Cihuacóatl

Cihuacóatl means «serpent woman», and Sahagún puts her first in the list of principal goddesses in Book I of his General History. He writes that she «brought adverse things such as poverty, dejection and hardship», that she appeared as a lady dressed in palace finery, and that at night she «cried out and roared in the air». They also called her Tonantzin, «our mother», and the friar could not resist reading in the woman and the serpent an echo of Eve: that is his commentary, not his informants'. Her oldest office is childbirth. In Book VI the midwife attending a hard labour urges the woman to strain «like that goddess who gave birth first, who was called Cihuacóatl and Quilaztli»: for the Mexica, giving birth was a battle, and she was the first to fight it. The Legend of the Suns, a Nahuatl manuscript dated 1558, gives her a larger part still: when Quetzalcóatl returns from Mictlan with the bones of the earlier humanity, it is Quilaztli, «who is Cihuacóatl», who grinds them in a jade bowl so that the gods can water them with their blood and people can come forth from that paste. Modern scholarship groups her with other mothers of the pantheon, such as Coatlicue, Toci or Teteoinnan, and with the cihuateteo, the women who died in childbirth; but Sahagún treats those goddesses separately and nowhere says that she presides over them.

Sahagún describes her apparition precisely: she wore white and had her hair gathered so that it formed «as it were little horns crossed over the brow». She carried a cradle on her back, like someone carrying a child, sat down in the tianguis among the other women and, vanishing, left the cradle behind; when they opened it there was no child inside, but a flint «like a lance-head», the knife of the sacrifices. That was how they knew Cihuacóatl had passed by. Durán tells the same scene from the other side: if eight days went by without sacrifices, her priests put the flint into a cradle, called it «the son of Cihuacóatl», and sent a woman to leave it in the keeping of the chief jeweller of the market; when at last it was unwrapped, word went round that the goddess had come «to show the hunger she had». What is an apparition in Sahagún is a rite in Durán. Her most famous appearance, the one among the omens of the Conquest, is usually told wrongly. In Book XII the sixth sign is a woman's voice crying at night «Oh my children, we are lost!» and «Oh my children, where shall I take you?», but there the voice has no owner. The one that names it is Book VIII, reviewing the reign of Moteuczoma: «the devil called Cihuacóatl went weeping at night through the streets of Mexico», saying «Oh my children, woe is me, for now I am leaving you!». Joining the two passages into one is the work of the commentators.

Cihuacóatl was also the name of an office: the second highest in Tenochtitlan after the tlatoani, that of the counsellor who governed the city from within while the king made war. The most famous holder was Tlacaélel, who exercised it in the fifteenth century under several kings. The title did not turn the man into the goddess, but it bound him to her: the dignitary bore her name because the office was, symbolically, the female half of power. Sahagún preserves the trace of the office at the final hour: after the fall of the city, the one who answers Cortés through Malintzin on behalf of the Mexica is a noble «who was called Cioacoatl», that is, Cuauhtémoc's cihuacóatl. Durán holds her to be the patroness of Xochimilco and also calls her Quilaztli; in Tenochtitlan she had her oratory in the sacred precinct, the Tlillancalmécac, «the house of blackness», served by three priests. When Mexica religion came apart, what remained of her was the cradle, the flint, the white attire and the night voice; and from the voice colonial tradition made a woman who weeps for her children beside the water. The identification of the two was set down in writing by Thomas Janvier in 1910, citing Orozco y Berra: it is a commentators' reading, not an inheritance the ancient sources assert, and that is why this entry and La Llorona's both tell it as such.