Huitzilopochtli

The patron god of the Mexica (Aztecs), a god of war identified with the sun, who led them from Aztlan to found Tenochtitlan. He is shown with a hummingbird headdress, and his name means “hummingbird of the left”.

Aztec symbols and gods. Also called huitzilopochtli symbol, hummingbird god.

Meaning

Dúrdica Ségota describes Huitzilopochtli as the god of war and patron of the Mexica, in whose name they conquered most of Mesoamerica; he was identified with the Sun, guided the migration from Aztlan to the founding of Tenochtitlan, and was usually shown wearing a hummingbird helmet. The historian María Castañeda de la Paz translates the name as “left of the hummingbird”, often given as “the left-handed hummingbird”. In the codices, she writes, he is a human figure with his hummingbird headdress, and it is not always easy to tell the god from his priest, from the captives to be sacrificed in his honour, or from the ruler dressed as him. Mexicolore describes him in the Codex Borbonicus carrying a shield and the serpent-shaped weapon called the xiuhcoatl. In Nicholson’s guide to deity insignia his face is painted blue with horizontal yellow stripes, and his shield is dotted with balls of down. Dictionary.com gives the name as wee-tsee-loh-POHCH-tlee.

Origin and history

Sahagún, the sixteenth-century Franciscan, called Huitzilopochtli “otro Hércules”, very strong and warlike, a destroyer of towns, whose device was “a very frightful dragon’s head that breathed fire from its mouth”. The Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan was a double pyramid, Guilhem Olivier writes, with Huitzilopochtli’s shrine on the south side and Tlaloc’s on the north.

The archaeologists of INAH’s Templo Mayor Project, led by Leonardo López Luján, point out that for the patron of the city he left surprisingly few images there, while images of Tlaloc are everywhere. Following Henry B. Nicholson and Elizabeth Boone, they read this as the trace of a sudden change: Huitzilopochtli went from a minor tribal god of a humble Nahuatl-speaking group to a god of the state, and was still “a god in formation” when the Spanish arrived in 1519. In the paintings of the pyramid’s second stage (1375–1427) his own figure does not appear; the walls of the south chapel show a mass of weapons instead: shields, darts, banners and devices.

The birth on Coatepec

The Florentine Codex tells the story, which Patrick Johansson retells. Coatlicue was sweeping on Coatepetl, the hill of the serpent, when a ball of feathers fell from the sky; she tucked it under her huipil and found herself pregnant. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui and her sons, the four hundred Centzonhuitznahua, plotted to kill her. In Mexicolore’s retelling, Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother’s womb with the xiuhcoatl in his hand and killed his sister at the head of the attackers. Johansson notes that the places the attackers pass in the story are named levels of the Templo Mayor.

Hummingbird, hawk and eagle

Dumbarton Oaks calls the hummingbird one of the most sacred animals for the Nahuas, because it stood for Huitzilopochtli; souls who died in battle or as sacrifices went with the sun, and after four years returned as hummingbirds or butterflies. By the time Tenochtitlan was founded, Castañeda de la Paz writes, the hummingbird had become an eagle: the bird of the eagle on the cactus. López Luján’s team excavated a pair of hawks buried at the foot of the Templo Mayor, dressed as Huitzilopochtli in gold, turquoise, shell and greenstone, one with a slender gold hummingbird beak.

Sacrifice in his name

Yólotl González Torres writes that Huitzilopochtli was believed to have demanded, in return for leading the Mexica, the building of shrines where the Sun was offered its divine food: the blood and hearts of warriors captured in war. Tenochtitlan had more than eighty temples, she writes, and sacrifice could be made at almost all of them, but it was made above all at the Templo Mayor, in honour of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc.