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Tepoztecatl and the Many Faces of Pulque's Four Hundred

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Tepoztecatl and the Many Faces of Pulque's Four Hundred

The Centzon Totochtin fathered by Patecatl and Mayahuel were not an anonymous mass; a number of them carried individual names, cult centers and distinct personalities of their own within the wider octli complex, and one in particular remains visible today. Tepoztecatl, whose name ties him to the town of Tepoztlan in what is now the state of Morelos, was worshipped as a specific pulque god with his own temple, built atop the steep hill known as El Tepozteco, a small stone pyramid that still stands and that modern visitors climb to reach, one of the relatively few pre-Hispanic shrines to a named minor deity of this particular pantheon to survive in recognizable architectural form.

Other named members recorded in colonial-era sources include Tezcatzoncatl, Colhuatzincatl and Tlilhua, along with more besides, each apparently associated with a different local cult, a different quality or intensity of drunkenness, or a different social context in which pulque was consumed, so that the octli gods collectively functioned less as four hundred literal individuals and more as a flexible mythological framework capable of absorbing many local pulque cults under one family headed by Patecatl and Mayahuel. This structure let Mexica religion honor pulque's genuinely double character, sanctioned ritual intoxication among the old and the specially permitted, and the real social dangers of drunkenness among everyone else, by distributing the substance's power across an entire numerous and only loosely organized divine family rather than concentrating it in one deity's single, simple portfolio.

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