The register rules: Xipe
Evidence dossier 533 — Xipe. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Xipe
- Original script: —
- Pantheon: Nahuatl
- Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 533 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Xipe — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form xipe differs from the canonical Xipe only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. The earliest material witness to the flayed-skin complex comes from the shaft tombs of West Mexico (Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, c. 200 BCE–500 CE), whose ceramic figures wear the flayed skins of other men — proof the imagery predates the Aztec state by centuries. At Tenochtitlan, the INAH excavations of the Templo Mayor precinct (from 1978) located Xipe's shrine, Yopico, and its caches; the Templo Mayor Museum preserves a monolithic Xipe Tōtec whose back shows the wearer's own skin beneath the knotted cords of the second skin. The cult's heartland lay among the Yope of the Guerrero coast and in the Puebla region, and the screenfold Codex Borgia (c. 1500) gives the god's fullest painted dossier.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Xipe Tōtec stands at the center of the modern debate over Aztec sacrifice — read by some as the theological heart of a sophisticated agricultural civilization, by others as evidence of state terror (Clendinnen, Townsend). His images anchor museum collections: the monolithic Xipe of the Templo Mayor Museum, wearing his knotted second skin, is among the most reproduced Aztec sculptures.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Xipe: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form xipe is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /xipe/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 2 (Tlacaxipehualiztli and the tototectin), Diego de Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites (the festival and the Holy Week parallel), Histoyre du Mechique, ed. Garibay (the flaying of the lord).
The Register Continues
This is one of 548 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Xiān (read it) · next entry: Xiuhtēcuhtli (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.