The Great Goddess of Teotihuacan and Her Hawkmoths

What is Teotihuacan?
Teotihuacan is an ancient Mesoamerican city in the Valley of Mexico, located about 40 kilometers northeast of Mexico City. It was built and occupied between around 200 BCE (the date of the earliest buildings) and 700 CE, when many of the major civic buildings used by the elite ruling class were looted and burned. Archaeologists believe that it housed 125,000 people or more at its height, which would put it on par with some of the largest and most developed cities in Europe and Asia at the time.
While many of the architectural and decorative elements of the city are similar to those we see in Aztec culture, Teotihuacan predates the Aztec by several centuries. In fact, it was already in ruins by the time they found it and they were still so impressed with the city that they considered it an extremely sacred place (“Teotihuacán” is the Aztec name, meaning “the place where the gods were created”) and incorporated much of what they found into their culture and mythology. Ongoing archaeological and historical research continues to shed light on the astounding civilization that flourished there.

Pic 1: Panoramic view of Teotihuacan from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon

The Great Goddess
The Great Goddess is a divine figure that appears over and over again in Teotihuacan art, indicating that she was one of the city’s main deities, if not the primary one. She has subtle variations in appearance but nearly always wears a bird headdress and a nose ring with fangs hanging over her mouth. In a series of murals from the Tepantitla Complex she wears both of these and has a large, branching flowered plant growing out of her head. The flowers drip liquid onto the figures below and are host to a large number of birds, spiders, and flying insects. Water pours out from her hands and body as well, and waves full of sea creatures and seeds create a ground line for her and the priests flanking her. Precise identifications have eluded modern audiences, however, with many scholars identifying the flowering plant as a generic ‘tree of life’ and the moths as ‘butterflies of the soul’, while ignoring the iconography that points to a much more specific type of plant and insect.

Pic 3: Figure of the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan in a reconstruction of the Tepantitla palace complex, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City

First, we notice the divine figure in the center of the composition, identified as female since she lacks the loincloth that all of the male figures in Teotihuacan art have, appears rising from a flood of water with various creatures and star-shaped objects portrayed inside. Much of her face is covered by an elaborate avian headdress with a frontal bird face, geometric designs, and numerous fans of colored feathers, although her long hair seems to be streaming out behind her. The headdress is pulled down over her eyes, which seem to be replaced by two diamonds in a geometric bar. Her nose is just barely visible over a large nose bar, which gives way to another torrent of water containing more star-shapes. Her arms, stretched out to either side, offer yet more water in stylized drops. Female (or male in female dress) attendants with a similarly avian headdress are drawn in profile on either side. The attendants hold incense bags one hand and a falling panel of offerings in the other, with a raised flowering volute panel.
Two plants sprout out of the goddess’s headdress: a red one on the left, which splits into an assortment of stalks and branches, and a yellow one on the right, which splits into one branch and one large stalk with smaller branches. Each branch is filled with an assortment of spotted pods, flowers, spiders, and moths, and ends with a four-lobed trumpet flower that is lined with eyes and pours out bands of liquid, also lined with eyes. Each branch has small spikes on the edge (likely leaves), and a number of birds wearing scarves fly around the outer edges.

Pic 5: The Great Goddess of Teotihuacan in a reproduction of the Tepantitla mural, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City

Taken together, both of these compositions give us important clues about the identification of the plants and insects portrayed. Extra eyes are often used in Ancient American art to symbolize the extra sensory perception one experiences during shamanic rituals, especially with entheogenic plants. The fact that eye water is pouring out of the trumpet flowers on the trees, the head of the person eating a plant at the bottom, and the mountain, indicates that we should be looking for a plant that produces a lot of liquid which has entheogenic properties. Secondly, the moths are shown all over the goddess’s plant and in connection with the shaman figures below, so we should look for a moth that likes flowers with lots of entheogenic liquid that are also able to fly freely in multiple directions. Hawkmoths and Datura plants fit all of these criteria.

Pic 7: Insects, plants and shamanic figures - illustration from the Tepantitla mural by Abel Mendoza

Like hummingbirds, however, this method of flight uses a lot of calories and hawkmoths require a food source that is both abundant and high in sucrose. It finds this in datura flowers, which are unique in the large amounts of nectar they produce. One species of datura, D. wrightii, has flowers that only last a single night and can still produce over 60ml of nectar. A female hawkmoth will often lay her eggs on a favorite plant. Manduca sexta hawkmoth caterpillars hatch as a pale translucent green larva that becomes a more vibrant green as it feeds on the plant. They also develop diagonal white lines across their abdominal sections with a small false ‘eye’ at the bottom. Even as fully grown insects, the moths are not immune to datura’s entheogenic powers, as scientists have noted that hawkmoths feeding on datura nectar behave as if intoxicated, flying erratically and occasionally appearing comatose.

Pic 9: Datura and a Hawkmoth

Although the artists of this mural did not leave us any convenient signs describing what is going on in their paintings, the details match known plant and insect behavior so closely that their identifications are clear enough once you know what to look for. As with so many forms of Ancient American art, the Tepantitla Goddess murals reveal a keen knowledge of how the natural world works and, in this particular case, the close relationship between hawkmoths and datura plants. By paying attention to these details and looking closely, we too can begin to see the same meaning in these tableaus as the people of Teotihuacan did.

Resources:-
*Please note that datura is extremely toxic in all of its forms and should not be ingested, unless you are a moth or a trained shaman. Casual use frequently leads to catastrophic nerve and brain damage, and potentially death.

• Cowgill, George L. (2015), Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in Central Mexico, Cambridge University Press
• Stone, Rebecca (2024 [2011]), The Jaguar Within: Shamanic Trance in Ancient Central and South American Art, University of Texas Press.

Pic 11: The Chumash Indians of southern California used Datura as a sacred and medicinal plant. Archeologists have interpreted the spiny silhouette around the circles in this pictograph to be Datura fruits