Xolotl

Xolotl is paired with Quetzalcoatl as a twin or double, and where the feathered serpent is the morning star, Xolotl is the evening — the same body seen going down rather than coming up. He is depicted with a dog's head, and often with features the sources describe as deformed or reversed: backward feet, ragged ears, sometimes an appearance of being flayed or of weeping. The dog association carries weight in a tradition where a dog accompanies the dead on their journey below.

His characteristic office is escort. He conducts the sun through the underworld between setting and rising, which makes him necessary rather than merely ominous, and he assists in the retrieval of the bones of a previous humanity from the underworld so that the current people can be made from them. In one widely-repeated account, when the gods must sacrifice themselves to set the new sun in motion, Xolotl refuses, flees, and transforms repeatedly to escape — into a maize plant, an agave, an amphibian — before being caught and killed.

That flight is the detail that complicates him. He is both the god who performs the necessary descent every night and the one who would not accept the necessary death, and the tradition holds these together without apology. The creature named after him remains identified with his final transformation, which gives the whole story an unusually concrete residue.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Read as a personality, Xolotl comes across as reluctant and faithful at once — a being who does the hardest recurring work in the pantheon and who nonetheless balked at the one thing asked of him permanently. The transformations during the flight suggest resourcefulness under panic rather than cunning, and the deformity the sources dwell on gives him an outsider's cast beside his luminous twin. What he most consistently offers is accompaniment: he goes with things into the dark.