Huitzilopochtli has no childhood. In the story that shaped the Aztec Empire, his mother Coatlicue is impregnated by a ball of feathers on Coatepec, her 400 sons and her daughter Coyolxauhqui march to kill her, and he bursts from the womb fully armed with the fire serpent, decapitating his sister and scattering his brothers across the sky. This episode reads that myth as an astronomical blueprint, with the sun defeating the moon and stars every dawn, and explains why a tiny hummingbird, observed by the friar Diego Duran entering winter torpor and reviving in spring, made sense as the emblem of a war god.

The discussion covers how the political reformer Tlacaelel elevated a minor tribal patron to the level of ancient gods like Tlaloc, the migration from Aztlan and the renaming of the people as Mexica, the abandoned sorceress sister Malinalxochitl, and the heart of the nephew Copil thrown into Lake Texcoco to mark the future site of Tenochtitlan. It closes with the Templo Mayor as an architectural replica of Coatepec, the afterlife that turned fallen warriors and women who died in childbirth into hummingbirds, the amaranth-and-honey idol eaten during the festival of Panquetzaliztli, and the disputed claim of 20,400 sacrifices at the 1487 reconsecration.

• What the name means: the left side of the hummingbird, or hummingbird of the south
• Two origin stories: cosmic creator alongside Quetzalcoatl versus the warrior born at Coatepec
• The eagle on a cactus devouring a serpent, now at the center of the Mexican flag
• Why sacrificed bodies tumbled onto the carved Coyolxauhqui stone at the temple base
• How inflated sacrifice numbers may have served as psychological warfare against neighboring states