Ixiptla - deity impersonator

For many years scholars have struggled to find an adequate term in English to faithfully represent the Nahuatl word ixiptla. In her detailed study, Molly Bassett has assembled the following: ‘representative’, ‘delegate’, ‘substitute’, ‘image’, ‘impersonator’, ‘likeness’, ‘representation’, ‘character’, ‘localised embodiment’, ‘deity embodiment’ - several of these translated from early Nahuatl-Spanish dictionaries, and from the pioneering work of eminent historians including Alfredo López Austin, Davíd Carrasco and Cecelia Klein. Bassett is careful to add the prefix te-, meaning ‘someone’s’, to remind readers of the concept’s possessed condition, and she outlines two essential forms: the concrete ixiptlatl (representative or delegate) and the abstract ixiptlayotl (representation, image, likeness); both feature in the Florentine Codex. At the centre of the Nahuatl word, and concept, is xip, meaning skin or covering, to which we return below.

Pic 1: A conch player announces a procession, headed by a deity impersonator being carried on a litter; Codex Magliabechiano fol. 35

Whilst his case was one extreme, it was by no means the only one in which the ixiptla was chosen several days prior to the ceremony in which he would be offered to the gods. The impersonator of Xipe Totec (‘Our Lord the Flayed One’, god of spring and rebirth) was selected forty days in advance of the major feast of Tlacaxipehualiztli. We should stress that deities were impersonated during every twenty-day veintena, the process beginning with a ritual bath to cleanse and purify the individual. The victims were by no means exclusively male: Carrasco noted that women participated as deity impersonators in 13 of the 19 festivals he studied, honouring the many goddesses worshipped by the Mexica. In either case, as Smith notes, the victims were carefully chosen to match the requirements of the god or goddess to be honoured - ‘most gods required warriors for their ixiptla, but some were satisfied with slaves purchased for the occasion.’ Not seen as ordinary mortals, they were viewed ‘as deities whose deaths repeated the original sacrificial deaths of gods described in myth.’ Dodds Pennock suggests that female ixiptlas were ‘concerned with questions of nature’, allied to the earth.

Pic 3: Stone figure of Aztec deity Xipe Totec, Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Switzerland

Not only was the victim decapitated, she was also flayed, by a priest, and her skin passed to another priest ‘who put on her flayed flesh and thus took on the role of deity impersonator.’ In the case of the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, multiple humans were clothed in the flayed skins of teixiptlahuan, victims sacrificed to Xipe Totec. ‘These impersonators then circulated throughout the captor’s neighbourhood for twenty days, collecting gifts for the captor and his family’ - clearly, as Klein points out, the right to impersonate a deity ‘was not available to everyone; the costumes were signs of rank, office, privilege, and the right to riches’.
Different god costumes could be worn for different occasions. Emperor Motecuhzoma II is depicted during the Battle of Toluca against Huexotzinco wearing the costume bearing the flayed human skin honouring Xipe Totec that had been worn by his predecessor Axayacatl when the Mexica fought against Tlatelolco in 1473. This shows, as Klein states, that ‘the god’s ferocity and bravery could be imparted via the costume to any person who wore it.’

Pic 5: Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin going into battle against Toluca dressed as Xipe Totec and wearing a flayed skin, detail from Codex Vaticanus A (Codex Ríos), folio 83v

Ixiptlas were then ubiquitous, the sacred force finding a vehicle ‘in a stone image, richly dressed and accoutred for the occasion; in elaborately constructed seed-dough figures; in the living body of the high priest in his divine regalia, and in the living god-image he would kill: human, vegetable and mineral ixiptlas’ (Clendinnen).
The fact that the Mexica could view human-made objects as bearers of sacred force indicates that they conceived ritual matter as what Bassett calls ‘the stuff of gods’. Stone - ideally precious, in the form of turquoise or jade - shell, cloth, skin, even wood could all be animated in ritual contexts, in order to invest the constructed object with life force, albeit temporarily. The eighteenth month, Izcalli, was dedicated to the old fire god Xiuhtecuhtli and to rain god Tlaloc. Every four years deity impersonators of Xiuhtecuhtli were sacrificed, and a wooden armature was constructed as the image of the god, with a precious turquoise mosaic mask as a face covering.

Pic 7: Artist’s impression of Mexica craftsmen constructing a wooden figure of Xiuhtecuhtli, headed with a turquoise mosaic face mask; illustration by Raúl Cruz

Like full costumes, these deity embodiments might ‘move through the ritual landscape’, to be taken from time to time from temples and paraded throughout the sacred precinct of the city.
Whilst death was not a necessary part of the ixiptla’s definition - for instance, the term could also be applied to a military deputy acting on the emperor’s behalf - it was certainly a key aspect of human sacrifice. The fire priests who processed to and up the Hill of the Star for the massive New Fire Ceremony held every 52 years wore the sacred costumes of deities including Quetzalcóatl and Tlaloc. They took on the ‘face’ and identity of the gods they embodied, and would be sacrificed in honour of them. in Book XII of the Florentine Codex Motecuhzoma is reported to have sent to Cortés the complete sets of garments and adornments of three different teteo, namely Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca and Tlaloc. It’s entirely possible that the Mexica ruler intended the Spaniard - and Pedro de Alvarado, his deputy - to dress in them and to become teixiptlahuan, to be honoured and revered - and then, ultimately, offered as gifts to the gods they had been chosen by the emperor to embody...

Pic 9: Artist’s impression of Mexica priests in a procession to the Hill of the Star in the lead-up to the New Fire Ceremony; illustration by Felipe Dávalos