Archaeology Museum - Juarez, Mexico
Page 11

Click for larger image

The next two sculptures reproduced here (numbers 22 and 23 on the museum garden map) are inextricably connected in the Aztec religion, and are two of its most important artifacts.  The standing figure is Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of the Earth and mother of the gods.  The disembodied head (next page) is that of  Coyolxauhqui, the goddess of the Moon.

The Aztecs said that Coatlicue was miraculously impregnated by a bundle of feathers she happened to find while cleaning a temple.  Her daughter, Coyolxauhqui, and her sons were shocked by this, and plotted to murder her.  The son she was carrying, the Aztec war and sun god Huitzilopochtli, was born fully grown to stop the plot, and he slew all the brothers and dismembered his sister.  The moon is Coyolxauhqui’s head, placed in the sky by Huitzilopochtli so that Coatlicue could remember her daughter.  According to Aztec theology, this drama is re-enacted in the sky every day, with Huitzilopochtli the Sun, born of his mother the Earth, driving away and defeating the Moon and the stars as he rises.  (Some versions of the story say that Coyolxauhqui was an innocent, and was going to warn Coatlicue and Huitzilopochtli of her brothers’ plot when the war god saw her and killed her, thinking mistakenly that she was part of the plot.  He then atoned by placing her head in the sky, at the insistence of their mother.) 

The Coatlicue sculpture is fearsome, and was deliberately made to lean forward and over the viewer.  Her skirt is a mass of writhing snakes (the name Coatlicue means “serpent-skirt” in Nahuatl, the Aztec language), and her head is formed by the heads of two more snakes. Most harrowing of all is her necklace, which consists of human hands and hearts, with a skull pendant.  Coyolxauhqui is shown dead and decapitated at the hands of her brother.  Both of these sculptures show the primacy of human sacrifice in the Aztec religion.  The bodies of sacrificial victims were thrown upon a relief sculpture of Coyolxauhqui (not the one shown here), which stood at the bottom of the steps to the great temple in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.