INTRODUCTORY
So numerous were the manifestations and variants of the Earth-goddess conceived by the Nahua or adopted into their pantheon, that this has been the cause of considerable misconception on the part of students of Mexican religion, who have confounded them in a manner which in the circumstances is scarcely surprising. An attempt will be made here to provide the reader with a list of the most important of these deities, briefly and barely outlining their various origins and attributes, in order that he may be the better able to comprehend what follows when we come to discuss them more fully.
Chicomecoatl (Seven Serpents)—the Mexican name of the Earth-goddess and that of the seventh day of the seventh week of the tonalamatl. She was probably of Toltec origin. The third interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus A identifies her with Xochiquetzal, and, perhaps more correctly, with Xumoco and Tonacacigua or Tonacaciuatl. She had two temples dedicated to her, the chicome iteopan and the cinteopan, and seems to have become a variant of Tonacaciuatl on the adoption of an agricultural basis of existence.
Tlazolteotl, Tlaelquani, Teteo innan or Toci—an earth-goddess whose worship had its origin among the tribes of the Atlantic seaboard, where maize grew abundantly. She possessed warlike propensities, as became a goddess to whom human sacrifice was much in vogue, and the myth of her impregnation by Uitzilopochtli was enacted at the ochpaniztli festival in August, typifying, perhaps, the impregnation of [154]the “earth-mother” by the “sky-father.” As Ixcuine she represented a plurality of goddesses. Seler1 believes that Chicomecoatl represents the young maize ear, and Tlazolteotl, the ripe ear of the plant.
Cihuacoatl (Serpent Woman)—an earth-goddess of Xochimilco and Colhuacan.
Coatlicue or Coatlantonan (Serpent Skirt)—a Mexican earth-goddess, mother of Uitzilopochtli.
Xochiquetzal—originally a mountain goddess of the Tlalhuica. An earth-and-maize goddess as well as a deity of flowers and vegetation.
Xilonen—originally a maize-goddess of the Huichol tribes. She represented the young maize-plant.
Cinteotl (Maize-god)—son of Tlazolteotl, originally a god of the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard. He is occasionally alluded to as a female deity, but is always male in the MSS. of the Borgia group, executed by a people of Nahua speech dwelling in the south. He is the equivalent of Xochipilli and had a separate temple, the cinteopan.
Xipe—an earth-god of the Teotitlan district, a god of spring vegetation. His temples were called yopico. His great festival was the Tlacaxipeuliztli, or “flaying of men.”
Only three of these deities, Tlazolteotl, Xipe, and Xochiquetzal, appear as rulers of one or other of the twenty day-signs of the tonalamatl. But Cinteotl figures in the ochpaniztli feast and appears as one of the “Lords of the Night.”
These criteria are perhaps sufficient to identify these figures as separate divinities. We find in Sahagun that Chicomecoatl, Cinteotl, and Xipe had separate temples of their own. In several of the rituals of the great festivals, however, the cults of Tlazolteotl, Chicomecoatl, and Cinteotl appear to have been very closely interwoven, and this leads me to suspect that the worship of the old Toltec goddess Chicomecoatl was in process of fusion with that of the “immigrant” Tlazolteotl at the period of the Conquest. Xilonen, too, according to Sahagun, had a separate festival in her honour, [155]the uei tecuilhuitl. From all this and from considerations still to be advanced we may, perhaps, be justified in assuming:
(1) That at the period of the Conquest the cults of Tlazolteotl, Chicomecoatl, and Cinteotl were very naturally in process of becoming amalgamated, the worship of the two goddesses, Mexican and alien, presenting many features in common.
(2) That Xochiquetzal, originally the goddess of the Tlalhuica, was regarded more properly as the goddess of flowers and of the spring florescence, a hypothesis which is upheld by her myths. Her equation with Tonacaciuatl appears to have been a later concept, due to the connection of both with the earth.
(3) That the Huichol goddess Xilonen came to symbolize for the Nahua the maize plant in its early stages of growth, and in that respect resembles Cinteotl.
(4) That the cult of the southern god Xipe, the grain-deity of a related people, had made great headway among the Nahua of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
(5) It follows from these conclusions that only one of these deities of growth—Coatlicue—was of Nahua origin, all the others being gods of the aboriginal or settled peoples. The Chichimec Nahua, a hunting people, possessing no official grain-goddess of their own, would naturally come to worship these on their adoption of an agricultural mode of life. As most of these forms hailed from districts of considerable cultural antiquity, I believe their worship to have been of long duration in the land, not much less ancient, indeed, than the cult of Tlaloc.
It is not claimed for these conclusions that they are more than approximate. The data relative to these deities is much too complex to permit of any more precise or dogmatic treatment, in fact at one time or another there was identification between them all; but with the above attempt at simplification in view we shall now endeavour to present the reader with a detailed account of each of these and other less important divinities who were regarded as in any way connected [156]with the personification of the earth or the growth of the crops, their festivals and ritual.
The earth-deities seem to have been prophetic and divinatory and to have been connected with medicine, like similar European and Asiatic goddesses. Some of them, like Itzpapalotl, share the butterfly symbol with the gods of fire, with whom they are frequently connected. They are also closely associated with the deer, a fertility animal, and the eagle, the sun-bird, and their victims were, like those of the sun and war deities, decked with eagle-down.