The goddess' Classical Nahuatl name can be rendered both Cōātlīcue and Cōātl īcue, from cōātl "snake" and īcue "her skirt", roughly meaning "[she who has] the skirt of snakes". The name Tēteoh īnnān, from tēteoh, plural of teōtl "god", + īnnān "their mother", refers directly to her maternal role.
Coatlicue 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 and her breasts are depicted as hanging flaccid from pregnancy. Her face is formed by two facing serpents, which represent blood spurting from her neck after she was decapitated.[5]
According to Aztec legend, Coatlicue was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple. She subsequently gave birth to the god Huitzilopochtli. Her daughter the goddess 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.[6] He killed many of his brothers and sisters, including Coyolxauhqui, who he decapitated, dismembered, 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.
Cecelia Klein argues that the famous Coatlicue statue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and several other complete and fragmentary versions, may represent a personified snake skirt.[7] The reference is to one version of the creation of the present Sun. The myth relates that the present Sun began after the deities gathered at Teotihuacan and sacrificed themselves. The best-known version states that Tezzictecatl and Nanahuatzin immolated themselves, becoming the moon and the sun. However, other versions add a group of women to those who sacrificed themselves, including Coatlicue. Afterward, the Aztecs were said to have worshiped the skirts of these women, which came back to life. Coatlicue thus has creative aspects, which may balance the skulls, hearts, hands, and claws that connect her to the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli. The earth both consumes and regenerates life.
^Cecilio A. Robelo (1905). Diccionario de Mitología Nahoa (in Spanish). Editorial Porrúa. pp. 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202. ISBN970-07-3149-9.
^Guilhem Olivier (2015). Cacería, Sacrificio y Poder en Mesoamérica: Tras las Huellas de Mixcóatl, 'Serpiente de Nube' (in Spanish). Fondo de Cultura Económica. ISBN978-607-16-3216-6.
^Susan D. Gillespie (1989). Los Reyes Aztecas: La Construcción del Gobierno en la Historia Mexica (in Spanish). Siglo XXI Editores. p. 192. ISBN968-23-1874-2.
^Otilia Meza (1981). El Mundo Mágico de los Dioses del Anáhuac (in Spanish). Editorial Universo. ISBN968-35-0093-5.
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 Principal de México, se hallaron en ella el año de 1790. Impr. de F. de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792; reprint Nabu Press (2011; Spanish), ISBN1-173-35713-0. 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. Library of Congress digital edition of Leon y Gama's 1792 work on the Calendar Stone [1]
López Luján, Leonardo. El ídolo sin pies ni cabeza: la Coatlicue a fines del México virreinal. El Colegio Nacional, Mexico City, 2020.
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.
Media related to Coatlicue at Wikimedia Commons
