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Illustration
A colossal basalt statue of Coatlicue ('Serpent Skirt'), the Aztec mother-earth goddess and mother of Huitzilopochtli. The goddess is represented with a severed head replaced by two snake heads, wearing a necklace of severed hands and human hearts with a skull pendant, and a dress of entwined snakes. She also has claws on her feet and hands which she used to rip off the flesh from corpses before eating them. The statue is 3.5 m tall and dates from the late Post Classical Period of Mesoamerica, 1250-1521 CE. (National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City)
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Based on Wikipedia content that has been reviewed, edited, and republished.
Original image by Luidger. Uploaded by Mark Cartwright, published on 28 November 2013. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.
Related Images
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Cite This Work
APA Style
Luidger. (2013, November 28). Coatlicue. World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2164/coatlicue/
Chicago Style
Luidger. "Coatlicue." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified November 28, 2013. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2164/coatlicue/.
MLA Style
Luidger. "Coatlicue." World History Encyclopedia. World History Encyclopedia, 28 Nov 2013. Web. 31 Dec 2025.
