Coatlicue
Coatlicue - "Serpent Skirt" / "She of the Serpent Skirt"
The primordial earth mother goddess, Coatlicue embodies the duality at the heart of Aztec religion. Her terrifying appearance - a skirt of writhing serpents, a necklace of human hearts and hands, clawed feet, and two serpent heads - represents both the life-giving earth that nurtures crops and the devouring grave that reclaims all living things. She is creation and destruction inseparable.
Names and Meanings
Attributes and Domains
Creation Mythology
The Birth of Huitzilopochtli
The most famous myth of Coatlicue describes how she became pregnant while sweeping at Coatepec Hill ("Serpent Mountain"). A ball of hummingbird feathers fell from the sky, and she placed them in her bosom. When she discovered she was pregnant, her four hundred sons (the Centzon Huitznahua, representing the stars of the southern sky) and her daughter Coyolxauhqui (the moon) were outraged.
Believing their mother had dishonored them, Coyolxauhqui rallied her brothers to kill Coatlicue. As they approached for the murder, Huitzilopochtli burst from his mother's womb fully armed with the fire serpent Xiuhcoatl. He slew his brothers and decapitated Coyolxauhqui, hurling her dismembered body down the slopes of Coatepec.
Earth as Mother and Grave
In Aztec cosmology, the earth itself was conceptualized as Coatlicue's body - a vast being that both gives life (through crops and plants) and consumes the dead (returning them to her womb/grave). This is why her iconography combines symbols of fertility (serpents, female form) with symbols of death (skulls, severed hands, hearts). The earth that grows corn is the same earth that swallows corpses.
Human sacrifice can be understood partly as "feeding" the earth mother, returning the blood and life that she gives to humanity through agriculture. The severed hearts offered to the gods were also offerings to the insatiable earth.
The Great Statue
The monumental stone sculpture of Coatlicue, standing nearly 9 feet tall and weighing 12 tons, is one of the most famous works of pre-Columbian art. Discovered buried beneath Mexico City's main plaza in 1790, it was considered so terrifying that it was immediately reburied and only permanently displayed in 1823.
The statue depicts Coatlicue in all her terrible glory: her head is two facing serpents (representing blood flowing from her decapitated neck), she wears a necklace of human hands and hearts with a skull pendant, her skirt is woven of snakes, and her hands and feet end in claws. Yet she also displays sagging breasts - the marks of a mother who has nursed many children. This synthesis of the nurturing and the horrific makes the statue one of the most powerful religious images in world art.
Sacrifice and Rituals
As the earth mother and "mother of the gods," Coatlicue received offerings in her various aspects. Her worship overlaps with related goddesses including Cihuacoatl, Tlazolteotl, and Tonantzin.
The Ochpaniztli Festival
During the eleventh month (Ochpaniztli, "Sweeping"), the Aztecs honored Toci/Teteoinan (aspects of the earth mother). A woman was sacrificed and flayed, and a priest wore her skin to represent the goddess. This ritual related to themes of agricultural renewal - the "death" of the old season and the "rebirth" of the new growing cycle.
Forms of Worship
- Blood Sacrifice: Hearts and blood offered to nourish the earth
- Flaying Rituals: Priests wore the skin of sacrificed victims to embody renewal
- Sweeping Ceremonies: Ritual sweeping honored her connection to the Huitzilopochtli myth
- Offerings: Serpent imagery, flowers, copal incense, and first fruits
Iconography and Symbols
Modern Significance
Coatlicue has become a powerful symbol in Mexican and Chicano/a identity. Her image represents the indigenous heritage that predates Spanish colonization and embodies a feminine divine that is not docile or gentle but powerful and terrible. Feminist scholars and artists have reclaimed her as an alternative to European models of femininity and motherhood.
Gloria Anzaldua, in her influential work Borderlands/La Frontera, invokes Coatlicue as a symbol of the mestiza consciousness that embraces contradictions - light and dark, creation and destruction, indigenous and colonial. The goddess represents wholeness that includes the shadow, refusing to split the sacred feminine into only nurturing or only destructive aspects.
Her connection to the Virgin of Guadalupe is also significant. The Virgin's shrine at Tepeyac was previously a site sacred to Tonantzin, an aspect of the earth mother. Some scholars see Guadalupe as a Christianized form of the ancient goddess, allowing indigenous peoples to continue honoring the earth mother in new religious language.
Related Across the Mythos
Coatlicue embodies the Earth Mother archetype in its fullest form - both nurturing giver of life and devouring grave that reclaims all beings.
See parallels: Gaia, Demeter, Pachamama, Prithvi >Her skull necklace and consuming nature connect her to the archetype of the Death Goddess - the feminine face of mortality.
See parallels: Kali, Hecate, Morrigan, Hel >Huitzilopochtli
Aztec Deity
Her son, born to defend her