Patecatl

Patecatl is the Mexica god of pulque, the fermented drink of the maguey (agave), and, by extension, of healing herbs and medicine, remembered in the colonial sources as the discoverer of the roots that ferment the maguey sap, and as a lord of the substances that both intoxicate and cure. He is the husband of the maguey-goddess Mayahuel, and the two are named as parents of the Centzon Totochtin, the Four Hundred Rabbits, the innumerable gods of drunkenness whose vast number expresses the countless forms intoxication can take. Pulque was a sacred and socially regulated drink in Mexica life, freely permitted only to the old and used in ritual, and Patecatl belongs to the cluster of octli (pulque) deities marked by the lunar and rabbit imagery associated with the drink.

Patecatl and his wife Mayahuel are named together as the discoverers of maguey processing in Book Ten of Sahagun's Florentine Codex, the principal source for this whole cluster of pulque deities, which credits the pair with working out how to ferment the plant's sap into the intoxicating drink. The same textual tradition ties their marriage to the birth of the Centzon Totochtin, and Mayahuel is conventionally shown with many breasts, an image read as expressing her role as mother to that vast, unruly brood of drink-gods; Patecatl's own more sober role as discoverer of healing roots kept him distinct from his wife's fertility-heavy iconography even within a single shared myth.

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.