The Cult
Her cult lived in the birthing chamber, not the temple precinct. The Florentine Codex (Book VI) preserves the full rite: the midwife received the newborn as a captive taken in sacred war, cut the cord over an open vessel, and buried the afterbirth — a girl's by the hearth, a boy's by the fields — while the divine protectresses of childbirth, Cihuacōātl among them, were invoked by name. Midwives were her effective priesthood, and the ceramic figurines of women in childbirth known from Mesoamerica stand as votive evidence of the whole complex. No excavated sanctuary can be securely assigned to her, though her name was borne by the second-highest office of the Mexica state, the Cihuacōātl, 'Woman-Snake,' who kept the courts and markets. Women who died in labor joined the cihuapipil spirits, feared and honored at crossroads. What survived the conquest was not an institution but a figure: the weeping woman of roads and waterways, still known across Mexico as La Llorona.