Xipe Totec

Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, is one of the oldest and most widely worshipped gods of Mesoamerica, a deity of spring, renewal, agricultural fertility and, later, of goldsmiths. His defining image is deliberately disturbing: he is shown wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim, its slack hands hanging at his wrists, symbolizing the earth that sheds its dry husk as new growth appears and the seed that splits its coat as it germinates. His festival Tlacaxipehualiztli, described in the Florentine Codex and other colonial sources, involved gladiatorial sacrifice and the wearing of victims' skins by devotees for twenty days, until the skins rotted and were cast off, dramatizing the renewal of vegetation in spring. In 2019 archaeologists reported the first temple positively identified with his cult, at Ndachjian-Tehuacan in Puebla, giving material confirmation of a deity previously known largely from images and texts.

Long before the Mexica built their empire around Tenochtitlan, images recognisably related to Xipe Totec's flaying complex were already circulating across Mesoamerica, evidence that the god's core cult predates and extends well beyond the state religion that eventually made him famous. Many scholars trace his likely origin to the Yopi people of the Costa Chica region on the Pacific coast of what is now Guerrero, reflected in the alternate name Yopico given to shrines associated with him, and ceramic and stone figures showing flayed or skin wearing deities appear in Mesoamerican art considerably earlier than the Aztec imperial period the Florentine Codex describes in such vivid detail, including examples from the Gulf Coast Classic period and from West Mexican shaft tomb traditions, though scholars debate how directly these earlier images relate to the fully developed cult the Mexica later adopted rather than a related but independent flaying tradition.

Whatever its precise regional origin, the flaying complex spread widely enough that Xipe Totec was worshipped, under various local names and with regional variations in emphasis, from the Gulf Coast to the Valley of Oaxaca to the Basin of Mexico by the time of the Spanish conquest, a distribution that fits a broader pattern in Mesoamerican religion where powerful agricultural deities linked to seed, renewal and sacrifice were shared, with local variation, across societies otherwise politically independent and often hostile to one another. The 2019 identification of a dedicated temple at Ndachjian-Tehuacan, discussed elsewhere, confirmed a physical cult site within this wider distribution, but the deeper, pre-imperial roots of the flaying imagery remain a matter of ongoing research rather than a settled chronology.