Hummingbird symbolism
The bird of Huitzilopochtli, patron god of the Mexica (Aztecs), whose name means “hummingbird of the south” or “of the left”. The Nahuas believed the souls of warriors killed in battle came back to earth as hummingbirds or butterflies; in Cherokee stories the hummingbird is the bird small and fast enough to steal back tobacco.
Meaning
Dumbarton Oaks calls the hummingbird “one of the most sacred animals for the Nahuas, as it symbolized the patron god Huitzilopochtli”. It was a bird of the afterlife as well: the souls of warriors who died in battle, and of sacrificial victims, returned after four years as hummingbirds or butterflies. Once Europeans learned of the bird, Christian writers gave it a meaning of their own, as an emblem of the Resurrection. Among the Cherokee, in the stories James Mooney collected between 1887 and 1890, it is the tiny, swift bird that nobody can see coming. The popular “spiritual meanings” and tattoo meanings given for the hummingbird online could not be traced to any of these traditions or to an older writer, and this page leaves them out.
Origin and history
Huitzilopochtli was the patron of the Mexica, “who are more generally known as the Aztecs”, as Mexicolore puts it, and he “symbolized the sun, war, youth and conquest”. Mexicolore translates his name as “Hummingbird of the South or Left”; Lewis Spence gave “Humming-bird to the left” and explained it by the hummingbird feathers the god wore on his left leg. In the Borbonic Codex he wears a headdress made to look like a hummingbird’s head. Native featherworkers wove hummingbird feathers into “images of their gods”, according to the early printed text Dumbarton Oaks quotes beside what is likely the first printed picture of a hummingbird.
The hummingbird also belonged to the dead. Most people, Dumbarton Oaks explains, faced a hazardous four-year journey to Mictlan, the place of the dead, but those who died in battle or as sacrificial victims were allowed to accompany the sun on its path, and “after four years, these glorified souls were resurrected as hummingbirds or butterflies”. Mexicolore gives the same account from Sahagún’s informants, and adds that Huitzilopochtli himself “was sometimes a hummingbird, the soul of a dead warrior”.
A Christian emblem of the Resurrection
Europeans who learned about the hummingbird gave it a Christian reading. Dumbarton Oaks records the belief that the bird hung from tall trees and fell into a catatonic state for up to six months, and that the Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, in his Historia Naturae, took this “hibernation” as a figure of the Resurrection of Christ.
The hummingbird in Cherokee stories
In “How They Brought Back the Tobacco”, which Mooney recorded among the Cherokee, geese have stolen the only tobacco plant and killed every animal sent to fetch it. The Hummingbird offers to go, and the others say he is “entirely too small and might as well stay at home”. The geese “could not see him because he was so small and flew so swiftly”; he darts down on the plant and snatches off its top “before the Dagûl`kû knew what had happened”. In a second version a conjurer puts on a hummingbird skin to fly over the guarded mountains. Another story opens with a woman choosing between two suitors: “She preferred the Hummingbird, who was as handsome as the Crane was awkward.”
A North Carolina superstition
One entry in the Frank C. Brown collection of North Carolina folklore warns: “If you kill a humming bird, you will not live to be twenty-one years of age.”
Related animals
The butterfly was the other form the Nahuas believed returning warrior souls took. The Cardinal symbolism is the other bird with a Cherokee story in Mooney’s collection on this site.
See also
Butterfly symbolism, Cardinal symbolism, Owl symbolism, Crow symbolism, Raven symbolism, Hawk symbolism.
Sources
- Hummingbirds and the Afterlife (Dumbarton Oaks), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University, online exhibition on epidemics and Mesoamerican herbals, Dumbarton Oaks
- God of the Month: Huitzilopochtli (Mexicolore), Julia Flood, Mexicolore, Mexicolore
- The Myths of Mexico & Peru (Lewis Spence), Lewis Spence, The Myths of Mexico & Peru (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company), Project Gutenberg, Chapter on the Aztec gods, Huitzilopochtli
- Myths of the Cherokee (James Mooney, 1900), James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, Project Gutenberg, Introduction; myth 6, How They Brought Back the Tobacco; myth 43, The Race between the Crane and the Hummingbird
- The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 7 (Wayland D. Hand, ed., 1964), Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina, part 2, ed. Wayland D. Hand (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964), Internet Archive (Duke University Library copy), No. 5301
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research