The Aztec Mother Goddess Who Terrified the Spanish

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the figure of Coatlicue, the Aztec mother goddess whose monstrous statue shocked the Spanish conquistadors when it was unearthed in 1790. They discuss her iconography — the skirt of snakes, the necklace of human hands and hearts, the twin serpent heads — and what she reveals about Mexica cosmology. Lucas explains how Coatlicue was both creator and destroyer, the mother of Huitzilopochtli, and the center of a myth cycle involving her daughter Coyolxauhqui and the four hundred Huitznahua. They touch on the 1978 discovery of the Coyolxauhqui stone at the Templo Mayor, the colonial burial of the Coatlicue statue, and how modern scholars interpret her as a symbol of the earth's voracious appetite for life and death. The episode also addresses the common misunderstanding of Aztec 'goddesses' versus Western ideas of deity, and how Coatlicue defies simple categories of good and evil. #Coatlicue #AztecGoddess #Mexica #Tenochtitlan #TemploMayor #Coyolxauhqui #Huitzilopochtli #AztecMythology #Mesoamerica #FlorentineCodex #BernardinoDeSahagun #SpanishConquest #1790 #Zocalo #EarthMother #AztecReligion #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo