Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said on Wednesday that they have found the first temple of the Flayed Lord, a pre-Hispanic fertility god depicted as a skinned human corpse during recent excavations of Popoloca ruins in Puebla state. The foundings include two skull-like stone carvings and a stone trunk depicting the god, Xipe Totec. It had an extra hand dangling off one arm, suggesting the god was wearing the skin of a sacrificial victim.
“Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins. The ritual was seen as a way to ensure fertility and regeneration”, experts said. Susan Gillespie, a University of Florida archaeologist wrote that “finding the torso fragment of a human wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim in situ is perhaps the most compelling evidence of the association of this practice and related deity to a particular temple, more so to me than the two sculpted skeletal crania”.
He was not involved in the project. A temple was built by Popolocas at a complex known as Ndachjian-Tehuacan between AD 1000 and 1260 and were later conquered by the Aztecs.The practice of Aztecs was to perform the sacrificial death in one or more places, but to ritually store the skins in another after they had been worn by living humans for some days. So it could be that this is the temple where they were kept, making it all the more sacred”, say experts.
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