waTeR and The sacRed ciTy • 29by a set of immortal deities who “possess reason, will, pas-
sions, and faculties of communication among themselves
and with humans” and are able to “modify . . . the world.”
This cosmos had a specific geography, divided into levels
and directions; the world moved in cycles that echoed the
agricultural cycle of maize; but finally, it was the human
body that was “one of the most important sources for the
formulation of ideas about the cosmos.” López Austin also
understood it to have a dialectical quality. For him, the
elaborate architecture of cosmovision had its foundations
in human experience: “Humans assimilated their experi-
ences, confronting and abstracting them to form bodies of
congruent concepts; this allowed them, conversely, to con-
struct a reality in which their perception of the world and
action facing that world acquired a particular meaning. . . .
Cosmovision served as a guide for action” at the same time
that action and experience then continued to shape the
understanding of the cosmos. 12 Such a model dovetails
neatly with the spatial model proposed by Lefebvre, where
the sphere of the representation of space, which in the case
of Mesoamerica would include cosmovision—a systematic
and integrated body of thought—inflects both lived spaces
and practice.
The space of the Mesoamerican cosmos was struc-
tured along the principle of “opposing and complementary
forces,” perceived in the alternation between the wet sum-
mer and the dry winter of the tropics, which added a tem-
poral dimension to spaces, which were transformed from
light and dry (October–April) to dark and wet (May–
September). The geography of this cosmos was composed
of nine underworld layers of a place Nahuatl speakers
called Mictlan, the underworld, and thirteen heavenly
ones of the place they called Omeyocan, a heavenly place
of creation. This multilayered cosmos was also divided into
four quadrants and a center. This representation of cosmic
space was imprinted on the lived space of architecture, as
Eduardo Matos Moctezuma has argued for the Templo
Mayor, the great twin temples that rose from the heart of
Tenochti tlan’s ceremonial precinct, which can be clearly
seen in the Covarrubias view (figure 2.1). In Matos’s view,
“the principal center, or navel, where the horizontal and
vertical planes [of the cosmos] intersect, that is, the point
from which the heavenly or upper plane and the plane
of the Underworld begin and the four directions of the
universe originate, is the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan.
Moreover, the structure itself represents the totality of the
vision the Mexica had of the universe.” 13
At the center of Tenochtitlan, and the pivot of the
cosmic order, the lived space of Templo Mayor carried
in it proof of the victories of the principal Mexica deity,
Huitzilopochtli, over his enemies, in particular, his princi-
pal female enemy, his half sister Coyolxauhqui. As told in
the Florentine Codex, the great encyclopedia of the Mexica
world written in parallel columns in Spanish and Nahuatl
by native intellectuals working under the auspices of the
Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, a woman named Coat-
licue was sweeping at a sacred place called Coatepec when
she placed an errant ball of feathers for safekeeping in her
dress, only to find herself impregnated. This miraculous
conception infuriated her daughter, Coyolxauhqui, and her
sons for the dishonor it brought; Coyolxauhqui incited
her brothers to murder their pregnant mother. But one
of them slipped away to give warning to the unborn child.
When the angry siblings charged up the hill of Coatepec,
the Florentine Codex continues, Huitzilopochtli burst
forth, fully armed and dressed in war costume, from the
body of his mother, Coatlicue, and proceeded to slay his
wrathful half siblings. 14
As represented in an image in the Florentine Codex,
the scene of battle takes place in Coatepec, which means
“serpent hill,” shown as a hill at whose top is a fork-tongued
serpent; Huitzilopochtli, with striped face and body paint
and wearing a crown of feathers, stands on the right of the
hill and battles his half brothers (figure 2.3). The lower
half of the central axis of the image is dominated by the
dismembered body of one of his half brothers: his head
lies upon the slope of Coatepec, and his bloody torso, with
arms and one leg chopped off, lies at its base. At the Tem-
plo Mayor site itself, the designers of the building brought
this representation to bear by setting undulating serpent
balustrades and serpent heads upon the main pyramid to
designate it as a Coatepec in miniature; the bundle repre-
senting Huitzilopochtli was cached in the upper reaches
of the temple, and a disk-shaped relief sculpture of his
half sister Coyolxauhqui, shown with head, arms, and
legs severed from her central torso, was set below, at its
base. This victory of (male) Huitzilopochtli over (female)
Coyolxauhqui was reflected in a daily cosmic event hap-
pening in the skies over the templo, in the contest between
Huitzilopochtli, a solar deity, and Coyolxauhqui, a lunar
deity, every time the brilliant solar orb rose up and blotted
out the weaker lunar one.
Representations of cosmic space were thus powerful
models for the lived spaces of Tenochtitlan, particularly