The Aztec sun god whose name contains a hummingbird, and whose dead became hummingbirds
Huitzilopochtli, patron of the Aztecs and their capital Tenochtitlan, carries a hummingbird in his name. Believers held that warriors killed in battle and women who died giving birth joined his southern palace and were transformed into hummingbirds. The god himself shone so fiercely that souls could glimpse him only through arrow holes in their shields.
Scholars agree his name joins huītzilin, hummingbird, with ōpōchtli, left side, and it is often rendered Left-Handed Hummingbird or Hummingbird of the South, since Aztec cosmology linked the south with the left. Linguist Frances Karttunen notes that Nahuatl compounds usually put the main word last, so the left or south side of the hummingbird may be closer. The friar Diego Durán described a hummingbird that seemed to die in a tree through winter, only to revive when spring came.
In one birth story the goddess Coatlicue, sweeping on Serpent Hill, was made pregnant by a ball of feathers. Her grown children, the goddess Coyolxauhqui and four hundred brothers, plotted to kill her, but Huitzilopochtli sprang out fully armed and routed them, scattering the brothers across the heavens. The tale doubled as astronomy: the god is the sun, his sister the moon and his brothers the stars, so each sunrise replays the chase. If he ever weakened, they would destroy their mother and with her the world.
He began as a minor figure for the Nahua peoples. After the Aztecs rose to power, the statesman Tlacaelel reshaped their religion, lifting him to the level of Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca and making him the solar deity, in constant struggle with darkness and in need of sacrificial nourishment to carry the sun through each 52-year cycle. He wielded a fire serpent, Xiuhcoatl, as his weapon.
His shrine crowned the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan's sacred heart, enlarged frontally eleven times across its two centuries. Twin temples topped the pyramid: a red one to the south for Huitzilopochtli and a blue one to the north for Tlaloc, god of rain. The Coyolxauhqui stone, found at the base of his staircase, turned the whole building into a model of Serpent Hill.
Source: Huītzilōpōchtli
