Huitzilopochtli

Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird of the Left — the left hand of the sun's path, the south — appears as a young warrior with blue-striped face paint, a hummingbird helmet, and a feathered left leg, carrying a mirrored shield and the blue fire serpent Xiuhcoatl. He was the Mexica's own tribal patron, god of war and of the sun at its height; warriors who fell in battle or on the sacrificial stone escorted the sun across the sky, and after four years returned as hummingbirds and butterflies among the flowers.

His birth is the most famous scene in Mexica myth. While the earth goddess Coatlicue swept the temple on Coatepec, Serpent Hill, a ball of feathers slipped into her bosom and left her pregnant. Her daughter, the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, raged at the disgrace and led the Centzon Huitznahua, the four hundred southern stars, up the hill to kill her. At the last moment Huitzilopochtli sprang from the womb fully armed, struck off Coyolxauhqui's head with the fire serpent, hurled her dismembered body down the slope, and scattered the four hundred — a battle read as the sun's daily rout of moon and stars at dawn.

Migration lore says it was he who ordered the Mexica out of Aztlan, speaking through the priests who carried his bundled effigy, and who, after some two centuries of wandering, gave the sign of an eagle perched on a stone-borne cactus that fixed the site of Tenochtitlan. The southern shrine of the Templo Mayor was his, paired with Tlaloc's on the north; the great Coyolxauhqui stone unearthed at its foot in 1978, about 3.25 meters across, shows the dismembered moon goddess lying exactly where sacrificed bodies once rolled down the steps.