History and Provenance

The monument makes visible the founding myth of the war god Huitzilopochtli. The earth goddess Coatlicue conceives him; his sister Coyolxauhqui leads their four hundred siblings to kill their mother; Huitzilopochtli is born fully armed, kills Coyolxauhqui and casts her broken body down the hill of Coatepec. The stone sits at the base of the temple stairs precisely where her body would have fallen, so that victims cast down the steps came to rest on the image of the defeated goddess. The 1978 discovery and the programme directed by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma recovered the monolith and thousands of buried offerings and reoriented Mexican archaeology toward the Mexica capital.

The carved relief depicts the goddess Coyolxauhqui dismembered, her limbs severed from her torso, illustrating the Mexica myth in which she led her four hundred siblings, the Centzon Huitznahua, against their mother Coatlicue and was killed and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the war and sun deity, immediately upon his miraculous birth. The stone was found at the base of the Templo Mayor's Huitzilopochtli-dedicated staircase, a placement archaeologists read as a deliberate architectural re-enactment: victims of ritual sacrifice at the temple's summit were, according to some interpretations, thrown down the stairs to land symbolically upon the defeated goddess's image.