Centzon Totochtin

The Centzon Totochtin, the "Four Hundred Rabbits," were the Aztec gods of pulque, drunkenness, and the many moods of intoxication — an innumerable host of rabbit-formed deities born of the maguey and given form so that mortals might understand, and perhaps forgive, the strange behavior wine could work upon a person. They were not a single god but a family, a crowd, a whole population of minor divinities each claiming a sliver of the drinker's experience as their own domain.

Four Hundred, Meaning Countless

In the Nahuatl tongue, centzontli literally meant "four hundred," but among the Aztecs the number rarely functioned as an exact count. It was, instead, a conventional expression for "innumerable" or "beyond counting," used whenever a speaker wished to gesture at a multitude too vast or too varied to number precisely. Tochtli, meanwhile, meant rabbit. Together the compound name did not describe four hundred individual rabbit-gods so much as it evoked a swarming, uncountable host — as many gods of drunkenness as there were ways for a person to lose themselves in drink.

Children of the Maguey

The Centzon Totochtin were understood as the offspring of two deities whose domains together produced pulque. Their mother was Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey plant, said to have four hundred breasts so that she might nurse her countless rabbit-children on the fermented sap of her own body. Their father was Patecatl, god of healing and of the peyotl root used to ferment the maguey's juice into pulque. Where Mayahuel supplied the raw material of intoxication, Patecatl supplied the transformative art — the knowledge of roots and fermentation that turned sweet aguamiel into something stronger, sacred, and dangerous.

A Mother of Four Hundred Breasts

The image of Mayahuel nursing her uncountable children was no idle flourish. It expressed, in the compressed language of myth, the belief that pulque itself was a kind of milk — a maternal, nourishing substance capable of sustaining an entire pantheon of lesser gods. Codex imagery preserved in sources such as the Codex Ramírez and the Codex Magliabechiano shows Mayahuel seated within or emerging from the maguey plant, sometimes riding a deer, holding foaming cups of the drink she embodied. Her fertility was inseparable from her intoxicating gift; to drink pulque was, in some sense, to be suckled by the goddess herself.

The Rabbit as Emblem of Excess

Why a rabbit, and not some fiercer or more dignified animal, came to stand for drunkenness is explained by Aztec observation of the creature's behavior. Rabbits were seen as erratic, skittish, unpredictable — bolting in one direction, freezing, darting again, seemingly governed by no steady logic. This same unpredictability, Aztec thinkers reasoned, was exactly what pulque produced in a person: a loosening of steady behavior into something wilder, sillier, or more volatile. The rabbit was not chosen to mock the drinker so much as to capture, in animal shorthand, the many unpredictable states drink could induce.

A Council of Named Rabbits

Though the group was imagined as countless, certain members of the Centzon Totochtin were singled out by name in the sources, each governing a particular flavor or degree of intoxication. Among them were Tepoztecatl, patron of the town of Tepoztlan and one of the most widely venerated pulque gods; Tezcatzoncatl; Colhuatzincatl; Toltecatl; Yiauhtecatl; and Ometochtli, "Two Rabbit." Patecatl himself, father of the host, was sometimes counted among them as well, blurring the line between progenitor and eldest child.

Ometochtli, Two Rabbit

Among the named rabbit-gods was Ometochtli, whose name was built from ome ("two") and tochtli ("rabbit"). The sources name him alongside Tepoztecatl, Tezcatzoncatl, Colhuatzincatl, Toltecatl, and Yiauhtecatl as one of the individual pulque and drunkenness deities within the Centzon Totochtin. Several sources identify Ometochtli as chief among the Four Hundred Rabbits and equate him with Tepoztecatl, the widely venerated patron of the town of Tepoztlan, though the two are also sometimes treated as distinct figures within the same divine family. The calendar sign linked by name to the maguey-pulque complex belongs not to Ometochtli but to his grandmother Mayahuel, who in some tellings is associated with Malinalli ("grass"), a day-sign of the 260-day tonalpohualli.

Each Rabbit, a Different Drunkenness

What distinguished one member of the host from another was not appearance so much as effect. Aztec belief held that drunkenness was not a single uniform state but a spectrum of possible experiences — one drinker grew merry and expansive, another maudlin and weepy, another combative, another foolish or reckless. Each of these moods was attributed to the influence of a specific rabbit-god, as though the drinker had been temporarily possessed or claimed by that particular deity. To become extremely drunk, in this framework, was to have surrendered oneself to one of the four hundred, each pulling the drinker toward a different corner of behavior.

Pulque and the Harvest Feast

Pulque was never merely a recreational beverage in Aztec society. Fermented from the maguey's sap through the arts attributed to Patecatl, it held real religious weight, central to the festivals and feasting that marked the agricultural calendar. In sanctioned ritual contexts — harvest celebrations and ceremonies honoring the pulque gods themselves — drinking was a communal, sanctioned act tied directly to the rhythms of planting and harvest, an offering of the maguey's own bounty back into the festival that celebrated it.

