Festival of Xipe Totec
Xipe Totec, Festival of
The Festival of Xipe Totec was an occasion for Aztec warriors to mimic the god. They killed their prisoners of war, often cutting their hearts out, and removed their skins from their bodies. They would then wear these skins for the entire 20-day month and hold mock battles, after which they would discard the now-rotting skins into caves or bury them.
Many scholars have noticed an agricultural metaphor in this practice—likening the wearing of human skin to the process by which a seed grows inside a rotting hull before emerging as a fresh shoot—but more recent scholarship has tended to discredit any connection between Xipe Totec, the donning of skins, and Aztec agricultural rituals.
CelebNature-1969, p. 136
GodsSymbAncMex-1993, p. 188 (c)