| Huitzilopochtli, whose name may be glossed "hummingbird on the left", was the supernatural patron of the Mexica people. Their legendary histories present several different versions of who, or what, Huitzilopochtli was. Accounts of the beginning of their wanderings describe an idol, carried on a litter by four human bearers, that spoke to them and directed the Mexica on their road. The same legendary histories describe the birth of Huitzilopochtli as a warrior who defeats his elder siblings, providing a model and an argument to justify the wars of conquest carried out by the Aztec polity on its sibling city-states. It is in the dual guise of patron of the Mexica and of war that Huitzilopochtli shared the supreme place in the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan with Tlaloc, the deity of earthly fertility. Both in the temple and in mythological accounts, Huitzilopochtli as young warrior was closely linked to the sun at mid-day.
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