A Drink Reserved and Restricted

Outside these sanctioned contexts, however, pulque was tightly controlled. Aztec law and custom reserved habitual or public drinking chiefly for priests engaged in ritual duties and for the elderly, whose long service to the community was thought to have earned them license to indulge. Ordinary commoners who drank to public excess outside of festival contexts faced serious social sanction, sometimes severe punishment. The sacredness of pulque was precisely what made its casual abuse so troubling — to squander a divine gift on idle drunkenness was to disrespect Mayahuel, Patecatl, and their countless rabbit-children all at once.

Rooted in the Maguey-Growing Highlands

Devotion to Mayahuel and her rabbit-host was strongest in the maguey-growing regions of the central highlands, where the plant itself was a defining feature of the landscape and the economy. Communities that depended on the maguey for fiber, food, and drink naturally cultivated the deepest reverence for the family of gods who governed its transformation into pulque. Temples, festivals, and household shrines in these regions honored the pulque gods as guarantors of a harvest that was, quite literally, fermented into ritual life.

Worship Among the Common Clans

The cult of the Centzon Totochtin found particular devotion among the calpulli, the commoner clan-based communities that structured much of Aztec social life. Festivals honoring these gods were tied closely to agricultural fertility, since pulque's raw material sprang from the earth's own bounty and its ritual consumption was central to the feasting that accompanied harvest. In this sense the rabbit-gods were not distant, aristocratic deities but familiar household and neighborhood presences, invoked at the feasts and gatherings that punctuated the ordinary calendar of clan life.

Octli: the Everyday Word for Pulque

The drink at the heart of this cult had its own plain Nahuatl name, octli. The Spanish word pulque is generally thought to come from a different source, and in the sixteenth century octli was the term used for the fermented sap of the maguey. The sap itself, called aguamiel or "honey water," was drawn from the heart of the plant after its central stalk was cut, then left to ferment into a thick, slightly sour, milky drink.

Because the preparation required patience and specialized skill, it is easy to see why the process was given divine parents. The plant that produced the sap, the root or herb used in fermentation, and the many states the finished drink could produce were each assigned to a god. The Centzon Totochtin turned a technical craft into a family story.

Tepoztlán and Its Cliff-Top Temple

The best-known physical trace of the rabbit gods is the small temple of El Tepozteco, built on a high cliff above the town of Tepoztlán in the Mexican state of Morelos and reached today by a steep climb. It is associated with Tepoztécatl, the pulque god who is sometimes treated as the chief of the Four Hundred Rabbits and sometimes as a separate member of the family.

The connection is not only archaeological. Tepoztlán holds a festival on and around the eighth of September, including the Reto del Tepozteco, a staged dialogue in the Nahuatl language that re-enacts the legend of the lord Tepoztécatl being challenged and converted to Christianity, and the figure of Tepoztécatl remains tied to local identity. This is a case where a pre-Hispanic divine name survives as part of a living regional tradition, though the festival today also reflects centuries of Christian influence and should not be treated as an unchanged ancient rite.

Two Rabbit as a Name in the Calendar

The Nahua count of days used a sacred cycle of 260 days built from twenty day signs combined with numbers, and Rabbit (Tochtli) was one of the twenty. The combination Two Rabbit, Ome Tochtli, was the name by which one of the pulque gods was known, and a day or a year carrying that name was linked with the drink in the same way a day carrying another sign could be linked with another power.

Calendar names mattered because a person's birth date shaped how they were addressed. The rabbit gods therefore occupied a position that was part theology and part vocabulary, appearing in the day count, in festival speech and in the language used to describe drunkenness.

Pulque After the Conquest

Pulque did not disappear after the Spanish conquest. Its production changed, its social controls loosened, and in the colonial and later periods it became a drink consumed widely in central Mexico, with pulquerías that remain part of urban culture today. The sacred framework of Mayahuel, Patecatl and the Four Hundred Rabbits was largely replaced in public life by Catholic and secular attitudes toward drink.

Even so, the family of rabbit gods lives on as a way of understanding the sources. They are one of the clearest examples of how a society can give a structured, almost philosophical account of a substance that affects behavior, treating each different mood as a distinct presence rather than blaming a single vice.

An Enduring Symbol of Balance

Read together, the myth of the Centzon Totochtin offers a strikingly nuanced moral vision. Rather than condemning intoxication outright or celebrating it without reservation, Aztec religion multiplied it into four hundred distinct faces, each governed by its own small deity, each representing a recognizable human experience. The result was a theology of moderation disguised as abundance: a reminder, carried in myth and ritual alike, that the maguey's gift was sacred precisely because it demanded respect, restraint, and the right occasion — lest a person find themselves claimed, unpredictably, by the wrong rabbit.