X: Xelhua to Xochiquetzal 295
X
T 295 T
Xelhua
The flood hero of the Aztecs’ creation legend, in which he sought refuge from
the Deluge by climbing to the top of Tlaloc’s mountain. Tlaloc, together with
Quetzalcoatl, was a version of Atlas, depicted in temple art as a bearded man
supporting the four quarters of the sky as a cross on his shoulders. He was identified
with a mountain, like Atlas, one of the Titans. Xelhua was also a giant who, just
before the Great Flood, went with his followers to central Mexico, where they
built the most massive structure in Mesoamerica.
Today, the Cholula pyramid is mostly overgrown and surmounted by a Catholic
church which substituted an Aztec temple. It used to enshrine a meteorite fragment,
a relic of the Deluge “which had fallen from heaven wrapped in a ball of flame.”
Before the pyramid was completed, “fire fell upon it, causing the death of its builders
and the abandonment of the work.” The original caption in Nahuatl, the Aztec
language, to a native illustration of the Cholula temple read, “Nobles and lords,
here you have your documents, the mirror of your past, the history of your ancestors,
who, out of fear for a deluge, constructed this place of refuge or asylum for the
possibility of the recurrence of such a calamity” (Nuttall, 269).
Cholula’s enshrined meteorite and related deluge tradition represent com-
pelling evidence for an Atlantean catastrophe brought about by a celestial event.