Coatlicue

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This article is about the goddess. For the statue, see Coatlicue statue.

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Statue of Coatlicue displayed in National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City

Coatlicue, also known as Teteoinan (also transcribed Teteo Inan) ("The Mother of Gods"), is the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the moon, stars, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war. She is also known as Toci ("our grandmother") and Cihuacoatl ("the lady of the serpent"), the patron of women who die in childbirth.

The word "Coatlicue" is Nahuatl for "the one with the skirt of serpents". She is referred to variously by the epithets "Mother Goddess of the Earth who gives birth to all celestial things", "Goddess of Fire and Fertility", "Goddess of Life, Death and Rebirth", and "Mother of the Southern Stars".

She is represented as a woman wearing a skirt of writhing snakes and a necklace made of human hearts, hands and skulls. Her feet and hands are adorned with claws (for digging graves) and her breasts are depicted as hanging flaccid from nursing. Coatlicue keeps on her chest the hands, hearts and skulls of her children so they can be purified in their mother's chest. Her face is formed by two facing serpents, referring to the duality of her nature.

Most Aztec artistic representations of this goddess emphasize her deadly side, because Earth, as well as loving mother, is the insatiable monster that consumes everything that lives. She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist.

According to Aztec legend, she was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple, and subsequently gave birth to the gods Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui then rallied Coatlicue's four hundred other children together and goaded them into attacking and decapitating their mother. The instant she was killed, the god Huitzilopochtli suddenly emerged from her womb fully grown and armed for battle. He killed many of his brothers and sisters, including Coyolxauhqui, whose head he cut off and threw into the sky to become the moon. In one variation on this legend, Huitzilopochtli himself is the child conceived in the ball-of-feathers incident and is born just in time to save his mother from harm.

[edit] In popular culture

In the novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Shadow dreams of a museum filled with statues of gods and goddesses, and is profoundly disturbed by the statue of Coatlicue.
Coatlicue is Monster in My Pocket #16. She appears in the Oriental garden, stage 5 of the video game, rushing toward her opponent when unseen, slowly backing away when seen.
In the video game Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Coatlicue is one of many multi-elemental summons in the game. She is referred to as the Goddess Bearing the Water of Life. Unusually, she is the only summon who does not have an attack, but rather heals the party and restores their HP after each round for several rounds after.
In the anime television series Zegapain, Coatlicue is a nickname of the mecha Santico.
Coatlicue does appear connected to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Chicano and Latin-American art since the 1960s. The idea is that both are powerful female figures, one which was the focus of ancient Mexican devotion, and the other a focus of worship since the 16th century.

[edit] Sources

Vistas Project at Smith College. Edited by Dana Liebsohn and Barbara Mundy.
Boone, Elizabeth H. "The Coatlicues at the Templo Mayor." Ancient Mesoamerica (1999), 10: 189-206 Cambridge University Press.
Carbonell, Ana Maria. "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros." MELUS 24(2) Summer 1999:53-74
Cisneros, Sandra. "It occurs to me I am the creative/destructive goddess Coatlicue."
The Massachusetts Review 36(4):599. Winter 1995.
Dorsfuhrer, C. "Quetzalcoatl and Coatlicue in Mexican Mythology." Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (449):6-28 NOV 1987.
Fernández, Justino. Coatlicue. Estética del arte indígena antiguo. Centro de Estudios Filosoficos, U.N.A.M., Mexico, 1954.
Franco, Jean. "The Return of Coatlicue: Mexican Nationalism and the Aztec Past." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 13(2) August 2004: 205 - 219.
Granziera, Patrizia. "From Coatlicue to Guadalupe: The Image of the Great Mother in Mexico." Studies in World Christianity 10(2):250-273. 2005.
León y Gama, Antonio de. Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras: que con ocasión del empedrado que se está formando en la plaza Pricipal de México, se hallaron en ella el año de 1790. Impr. de F. de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792. An expanded edition, with descriptions of additional sculptures (like the Stone of Tizoc), edited by Carlos Maria Bustamante, published in 1832. There have been a couple of facsimile editions, published in the 1980s and 1990s.
Pimentel, Luz A. "Ekphrasis and Cultural Discourse: Coatlicue in Descriptive and Analytic Texts (Representations of the Aztec earth mother goddess). NEOHELICON 30(1):61-75. 2003