In February 1978, electrical workers digging beneath downtown Mexico City struck a stone disk three meters across, carved with the dismembered body of a Mexica goddess. The stone had lain face-up under the colonial plaza for four and a half centuries.
Her name was Coyolxauhqui, "Bells-Her-Cheeks." She was the daughter of the earth mother Coatlicue, the sister of the war god Huitzilopochtli, and the defeated leader of an army of four hundred southern stars destroyed by her brother at the mountain of Coatepec. The Aztecs carved her at the foot of the Templo Mayor as a warning to enemies and a charter for the sacrificial killings staged on the steps above her.
She was also the moon. And the moon does not stay dismembered.
Coyolxauhqui: The Dismembered Moon is a full-length account of this extraordinary figure, drawing on archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary scholarship to trace her across five centuries. Her story is the Mexica story in miniature, from cosmology through conquest, colonial silence, and modern recovery, and through her the broader pre-Hispanic world becomes visible.
The book covers:
•The Mexica cosmology and the myth of Coatepec
•The 1978 discovery and the great Templo Mayor stone
•The symbolism of dismemberment, bells, and the moon in Aztec religion
•The architecture of the imperial temple complex she anchored
•The institution of human sacrifice and her place within it
•The Spanish conquest, the colonial silence, and what survived
•Her modern recovery and her central role in Gloria Anzaldúa's Chicana feminist thought
A careful, evidence-based account for readers interested in pre-Hispanic Mexico, Mesoamerican religion, the Templo Mayor, and the long afterlife of a goddess who has been a warning, an emblem, and a metaphor for healing across five hundred years.
