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Ceramic Xipe Totec figurine from the Tehuacan Valley, 1150-1521 AD, in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.

Xipe Totec ("our lord the flayed one") was a life-death-rebirth deity, god of agriculture, vegetation, the east, disease, spring, goldsmiths, silversmiths and the seasons. Xipe Totec flayed himself to give food to humanity, symbolic of the way maize seeds lose their outer layer before germination and of snakes shedding their skin.