Deity · Mesoamerican · c. 1400 CE
Huitzilopochtli
Also called Uitzilopochtli, Hummingbird of the South
The Mexica war god, born fully armed to defend his mother from his four hundred siblings — a tribal patron who became the state god of an empire and the sun that had to be fed.
Single lineage
He is the most political god in this corpus. Unlike almost every other figure here he has no deep pre-Mexica history; he rises with the people who carried him, and the doctrine rises with him — the sun requires blood to keep moving, war supplies it, and the empire's expansion becomes a religious obligation. His birth story is a battle at the moment of being born: he emerges armed and destroys his sister and his brothers, the moon and the stars, which is the daily victory of the sun told once as a family killing. The Spanish singled him out above all the others as the devil of the Mexica, and in the sense they meant it — the god that justified the killing — they had identified the right figure for the wrong reason.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
The southern shrine on the Templo Mayor, the centre of the Mexica state cult
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Florentine Codex · 1545-1590
- Rank
- The War God of the Mexica
- Pantheon
- Mesoamerican
- Order
- Mesoamerican pantheon
- Base of operations
- The southern shrine on the Templo Mayor, the centre of the Mexica state cult
- Era
- c. 1400 CE
- Traditions
- Mesoamerican
Traits
- Domain
- War, the sun's daily fight, the tribute the state required
- Traditional form
- A warrior with the fire serpent and a hummingbird headdress
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
now Mexico City
The sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan, where the god of the night sky and the god of the dead both had houses.
The southern shrine, and the centre of the Mexica state cult.
19.435, -99.131 · Wikidata Q774021
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Huitzilopochtli, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial3
- malefic1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Huitzilopochtli, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as The war god; The chief idol
Born armed at Coatepec and destroying his siblings; the patron of the Mexica, with the feasts, the offerings and the temple described in Nahuatl by Nahua informants.
Treated as the principal devil of the Mexica and described at length: the image, the great temple, the festivals and the sacrifices, by a Dominican arguing the whole system is a diabolical parody.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Huitzilopochtli?
What rank is Huitzilopochtli?
How else is Huitzilopochtli spelled?
What is Huitzilopochtli said to do?
How old is Huitzilopochtli?
Nearest in the corpus
If Huitzilopochtli is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Quetzalcoatl
Feathered Serpent · Mesoamerican
The feathered serpent who goes down into the underworld to recover the bones of humanity. Here, for once, the serpent is not the monster.
Tezcatlipoca
Lord of the Near and the Nigh · Mesoamerican
God of the night sky, sorcery and arbitrary fate — Quetzalcoatl's rival, and impossible to place on a good/evil axis.
Mictlantecuhtli
Lord of Mictlan · Mesoamerican
The Aztec god who rules the ninth and lowest underworld, where the ordinary dead arrive after a four-year journey. Nothing is punished there.
Tlaloc
He Who Makes Things Sprout · Mesoamerican
The Nahua rain god, who takes the drowned and the lightning-struck into a paradise of his own — and whose rites, as the Spanish friars recorded with horror, were performed on children.
The Lords of Xibalba
Underworld Lords · Mesoamerican
Twelve Maya lords of the underworld, each named for the sickness he inflicts, who trap visitors in a sequence of houses of ordeal. The Hero Twins outwit them.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
The books behind Huitzilopochtli
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Florentine Codex
Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua informants · 1545-1590 · Nahuatl and Spanish
Read Florentine Codex in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Bernardino de Sahagún · Wikimedia file page
Historia de las Indias de Nueva España
Fray Diego Durán · c. 1581 · Spanish
Read Historia de las Indias de Nueva España in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.