Celebrated in March.
Xipe Totec was a war-god of the Aztecs, often called "Our Lord the Flayed One". Statues and images of Xipe Totec depict a god wearing a human skin. His festival, known as Tlacaxipehualiztli, was held in March.
Aztec warriors took the festival of Xipe Totec for an excellent opportunity to mimic the god himself. Slaughtering their prisoners of war, also cutting their hearts out, they removed their skins and wear them for the entire 20-day month. They would fight mock battles, after which they would dispose of the rotting skins of the slaughtered in caves or holes in the ground.
Modern scholars have read a little too much into this practice when they saw it as an agricultural metaphor, and the wearing of human skin as a symbolic representation of the process by which a seed grows inside a rotting hull before popping its head as a fresh shoot. More recent archaeological evidence discredits any connection between the Aztec festival of Xipe Totec and Aztec agricultural knowledge.
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