Mexicolore logoMexicolore name

Article suitable for older students

Find out more

Question for November 2018

Why did the Aztecs think gold was the poo of the sun god?? Asked by Ardingly College Prep School. Chosen and answered by Our In-House Team

The answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think!
One way to answer this is to look at the explanation given in the Florentine Codex, compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the years following the Spanish invasion. He compiled this with a group of Mexica informants. Here are the ‘bare bones’ of the section on gold from Chapter 9 of Book 11 (‘Earthly Things’):-
• Gold ‘rests in mother earth’
• When mother earth pees, ‘her urine stains deeply’, so that it appears yellow on the surface
• Gold forms veins in the earth, in mountains, and can then be gathered, sometimes in rivers
• The Mexica people did not mine gold, they ‘just took the river sand; they panned it’. ‘They found the gold where it settled as big as grains of maize... Later they melted it, cast it; they prepared, they formed necklaces, bracelets, ear pendants, lip plugs etc.’

• The name for gold is ‘god’s excrement’ (follow first link below for more details) ‘because it is wonderful, yellow, good, fine, precious.’ It is the wealth, riches, ‘property of the rulers, our lords’
• The origin of the word springs from the fact that sometimes at dawn can be seen ‘something like a little bit of diarrhea. They named it “the excrement of the sun”... resting like an ember, like molten gold’
• It was named after the ‘pimply god’ Nanahuatzin (the one who bravely jumped into the fire at the start of the fifth creation to become the Sun**
• Gold is ‘perfection, the leader of all. It leads all riches on earth’.

** So gold is a sacred kind of what’s called ‘excrescence’ - an unusual warty (in this case mineral) outgrowth on the earth’s surface, ‘deposited’ by the gods to be a visible sign of their presence on the earth. Sahagún’s informants suggest too that this ‘excrement of the sun’ was sometimes given as a medicine for pustules (warts), and that ‘for this reason pustule medicine, his [Nanahuatzin’s] excrement, sometimes appeared on earth.’ So the story of Nanahuatzin kickstarting our world into life ensured that this sacred waste product of his would forever be something precious to the Mexica.

It’s worth pointing out, incidentally, that several gods were depicted by the Aztecs wearing gold in some form - from Chalchiuhtlicue (water goddess) to agricultural gods and Xipe Totec (god of spring, and patron god of Mexica goldsmiths) - not just the sun god.

Info from Florentine Codex, Book 11 - Earthly Things, translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson (part 12 of 13 parts), School of American Research and University of Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963, pp 233-4.
Images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

‘What was the symbol of gold?’‘What does (my) name Cuitlahuac mean?’

Our In-House Team has answered 25 questions altogether.

Comments (1)

E

Erno

1st May 2022

It’s interesting that in fact gold is only produced when the very largest of stars (suns) finally die and explode in supernovae, ejecting the heavier elements into space to eventually form gold on planets like our earth. So in a curious way the Mexica were right.

M

Mexicolore

Thanks, Erno, for this interesting insight.

Our In-House Team

Our In-House Team

Recent answers