Aztecs: Still Sexist

Question: So Itzpapalotl helped create humanity but now apparently just wants to destroy. Does she just wanna watch the world burn, or does she have a motive for wreaking havoc?

Itzpapalotl (and Cihuacoatl, her other face) is a complicated creature. Like many Aztec gods, she encompasses both helpful functions that are essential to the universe and horrible cruelties that everyone else just has to deal with.

She has positive aspects, it's true! She aided Quetzalcoatl in creating humanity from the bones of the dead people of the Fourth World, and she takes care of the souls of dead infants and newborns as her especial responsibility, keeping them in the paradisaical fields of Tamoanchan. Yet she is also terrible and destructive, destroying and devouring the Centzonmimixcoa (her own children possibly, depending on the geneaology!) and leading the horrible hordes of the maleficent cihuateteo and the terrifying tzitzimime. And sometimes she hovers somewhere in between, such as when she abandons her son Mixcoatl at birth but then spends the rest of her life looking for him, consumed by remorse, or when we learn that she's a warlike goddess of destruction because she herself was the first victim killed in a war. She's a nurturing mother figure who tends to infants and symbolizes the symbiotic relationship of butterfly and flower, and she's an evil baby-eating warrior who takes no prisoners. There's really never been a time that she's been an all positive or all negative figure; at best, she's an unpredictable creature who occasionally helps the gods out on her own agenda, at worst a malevolent monster bent on destroying them.

A lot of this oddly dual Aztec attitude toward their goddess is due to sex symbolism; Itzpapalotl is, like all goddesses, a powerful and dangerous figure, but she crosses the line from the areas that are appropriate for women to be powerful in and into those that are not (Coatlicue has this problem, too). As the patron of babies, pregnant women and childbirth in general she must be a mighty warrior figure because childbirth is a bloody battle as far as the Aztecs are concerned, but when she extends that to actually marching into war the way a man would, she leaves the rightful place of a woman and starts behaving like a man, something that always pushes all the Aztec sociological buttons. She must have control over blood, death, sacrifice and war, because childbirth is part of those things; but that also means she's a dangerous being that is straddling the worlds of both sexes in a frankly threatening manner. The Aztecs couldn't justify her not being a badass because she's directly the goddess of one form of that bloody and violent power, but they were also made intensely uncomfortable by her when she took on other aspects of that role.

Which is actually a very handy way of separating when Itzpapalotl's "good" and when she's "bad". When she's being a mother and fulfilling a traditionally female role - giving birth to and searching for her baby, helping Quetzalcoatl give birth to a whole new race of humanity - she's good. When she's being a warrior and doing things that the Aztecs would have considered masculine - battling and devouring the Centzonmimixcoa, invading and waylaying people with the tzitzimime - she's bad. When she's doing those first "good" things, the gods are her friends and nobody bothers her, and when she's doing the "bad" things, she gets murdered (and, depending on the translation and interpretation, possibly sexually dominated first) to stop her.

So the Aztecs were kind of ambivalent about her, because she was obviously necessary and fulfilled a super important function that the universe needs, but was also evil and terrifying and they wished someone would put a stop to her. Her myths and representations are accordingly more than a little bipolar, depending on where she's appearing and what she symbolizes when she does. Pregnant women tried to emulate her strength and courage when they went into labor, while men were more concerned with the story of Mixcoatl putting her down when she struck against him in war. Necessary but dangerous: the story of Aztec religion.

For Scion, this makes Itzpapalotl one of those multi-layered, complicated antagonists that you can't really just pigeonhole and forget. We're very certain she's a Titan - she's one of the oldest beings in the Aztec universe, is in charge of not one but two separate groups of malevolent creatures that want to harass and destroy humanity, is aligned with the hated stars and has a death-story that rings pretty perfectly as an imprisonment in Tartarus. But she's also probably got more motivations than just "I have Stars and Stars hate the Aztlanti" to go on. A great part of it probably is that she wants to watch the world burn - or, more accurately, that as a primal being concerned with war and blood, she needs to be out making those things happen all the time and isn't overly concerned with who she's murdering or why. As with most previously imprisoned Titans, there's probably also a heavy element of hatred for the gods who locked her up, and ironically also for fellow Titan Mixcoatl, with whom she has a very nasty, very unlikely-to-get-better relationship.

Of course, as a patron of childbirth, she probably also wants to run around causing pregnancies and bloody deliveries all the time, too. But the gods probably accurately assessed that she'd be doing more harm than good, and put her away lest she keep murdering all the adults until there was nobody left but hordes of bloodstained infants, forming Lord of the Flies-style societies in her honor and slowly being picked off by hungry tzitzimime. The fact that women who can beat them in a fight upset Aztec gods is probably just a helpful additional motive to their desire to get her out of play.