The Hummingbird That Ate the Sun
He tore free from his mother's womb already armored for war, and beheaded his own sister on a mountaintop before the sun had even risen. Meet the god who demanded blood to keep the world turning.
On a hill called Coatepec, near what is now Tula, Hidalgo, a goddess named Coatlicue swept the temple grounds when a ball of feathers drifted down and touched her. She became pregnant. Her other children, already grown — the four hundred Centzonuitznaua and their sister Coyolxauhqui — saw this as an insult, and they conspired to kill their mother before the child could be born.
They never got the chance. Huitzilopochtli burst from Coatlicue's womb fully grown and fully armed, in some tellings arming himself the instant he emerged. He turned on his siblings at once. Coyolxauhqui he beheaded, casting her body from the mountaintop. His four hundred brothers fled in terror and scattered across the sky, becoming the stars. In the Aztec telling, this is why the sun forever chases the moon and stars across the heavens — Huitzilopochtli, born as the sun, still pursuing the family that turned against his mother.
A second, gentler myth gives him a different beginning: as the smallest son of the creator couple Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl, brother to Quetzalcoatl, Xipe Totec, and Tezcatlipoca. In that version, his parents charged him and Quetzalcoatl with bringing order to a formless world, and together the two brothers made fire, the first man and woman, the earth, and the sun itself.
Whichever origin the Aztecs told, Huitzilopochtli's role afterward was constant and demanding: he was locked in perpetual struggle against darkness, and only nourishment — sacrifice — kept him strong enough to hold back the night. The Aztecs believed they were literally 'people of the sun,' obligated to feed him tlaxcaltiliztli, sustenance in the form of blood and hearts, or risk the destruction of the world along with their mother-earth.
His name itself carries the memory of this cosmic violence in gentler form. Scholars generally break it into huitzilin, 'hummingbird,' and opochtli, 'left hand side,' giving translations like 'Left-Handed Hummingbird' or 'Hummingbird of the South,' since Aztec cosmology placed the south to the left of the body. The hummingbird held real spiritual weight in Aztec culture — the chronicler Diego Duran described how the bird appeared to die in winter, only to be reborn each spring, a small mirror of the god's own solar cycle of death and renewal.
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