The Flayed Lord

Question: So, Family (capital F and all) seems pretty important to the Aztecs. And yet, looking at your pantheon page for them, there's an odd man out. So my question is this: what's the deal with Xipe Totec and his relationship to the rest of the pantheon? Is he a welcomed member of the family, or just 'that one god that feeds our people so we don't sacrifice him'? What's it like for him being the only Aztec not related to the others by blood?

Xipe Totec is in a weird position. He's probably actually a pre-Aztec god, adopted by them at some point in their conquests, but he's neither as wildly influential as Quetzalcoatl nor as marginalized as other adopted gods like Xochipilli. He has an incredibly important function - so important, in fact, that he's one of the four Tezcatlipocas - and yet he also doesn't quite seem to fit into the pantheon anywhere, since we have no surviving genealogy for him and his origins are shrouded in pre-Hispanic mystery. Oddly enough for an Aztec god, he also has no apparent consort, not even a representational one; he's somewhat related to other maize and fertility gods like Chicomecoatl, Xilonen or Centeotl, but they're all spoken for and never said to be his true relatives. He also has no children we know of. So where does he fit into this tightly-knit, familially loyal pantheon?

Well, to begin with, there actually is a familial connection for Xipe Totec, although it's buried in a myth that's less well-known than some of the other Aztec stories. In the Five Suns creation myth, Xipe Totec, along with Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, is born at the beginning of the universe from the original Aztec creation Titan, Ometeotl (sometimes split into two male and female halves that are both the same person, Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl). He is therefore a full brother to all three of the other Tezcatlipocas, a far cry from a disconnected nobody.

However, this myth is in direct contradiction to other stories surrounding the birth of the Tezcatlipocas, the most famous being Coatlicue's parthenogenic mothering of Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl's status as son of Mixcoatl. Storytellers looking for a way to make Xipe Totec more connected could follow the Five Suns mythic narrative that makes him brother to the other major powers of the pantheon, but if they do so may find themselves wondering what to do with these other awesome stories of different gods' birth. One option would be to simply transport Xipe Totec's relation to his brothers down to the other myths, declaring him a son of Coatlicue so he can keep his original relationship to them despite the fact that we have no record of him as Coatlicue's child. Another would be to say that, since there also exists a variant myth that says the Tezcatlipocas sacrificed themselves to create the world, both myths are true and they were both born originally of Ometeotl and then reborn of Coatlicue and/or Mixcoatl at a later time. In that case, you could again include Xipe Totec with them, or you could decide that he was the only one of the brothers who didn't die in the sacrifice, and thus has no extra story of his birth.

As far as how the pantheon treats him, brother or not, he's probably considered no less a full and important one of their number. While he might not spark the personal dedication of Loyalty if you decide he isn't anyone's relative, he is still one of the all-important Aztec divinities, a Tezcatlipoca in his own right and a necessary person to the continuing preservation of the universe. Both Conviction and Duty are on his side, and, more importantly, not having a specific genealogy may not make much difference to the rest of the Aztlanti anyway. If he's one of them, he shares the same blood; it doesn't really matter who his mother was, because he's Aztec and that's enough to make him an indispensable part of the community. To the ancient Aztecs, being one of their people by blood meant that they were part of the whole; the exact lineage would determine your place in society, but you would still be part of society regardless. So, I would assume, it is with Xipe Totec.

Of course, if you're setting up a game that plays on racial tensions between native Mexican gods and their borrowed Toltec and Maya pantheon-members, you might find it more interesting to consider him an unrelated import, which would give you a nice split down the middle - Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca representing for the Mexica, and Quetzalcoatl and Xipe Totec across the way for the conquered peoples they absorbed.

No matter what you choose, though, Xipe Totec is a Tezcatlipoca and one of the most important of the Aztec gods by anyone's reckoning. What he says matters and what he does is to be respected, so whether he's a native son on par with his brothers or a foreign dignitary who made his way to the top, he's nobody to be ignored.