Coatlicue, whose name means "Serpent Skirt," was the Earth goddess of life and death in the Aztec mythology. Coatlicue had a horrible appearance. She was depicted as a woman wearing a skirt of snakes and a necklace of hearts torn from victims. Goddess of Earth and Fire. Has terrible dress sense. Wears a skirt of writhing snakes and a necklace of human hands and hearts. Also have claws and a double snake head. She's known as the Mother of the Gods, and her offspring shot to the top of the pantheon. Her sons were QUETZALCOATL and XOLOTL, her daughter was Coyolxauhqui, and she also gave birth to HUITZILOPOCHTLI in very suspicious circumstances.
A host of interesting Gods with completely unpronounceable names. The Aztecs must have possessed the most dexterous tongues in the known world. By using Scrabble letters and adding the odd X you could probably make up your very own pantheon of Aztec deities. The mighty Aztec Empire was happily established in Mexico before it was Mexico. Lots of colour, festivals, feathers and enough fighting and sacrifices to keep HUITZILOPOCHTLI happy and the sun shining. In fact the Aztecs believed that the Gods needed constant supplies of fresh blood otherwise they'd wither and die. This is why the entire culture was built around human sacrifice.
Just as the griots of Africa and the balladeers of medieval Europe passed their stories along orally, so too, the Aztecs passed along the accounts of their gods and goddesses orally. The myths depended on word of mouth although some were recorded in codices. The stories were often sung and accompanied by drums. Often there were mask wearing dancers, pantomime or stage props. The story tellers strung the stories together into epics (Bierhorst 1984: 17). These practices continued until the conquest when the stories were written down by missionary friars and Aztec nobility who had learned Spanish. The purpose of writing down the stories was not so much to preserve them as to refute them with Christianity.
The friars thought that the more they learned about the Aztec religion, the better they would be able to work against it. There were, however, those who were interested in the religion simply because they had a quest for knowledge of the world (Bierhorst 1984: 3). It is important to relate this to my students. My goals for them are to foster this same quest for knowledge in order that they better understand their world and the people around them. A great deal of Aztec mythology revolves around the role and worship of the sun. Such worship is not surprising given the climate the Aztecs lived in. To an extent, all ancient cultures had some reverence towards the sun, especially in colder climates where the sun's life giving powers could be in short supply for months at a time.
These cultures tended to view the sun more mercifully. However, in warmer climates the sun took on a different role. These areas rarely experienced a lack of the sun's heat, but rather an abundance of it. Life became more dangerous during the warmest parts of the year, and precautions would need to be taken in order to avoid more mundane dangers like heat exhaustion and stroke. But humans were not the only life forms to suffer during period of intense heat. There was also damage done to vegetation. A dry season could spell disaster for a community if the sun became too angry and refused to let the life giving rains fall to earth.