Cipactli- Aztec CreatureCreature · Monster

The Making of the Earth

Cipactli was a great monster dwelling in the primordial waters before the creation of the earth, part crocodile and part toad, with a mouth at every joint of her body. She swam through the dark cosmic ocean in a world that had no land, no sky, and no sun.

To bring the earth into being, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl descended into the waters to confront her. Tezcatlipoca dangled his foot into the dark as bait. Cipactli seized it and tore the foot from his leg, but the sacrifice let the two gods grapple the monster and rip her apart. From her dismembered body they shaped the world: her skin became the ground, her mouths the caves and valleys. Tezcatlipoca's missing foot, the permanent cost of creation, became his most distinctive mark, often replaced in his iconography by a smoking mirror or an obsidian blade.

The Hungry Earth

The earth shaped from Cipactli's body was no dead surface. It was alive and hungry, demanding sustenance as Cipactli had demanded flesh. The land beneath human feet was once a living creature, and its hunger never ended. Sacrifice fed the ground.

Cipactli also lends her name to the first of the twenty day signs in the tonalpohualli, the 260-day ritual calendar. The Codex Borgia depicts the glyph as a stylized crocodilian head. As the opening sign of the calendar cycle, Cipactli marked the beginning. The creature whose death was the world's birth.