is both a skilled warrior ready to kill and a domestic figure.

Among the tribes who migrate to the Valley of Mexico, she is called Yaocihuatl, Enemy Woman, or Itzpapalótl, Butterfly with Claws. In this guise, she is a ferocious warrior. She can appear in many shapes, especially as a beautiful woman who lures the unwary to death or as a skeleton with transparent butterfly wings tipped with claws or knives—an attractive but deadly creature.

Later, she is called Teteoinnan, Mother of the Gods, or Coatlicue, Serpent Skirt. In this form, she is credited with giving birth to fire, the stars, and four hundred other children, though she remains a virgin. As Coatlicue, she finds and pockets a ball of feathers while sweeping a temple, through which she becomes pregnant with Huitzilopochtli, a god of war who later becomes the sun. This pregnancy angers Coatlicue’s daughter Coyolxauhqui and her many other offspring, who gather to kill and decapitate their mother. At the moment of her death, Huitzilopochtli is born fully formed; he soon avenges his mother’s death by killing most of his siblings. He beheads Coyolxauhqui and flings her head into the sky, where it became the moon. From Coatlicue’s headless corpse grow a pair of fearsome snakes, eager to devour. Around her neck hang human hands, hearts, and skulls to show her power over life and death. Her skirt is made of living snakes.

In yet another form, she is Tlazolteotl, Eater of Filth. She appears naked, squatting to give birth and to defecate simultaneously. A goddess of the purification derived through steam baths and of midwives who assist at births, Tlazolteotl both creates and forgives sins. A seductress who lures men into adultery, she allows them to make a one-time confession of their transgressions, which she swallows, absolving them.

Her best-known manifestation is Cihuacóatl, Serpent Woman, guardian of female warriors who died during the battle of childbirth. Linked with bellicose creation goddess Quilaztli, Cihuacóatl is a chief deity during the heyday of the Toltecs, the spiritual progenitors of the Mexica, later called Aztecs, who adopt the goddess as their own and adapt her for their own purposes. A patron deity across a broad swath of Central America, she protects Culhuacán and is closely associated with Lake Xochimilco. Both a creator and a destroyer, she holds a hoe and an ear of corn to demonstrate the cause and effect of her beneficence, yet in portraits she sometimes carries a spear, and her glyphic symbol is a mouth ringed with sharp, bloody teeth. She is alternately depicted with the head of a young woman, her face whitened in the manner of the nobility, or a bare skull. Cihuacóatl always wears pure white. Characterized as a mother who abandoned her son and afterward regretted it, she wanders the night weeping and searching for her lost child, an activity that was interpreted as a harbinger of approaching war and doom.

SIGNIFICANCE

Cihuacóatl is representative of the complicated, flexible, and incorporative nature of Mesoamerican myth and religion. Ancient Mexican beliefs often combined the qualities of similar gods old and new and modified theology as necessary to accommodate the rising or falling fortunes of various tribal groups. Cihuacóatl, one of the most important figures in Aztec mythology, was associated in some way with most major deities.

Initially conceived as a goddess of both fertility and war, Cihuacóatl developed conceptually during waves of pre-Columbian migrations of tribes. These migrations began with the Chichimeca, followed by a dozen groups of Nahuatl-speaking peoples and finally the Mexica. All the migrants supposedly traveled from Aztlán or Chicomoztoc, legendary lands somewhere to the north, to the Valley of Mexico. Depictions from this period of Cihuacóatl as a soldier carrying weapons probably reflected a common reality: women often fought alongside men in tribal warfare.

The first of the migrant groups arrived at their destination ca. 950 CE to find the area under the dominion of the Toltecs. By then, the deity representing Cihuacóatl had merged with numerous related goddesses, been elevated into the upper echelon of the Mesoamerican pantheon, and inherited attributes subtly indicative of an increasingly male-dominated civilization. She was still an earth mother and implement-inventing goddess, but she was relieved of soldiery and more strongly than ever identified with the type of warfare only women can appreciate: the life-or-death battle women undergo during childbirth. Women who died in childbirth were considered the equal of those killed on the battlefield and entitled to the same honorable afterlife.

Cihuacóatl was so popular among worshippers that when the Aztecs came into power in the thirteenth century, they built temples to her in their capital of Tenochtitlan; her name appeared more frequently than that of any other deity on city structures. The Aztecs also named an important governmental post in honor of the Serpent Woman. The cihuacoátl was second in command under the emperor during the last century of Aztec rule. A nobleman who for ceremonial occasions wore a snakelike skirt suggestive of the most recognizable feature of the goddess, the cihuacoátl served as supreme judge in criminal matters, as military campaign planner and organizer, and as head of state when the emperor was absent from the city.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bierhorst, John. The Mythology of Mexico and Central America. New York: Morrow, 1990. Print.

Carrasco, Davíd. City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print.

Littleton, C. Scott, ed. “Mesoamerica’s Gods of Sun and Sacrifice.” Mythology: The Illustrated Anthology of World Myth and Storytelling. San Diego: Thunder Bay, 2002. 526–81. Print.

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Soustelle, Jacques. Daily Life of the Aztecs: On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1970. Print.