Xolotl

Xolotl is the dog that takes you across. His name is the word for a servant and for a twin — and for the hairless dog, the xoloitzcuintli, which the Mexica buried with their dead precisely so that there would be one waiting at the river in Mictlan. He is the evening star to Quetzalcoatl's morning star: one plumed serpent announcing the sun coming up, one dog walking it down into the ground, and both of them Venus. He is also the god who is drawn deliberately ugly, with his feet on backwards, in a pantheon that mostly did not do that.

Domains

• venus
• underworld

Relations

• counterpart of: QuetzalcoatlHis twin, and the other half of one planet. The Mexica astronomers knew perfectly well that the morning and evening star are the same body, and made two gods of it anyway, because what the object does in the morning and what it does at evening are opposite things.Reference treatment of Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl as the twin phases of Venus, morning and evening. (secondary)
• twin sibling: TlahuizcalpantecuhtliNamed as his twin in the reference treatment, on the same morning-and-evening logic.Reference treatment of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli as the twin brother of Xolotl, representing the morning star aspect of Venus. (secondary)

Sources

• Xolotl is the dog-headed Mexica god of the evening star, twin of Quetzalcoatl, a god of fire, lightning and death who guides the dead through the underworld.: Reference treatments of Xolotl, of his dog form and of the Venus twinning with Quetzalcoatl. (secondary)