Theophagy, understood as the ritual consumption of a deity's body, was a central practice in Mesoamerican religion and is widely documented in sixteenth-century sources. Through the symbolic ingestion of deities, Mesoamerican peoples renewed the bonds connecting humans, gods, and nature. This act was conceived as both communion with the divine and a process of transubstantiation. Its integrative effects extended beyond the spiritual realm to encompass social, therapeutic, economic, and political dimensions.
Among the ancient Nahuas, deities were embodied in various edible forms, including amaranth figures or tzoalli, ceremonial bread, birds, and parts of sacrificed captives. Tzoalli was made from honey and toasted amaranth seeds and was used to mold representations of nearly all deities in the Mexica pantheon. Specialists also crafted serpents and small hill-shaped figures of tzoalli to represent water and fertility gods, drowned individuals, and sacred mountains. These figures commonly featured pumpkin-seed teeth and bean eyes, both plants with strong symbolic significance. Following ritual celebrations, the tzoalli figures were sacrificed. The image of Huitzilopochtli was immolated, and its heart was consumed by Motecuhzoma. The rest of the body was distributed among participants as an act of renewal and communion – teocualo, “the god is eaten,” and teopia, “one possesses the god.”
It is probable that symbolic and ritual anthropophagy existed, keeping a close connection to warfare, with the purpose of capturing of both enemies and deities. There is speculation that if captives were destined for ritual consumption, those who died in sacrifice could be prepared in the captor warrior’s household as tlacatlaolli, a stew made with cooked maize that was distributed among warriors and their relatives.
Some studies propose that the ritual and cosmological character of anthropophagy is evident in the belief that consuming divine food generated new beings or revitalized existing ones. This generative model also applied to the gods and the agricultural sphere, where the earth “consumes” human corpses and transforms them into bone-seeds, hearts “stripped” of memory and identity that became a source of fertile power. Consumption thus played a central role in processes of fertility, death, and creation.