aztec empireaztec mexica
Coatlicue (Earth Mother)
Monumental basalt sculpture of the Mexica earth and death goddess Coatlicue, c. 1500 CE, carved by an anonymous Mexica workshop. Standing 2.7 metres tall, the figure wears a skirt of serpents and a necklace of severed hands, skulls, and hearts. Discovered in 1790 at the Zócalo, Mexico City. Now at the Museo Nacional de Antropología.
Scholarly Significance
Add Coatlicue to anchor the Aztec sculpture cluster alongside the Sun Stone — representing the female/earth dimension of Mexica monumental religion.
Notes
- ·Discovered 13 August 1790 during paving works at the central plaza (Zócalo) of Mexico City — the same excavation that revealed the Aztec Sun Stone and the Sacrificial Stone (Piedra de Tizoc) nearby.
- ·Coatlicue (Nahuatl: 'Serpent Skirt') was the Mexica goddess of earth, life, death, and rebirth. She is the mother of Huitzilopochtli (god of the sun and war) and Coyolxauhqui (moon goddess).
- ·The sculpture is one of the most complex expressions of Aztec religious iconography: a head replaced by two opposed serpent heads forming a face, a necklace of hands and hearts, a skirt of intertwined serpents, and clawed feet.
- ·After discovery, the sculpture was shown briefly, then reburied because Spanish clergy considered it dangerously pagan. It was re-excavated in the early 19th century for scientific study.
- ·Alexander von Humboldt saw and described the sculpture in 1803–1804, bringing it to European scholarly attention in his Vues des cordillères (1810).
- ·It was one of the objects that moved to the new Museo Nacional de Antropología when it opened in 1964.
- ·Octavio Paz's essay on Coatlicue (1960) analysed it as a paradigm of the Aztec cosmic world-view and of the productive tensions between beauty and horror in pre-Columbian art.