Huehueteotl

The old god is the oldest god. The brazier-bearing figure — a hunched, wrinkled old man sitting cross-legged with a fire bowl on his head — turns up at Cuicuilco, which a volcano buried around the beginning of the common era, and again at Teotihuacan, and is still being made when the Mexica arrive fifteen centuries later. Whether he is the same deity as Xiuhtecuhtli, the turquoise lord the registry already carried, or an older separate one absorbed into him, is not settled. The record links them and says so, because the alternative — merging a Preclassic image into a Postclassic name — would be a claim the evidence does not make.

Domains

• fire

Relations

• counterpart of: XiuhtecuhtliRecorded as a separate record and linked, not merged: some treatments make him simply the old form of Xiuhtecuhtli, others hold the two apart, and the archaeological figure is fifteen centuries older than the Mexica name.Reference treatment of Huehueteotl and Xiuhtecuhtli, identified with one another in some treatments and distinguished as the aged and the youthful forms of fire in others. (secondary)

Sources

• Huehueteotl, 'the old god', is the aged fire deity of central Mexico, depicted carrying a brazier on his head, attested from the Preclassic onward and identified with or distinguished from Xiuhtecuhtli.: Reference treatments of Huehueteotl, his iconography and his relation to Xiuhtecuhtli. (secondary)