The Birth of the War God (Aztec myth)
"The Birth of the War God" is a significant Aztec myth centered around the deity Huitzilopochtli, who embodies war and conquest. The story begins with Coatlicue, a mother living in the mythical land of Aztlán, who becomes pregnant after discovering a magical ball of feathers. Her other children, furious at what they perceive as dishonor, pursue her, but Huitzilopochtli is born fully grown and armed, defending Coatlicue from her siblings. He kills his sister Coyolxauhqui, whose severed head becomes the moon, and defeats his brothers, scattering their bodies as stars. This myth not only illustrates Huitzilopochtli's emergence as a central figure in Aztec culture but also serves as a narrative for the Aztec migration to their eventual home, Tenochtitlán, marked by the vision of an eagle on a cactus. The tale captures themes of family conflict, divine intervention, and the establishment of cultural identity, with Huitzilopochtli representing the martial spirit of the Aztec Empire. The myth has also been linked to the historical migration of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples and continues to resonate in modern Mexican culture, symbolized in the national emblem of Mexico featuring the eagle and cactus.
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The Birth of the War God (Aztec myth)
Author: Traditional Aztec
Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE
Country or Culture: Mesoamerica
Genre: Myth
PLOT SUMMARY
Coatlicue lives in Aztlán, the mythical home of the Azteca (Aztec people). She has two daughters, Coyolxauhqui and Malinalxochitl, and four hundred sons. One day, she finds a magical ball of feathers on the ground, and when she tucks it under her clothing, feeling inextricably drawn to it, she becomes pregnant. Coatlicue’s children are furious, demanding to know the identity of the father and believing that their mother has dishonored the family. The baby inside Coatlicue speaks to her and tells her to flee to the top of a mountain. Coatlicue’s children pursue, intending to kill her. However, Coatlicue’s divine baby, Huitzilopochtli, is born full grown, wearing armor and brandishing weapons. He defends his mother’s life, killing his sister Coyolxauhqui and flinging her head into the sky, where it remains as the moon. He also kills many of his brothers, scattering their bodies in the heavens as the stars.
The ancient Aztecs accept Huitzilopochtli as their god of war, and he tells the people that he will lead them forth to a new land, where they will conquer and unite the various people and establish great kingdoms. Huitzilopochtli and his followers depart one night while his surviving sister, Malinalxochitl, is sleeping. When she wakes up, she is furious at her brother and leads her own followers to the mountain Texcatepetl, where she gives birth to a son, Copil.
When the Azteca arrive in Techcatitlan (now Texcaltitlán), Huitzilopochtli is forced to battle with his nephew Copil, who by then has grown to become a great warrior. Huitzilopochtli defeats Copil and cuts out his heart; he gives the heart gives to a servant and tells him to throw it into the forest in a bed of reeds. At this point, Huitzilopochtli leaves the Azteca to attend to other concerns, but he continues to watch over them in spirit as they search for their new home.
For more than forty years, the Azteca wander the wilderness looking for the land foreseen by Huitzilopochtli, occasionally trying to settle in various areas they find along the way. While watching over them, Huitzilopochtli uses magic and trickery to prevent the Azteca from settling until they reach the chosen land. The Azteca eventually reach the borders of Lake Texcoco, where one of the priests receives a vision of Huitzilopochtli, who tells the Azteca to be on the lookout for an eagle perched on a tenochtli, or stone cactus, while holding a snake in its beak. This cactus has grown from the discarded heart of Copil, and the eagle is the physical manifestation of Huitzilopochtli. In a patch of grasses near a marsh, the people spot the eagle perched on the cactus, and it bows to them, signifying their arrival at their new home. It is here that the Azteca found their kingdom of Tenochtitlán, which would become the largest city of the Aztec Empire and remain the home of the Aztec people into the modern era.
SIGNIFICANCE
Historians have theorized that the mythical land of Aztlán may have referred to a real place where the ancestral Nahuatl-speaking people lived before establishing the Aztec Empire in central Mexico. The Aztec Empire formed through conquest, with the ancestral Aztecs invading and subduing a number of other societies in the process of building their empire. Huitzilopochtli is seen as having influenced this migration, using magic and trickery to prevent the migratory Azteca from settling in other locations before they reached the land he envisioned. While there are no historical records of this journey, in myth, the people continued moving because of floods, famines, and the hostility of other kingdoms. Some historians have suggested that these mythical events might be rooted in various actual experiences that the Azteca encountered during the migration.
The myth of the birth of Huitzilopochtli has also been utilized as part of the overall creation theory of the Aztecs, with parts of the story explaining the existence of the heavenly bodies, such as the birth of the moon and stars from the bodies of Huitzilopochtli’s siblings. The cosmic genesis elements of the Huitzilopochtli myth were a late development in Aztec culture, occurring after the reformulation of their religion in the fifteenth century. It was during this renaissance period that the Aztecs elevated Huitzilopochtli to become one of their primary gods and reformulated many myths to focus on Huitzilopochtli as the primary character. Huitzilopochtli was also the god of war, and his acceptance as the patron of the fifteenth-century empire reflects the fact that warfare and conquest were a central part of this culture’s values and history.
In many reformulated versions of the myth—changed after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the sixteenth century—Huitzilopochtli tells the Aztec people that after they leave Aztlán they will no longer to be known as the Azteca and should instead call themselves the Mexica. Huitzilopochtli is still considered the patron of the Mexican people; the ancestral city of Tenochtitlán was rebuilt after the Spanish conquest and is now known as Mexico City.
Huitzilopochtli and the myth of the eagle perched on the cactus is also an important part of modern Mexican heritage and has been preserved in the Mexican coat of arms, which depicts a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus and struggling with a rattlesnake. This emblem reflects the cultural history of Tenochtitlán and the continuity of modern Mexican culture and the Aztec Empire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
Carrasco, David. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Print.
Carrasco, David, and Scott Sessions. Daily Life of the Aztecs. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2011. Print.
Clendennin, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print
Dils, Lorna. “Aztec Mythology.” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale-New Haven Teachers Inst. , 2013. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.
León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. Print.
Spence, Lewis. The Myths of Mexico and Peru. New York: Cosimo, 2010. Print.
Webley, Kayla. “Huizilopochtli, Aztec God of Sun and War.” Time. Time, 7 Feb. 2011. Web. 29 April 2013.