102 UNIT 1 PREHISPANIC MESOAMERICA
the main temple of Tenochtitlán, presumably to provide legitimization of the criti-
cal but unequal relationship between the ruling and commoner classes. Together
these deities symbolically expressed the Aztecs’ propagandistic claim that they had
achieved cosmic balance between noble and commoner, warfare and agriculture,
life and death, civilization and barbarism.
Little children were sacrificed to the rain deities because of the magical rela-
tionships between their teardrops and rain, as well as their small size and the diminu-
tive Tlaloque sprinklers. In general, both human and vegetative fertility were closely
associated with commoners and women in Aztec religion. The ancestral “mothers”
and “grandmothers” of the Aztecs were patron goddesses of earth, birth, and curing
(Teteo Innan, Toci, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal). The red deity Xipe Totec represented
the renewal of the vegetation layer at springtime, and he was more masculine and mil-
itant than the fertility goddesses. Victims sacrificed in Xipe’s honor were flayed, and
the skins ceremonially donned (for the origin of this deity in Yopitzinco, see Box 3.2
in Chapter 3).
Quetzalcoatl, the “feathered serpent” deity, was patron of priests (Figure 2.16).
To the Aztecs, this deity shared an identity with Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the legendary
priest-ruler of the ancient Toltecs. According to Aztec history, Topiltzin left Central
Mexico in the ninth century for the east coast, where he is alledged either to have
died and been apotheosized as the Morning Star or to have set sail on the ocean
with a promise to return. The legitimacy of the Aztec rulers was based on their
claimed genealogical right to stand in for Topiltzin. As patron of the priests, Quet-
zalcoatl symbolized the abounding wisdom, knowledge, and art of the Toltecs, handed
down through the priesthood. “He embodied all that the Mexica characterized as ‘civ-
ilization’” (Berdan 1982:130). The Aztecs usually portrayed Quetzalcoatl as wearing
a mask with a bird’s beak, conical headdress, and garment bearing a sea shell. Ehe-
catl, the Aztec wind and rain deity, was another aspect of Quetzalcoatl, and Ehecatl’s
temple at Tenochtitlán was cylindrical in shape like a coiled serpent.
The professional artisans and merchants also had patron deities that bore the spe-
cial symbols traditionally associated with these two “middle-level” occupations. Ya-
catecuhtli, the most important patron deity of the merchants, was portrayed as a
traveler, usually carrying a staff and backpack. Yacatecuhtli was represented as hav-
ing a long nose, the nose symbolizing the merchants moving forward during their ex-
tended trading journeys. Some of the Aztec wise men apparently went beyond the
otiose creator deities to conceptualize an even more abstract universal creative force.
This was a dualistic force, having both male and female aspects, sometimes associated
with the creator couple and sometimes with Tezcatlipoca, the source of all natural
force and human strength. As the ethnohistorian H. B. Nicholson (1971:411) ex-
plains: “In the conception of the leading religious thinkers, all the deities may have
been considered merely aspects of this fundamental divine power.” With this om-
nipresent, abstract creative force we are brought once again to the issue of religion
and political ideology. Although some scholars consider this abstraction to be a pro-
jection of Christian ideas back onto Aztec religion, it may well have been an indige-
nous religious expression of the Aztec dream to create a “universal” empire out of
the intangible but socially very real Mesoamerican world.