Cihuacoatl- Aztec GodDeity"Snake Woman"

Snake Woman

Cihuacoatl wore a white-painted face with bared teeth and an eagle-feather headdress. She carried a shield in one hand and a weaving batten in the other. Her worship predated the Aztec empire, rooted among the Culhua people of Culhuacán, one of the oldest settled communities in the Valley of Mexico, whose religious traditions the Mexica absorbed as they consolidated power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Mother of Humanity

After Quetzalcoatl retrieved the bones of past humanity from Mictlan, the lord of the dead's realm, he carried them to Tamoanchan, the paradise above the heavens. There Cihuacoatl, called Quilaztli in this role, took the bones and ground them to fine powder in her jade grinding bowl, working them the way a woman grinds maize on a metate. The bones had been shattered in Mictlan when quail startled Quetzalcoatl and he stumbled on his way out of the underworld, which is why they came to her already broken and unequal in size. Cihuacoatl ground them further and mixed the powder into a paste. Quetzalcoatl pierced his own flesh and let his blood drip onto the bone meal, and from this mixture of death and divine life, Cihuacoatl shaped the first people of the Fifth Sun. They were called macehualli, "the deserved ones," because they had been earned through sacrifice. That humans come in different sizes traces back to the broken bones, but that they live at all traces back to Cihuacoatl's hands and Quetzalcoatl's blood. The Leyenda de los Soles names her as the artisan who turned the raw material of the dead into living flesh.

Patron of Childbirth

In Aztec thought, childbirth was battle. A woman in labor was a warrior fighting to bring new life from her body, and Cihuacoatl presided over this struggle as its divine patron. Midwives invoked her name during difficult deliveries, speaking the elaborate orations that Sahagún recorded in the Florentine Codex. A successful birth was celebrated with offerings at Cihuacoatl's temples. A death in labor was mourned as a battlefield loss: the fallen mother's body was processed through the streets with the same honors given to slain warriors, and her spirit rose to join the Cihuateteo.

The Cihuateteo, women who had died in childbirth transformed into fierce supernatural beings, accompanied the sun on its afternoon descent from zenith to the western horizon, carrying it down into the darkness as the male warrior-dead carried it up from dawn to noon. On certain calendar days, the Cihuateteo returned to the western crossroads of the living world, where they could strike children with illness or seizures. Cihuacoatl ruled over these divine women, the commander of an army that had passed through the same agony she governed.

The Wailing Woman

At night, Cihuacoatl roamed the streets of Tenochtitlan in white robes, her screams tearing through the darkness. Sahagún records the words the people heard: "O my children, we must flee!" and "O my children, where shall I take you?" Her wailing came before wars and disasters, a sound that froze the blood of anyone who heard it. Sometimes she was seen carrying a cradle on her back, and those brave or foolish enough to look inside found not a child but a sacrificial knife. She also appeared at marketplaces, leaving the cradle with its knife for people to discover in the morning light.

The Political Title

Cihuacoatl's authority reached into the highest levels of Aztec government. The second most powerful office in the empire bore her name: the Cihuacoatl served as the tlatoani's chief advisor and co-ruler, managing internal affairs, the judiciary, and the treasury while the emperor led wars and diplomacy. The most famous holder of this office was Tlacaelel, who served under Itzcoatl, Moctezuma I, and Axayacatl, and who reshaped Aztec ideology by expanding human sacrifice as state policy and burning rival peoples' historical records.