Cipactli
Mythological Narrative
Before the world there was only the boundless primordial water, and in it swam Cipactli, a monster part crocodile, part great fish, part toad. Snapping mouths opened at every one of its joints, and nothing could fill them: whatever the gods created fell into the water and was devoured, so the world had nowhere to stand.
To win ground for creation, Tezcatlipoca dangled his right foot into the water as bait. The beast surged up and bit it off — and lost its own lower jaw in the struggle, so that it could never again sink beneath the surface. In the version preserved in the sixteenth-century Histoyre du Mechique, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl then took the form of two great serpents and tore the earth monster in half, making the land from one part and the sky from the other; the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas says instead that the gods made the earth from the great fish cipactli. The monster of the one account, there called Tlaltecuhtli, and the cipactli of the other are generally read as names for the same primordial being. The world of the living, tlalticpac — "upon the earth" in Nahuatl — rides on the creature's back: mountains are the ridges of its hide, and trees and grasses grow from its skin. Its body was said to cry out still for blood — one more reason the earth had to be fed with sacrifice.
Cipactli is also the first of the twenty day signs of the tonalpohualli, the 260-day divinatory calendar: the day Crocodile governs beginnings, and divinatory books such as the Codex Borgia draw it as a crocodilian head with upcurved snout. Those born under it were held to be destined for abundance.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## The Earth That Was a Crocodile
In the Histoyre du Mechique and related Nahua cosmogonies, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl tear the primordial caiman Cipactli to make land. Mouths at the joints explain why the earth still drinks blood. The day-sign Cipactli opens the 260-day count. One caiman, one world-body: later art still shows earth as a hungry hide.
## The first day
Cipactli is the first of the twenty day signs of the tonalpohualli, the 260-day ritual calendar, which is why the creature appears at the start of the calendar in divinatory codices like the *Codex Borgia*. In the *Histoyre du Mechique* the gods make the plants, springs, and caves of the earth from her body to compensate her, and she cries out at night for human hearts, a clear link with the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Cipactli.
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