Xotlatozca

Xotlatozca is the central deity of the monotheistic Cozauist Temple. The origins of the deity are still debated, but are generally associated with the combined Puré-Nahua pantheon that emerged in the Purépecha colonies in what is now southeastern Zacapican. Worship of Xotlatozca is first recorded in classical Angatahauca, where it is thought that the Nahuanized Purépecha conflated their ancestral fire god Curicaveri with the Nahua deity Xiuhtecuhtli, combining aspects of both into Xotlatozca who would be associated with fire and the sun, as well as the passage of time marked by the solar day and year. Xotlatozca was know by the epithet Moyocoyani ("creator of himself"), a manifestation of heavenly fire represented by the sun in the sky which would symbolically die every night and recreate itself every morning. The early Angatahuacans remained polytheistic, worshipped Xotlatozca as a creator god alongside other deities of the Nahua and Purépecha pantheons. It was only with the doctrines of Cozauh Tlecoyani in the mid-9th century that Xotlatozca would be elevated to the status of supreme being, exalted above all other gods.

The early Cozauist Temple was henotheistic in nature and upheld Xotlatozca as a supreme deity while not fully rejecting the worship of other, lesser deities. This is thought to have facilitated the assimilation of other gods and belief systems into the Xotlatozca-centric Cozauist religion, associating local deities and spirits with the central god of the Temple without contradicting the established doctrine. As the influence of Angatahuaca and its Cozauist Temple spread across the region, deities of the Iakan and Selk'nam pantheons such as Temáukel would be absorbed into Xotlatozca as lesser emissary of the greater deity. This pattern would repeat itself through the phases of Angatahuaca's expansion from a regional power to an intercontinental polity, with the most notable example being the Tlaloc sect, a branch of modern Cozauism created by a Malaioan strand of the Temple that integrated the rain divinity of the local people into the Cozauist belief system through association with the Nahua deity Tlaloc, who himself had long since been cemented as a emissary of Xotlatozca.

The Temple of Xotlatozca would gradually become more exclusively monotheistic as the centuries progressed and Angatahuaca's expansion slowed and eventually began to reverse. Deities which had once been regarded as distinct and loosely associated entities would have their aspects, epithets and associations transferred instead to Xotlatozca or else cut out of the religious canon as the focus on the worship of the supreme god intensified throughout the Temple. This shift in the doctrine of the Temple coincided with an increasing degree of uniformity across the western Cozauist world in southern and central Oxidentale, while eastern Cozauism would itself coalesce as a coherent orthodoxy of its own around the nucleus of the Tlaloc sect. The modern interpretation of Xotlatozca as a singular and overriding universal god comparable to the Sarpetic god was formalized in 1761 with the Council of Aquillican.