The Dog-Headed God, Lord of the Evening Star and Twins
Xolotl is a dog-headed god, twin brother of Quetzalcoatl: where the elder twin is Venus rising as the morning star, Xolotl is Venus sinking after sunset, the evening star that falls into the dark. The codices draw him with a canine head, hollow or fallen eyes, and ragged ears, wearing the same cut-conch pectoral as his brother. In Nahuatl his name carries the senses of both dog and of doubling or malformation, so twins, double ears of maize, and double-stalked maguey all belonged to him, and he stood among the patrons of the ballgame. In dog form he escorts the sun through Mictlan every night and sees it reborn in the east.
Book 7 of the Florentine Codex preserves his most famous story. When the Fifth Sun was kindled at Teotihuacan it hung motionless on the horizon, demanding the blood of the gods. One by one they submitted to death, but Xolotl wept until his eyes dropped from their sockets and fled. He hid in a field as a double maize stalk, the xolotl; then as a double maguey, the mexolotl; at last he leapt into the water as the axolotl. There the executioner, the wind god Ehecatl, caught and killed him, and only then did the sun begin to move.
His name survives in the axolotl — ajolote in Mexican Spanish — the neotenic salamander of the Mexican lakes that never outgrows its larval form and regrows lost limbs, and in the xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican hairless dog, buried with the dead in ancient times to guide souls across the river of the underworld.
