Coatlicue or Coatlantonan (Serpent Skirt)—a Mexican earth-goddess, mother of Uitzilopochtli.
Xochiquetzal—originally a mountain goddess of the Tlalhuica. An earth-and-maize goddess as well as a deity of flowers and vegetation.
Xilonen—originally a maize-goddess of the Huichol tribes. She represented the young maize-plant.
Cinteotl (Maize-god)—son of Tlazolteotl, originally a god of the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard. He is occasionally alluded to as a female deity, but is always male in the MSS. of the Borgia group, executed by a people of Nahua speech dwelling in the south. He is the equivalent of Xochipilli and had a separate temple, the cinteopan.
Xipe—an earth-god of the Teotitlan district, a god of spring vegetation. His temples were called yopico. His great festival was the Tlacaxipeuliztli, or “flaying of men.”
Only three of these deities, Tlazolteotl, Xipe, and Xochiquetzal, appear as rulers of one or other of the twenty day-signs of the tonalamatl. But Cinteotl figures in the ochpaniztli feast and appears as one of the “Lords of the Night.”
These criteria are perhaps sufficient to identify these figures as separate divinities. We find in Sahagun that Chicomecoatl, Cinteotl, and Xipe had separate temples of their own. In several of the rituals of the great festivals, however, the cults of Tlazolteotl, Chicomecoatl, and Cinteotl appear to have been very closely interwoven, and this leads me to suspect that the worship of the old Toltec goddess Chicomecoatl was in process of fusion with that of the “immigrant” Tlazolteotl at the period of the Conquest. Xilonen, too, according to Sahagun, had a separate festival in her honour, [[155]]the uei tecuilhuitl. From all this and from considerations still to be advanced we may, perhaps, be justified in assuming:
(1) That at the period of the Conquest the cults of Tlazolteotl, Chicomecoatl, and Cinteotl were very naturally in process of becoming amalgamated, the worship of the two goddesses, Mexican and alien, presenting many features in common.
(2) That Xochiquetzal, originally the goddess of the Tlalhuica, was regarded more properly as the goddess of flowers and of the spring florescence, a hypothesis which is upheld by her myths. Her equation with Tonacaciuatl appears to have been a later concept, due to the connection of both with the earth.
(3) That the Huichol goddess Xilonen came to symbolize for the Nahua the maize plant in its early stages of growth, and in that respect resembles Cinteotl.