COATLICUE ("serpent skirt") was one of an array of Aztec earth-mother goddesses, the Teteoinnan, who represented the notion of maternal fertility associated with the earth. Coatlicue's monumental stone image, excavated in 1790 in the heart of Mexico City, is one of the finest and most monstrous achievements of Mesoamerican religious art. It is an eight-foot-tall stone figure consisting of a female form draped with a blouse of severed human hands and hearts, a skirt of intertwined serpents with skull belt buckles in front and back, ferocious rattlesnakes for hands, and a head composed of two giant rattlesnake heads facing one another. According to art historians, these two giant serpent heads emerge from spurts of blood resulting from Coatlicue's decapitation. Her feet are giant jaguar claws. A serpent of blood flows from beneath her skirt of serpents. This masterpiece of Mesoamerican sculpture, located today in the Museo Nacional de Antropolog...