The Primordial Crocodilian from Whose Body the Earth Was Made
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.
