Huitzilopochtli

Sahagún tells of his birth in Book III. Near the town of Tula there is a mountain called Coatepec, and there Coatlicue, mother of the Centzon Huitznahua and of their sister Coyolxauhqui, did penance by sweeping. One day «a little ball of feathers, like a ball of spun yarn» fell to her; she tucked it into her bosom, under her skirts, and when she went to take it out it was gone: she was with child. Her children took it as a disgrace, and Coyolxauhqui persuaded them to kill their mother. The child comforted her from the womb, and one of the brothers, Cuauhtlicac, went over to his side and kept telling him where they were climbing. At the very moment they arrived, he was born: with a shield of down, a dart and a blue staff, his face painted, a tuft of feathers on his head, his left leg thin and feathered and his thighs and arms painted blue. He ordered Tochancalqui to light the xiuhcóatl, a serpent made of pine torches, and with it he struck Coyolxauhqui, who died broken to pieces: her head stayed on the top of the mountain and her body went tumbling down. Then he chased the four hundred round the mountain four times; many died, and those who were left fled south. Reading this battle as the newborn sun defeating the moon and the stars is a modern interpretation, above all Eduard Seler's at the beginning of the twentieth century: the text speaks of a mother and her children.

Coatepec is not the only origin he is given. The History of the Mexicans by Their Paintings, written around 1540, tells that the creator couple, Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacíhuatl, «begot four sons»: the red Tezcatlipoca, the black Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcóatl, and the fourth and smallest, Omitecuhtli or Maquizcóatl, «and the Mexicans called him Uchilobi, because he was left-handed». That youngest son was born without flesh, with bones alone, and stayed that way six hundred years, until his brothers charged him and Quetzalcóatl with ordering the world: they made fire, half a sun, and the first human couple. No source reconciles the two genealogies, and this entry does not blend them: Coatlicue's is the Mexica vulgate and the four brothers' is a variant with its source. The name says the same in both: huitzilin, «hummingbird», and opochtli, «left», which for the Mexica was the side of the south. Sahagún, for his part, opens Book I with him and reads him his own way: «he was another Hercules», an immensely strong man and «great destroyer of peoples», who bore as his device «a most frightful dragon's head that breathed fire from its mouth», who «turned himself into the shape of various birds and beasts», and whom they honoured as a god after his death. That reading, the deified hero, is the friar's, not the Mexica's.

Durán, in his History of the Indies, tells the part of the migration that Sahagún barely touches. Huitzilopochtli had a sister, Malinalxóchitl, a sorceress, whom he had abandoned asleep on the road; she founded Malinalco, and her son Copil went from town to town raising the peoples of the valley against the Mexica. The god warned them, they killed him on the hillock of Tepetzinco, today's Peñón de los Baños, tore out his heart and threw it among the reeds of the lake. From that heart grew a prickly-pear, and the prophecy Durán puts in the god's mouth says that an eagle lived on it which «feeds and eats of the best and finest birds», surrounded by green, blue, red and yellow feathers. In Durán the eagle eats no serpent: the snake appears apart, in the formula «where the eagle sang and the serpent hissed». The image of the eagle devouring a serpent prevailed later, and the arms of independent Mexico fixed it. On that islet rose Tenochtitlan, and at its centre the Templo Mayor, with two shrines on its summit, his and Tláloc's. His great feast was Panquetzaliztli, when those who stood for the Centzon Huitznahua were killed in the temple of Huitznáhuac. And in 1978, at the foot of his side of the temple, the Coyolxauhqui monolith came to light: a dismembered woman, in the place where the myth says her body fell.