Codex Borgia.—Sheet 14: This is one of the most striking representations of the Death-god which has come down to us. Here he is depicted as a skeleton with a skeleton’s thorax and a skull for head, the arms and legs painted white with yellow spots picked with red, to symbolize the bones of a newly flayed person. He has a large rosette at the occiput and a flag, both painted in alternate white and red cross-bands, and this motif is carried out in the ends of the loin-cloth, and in the extremities of other bands and stripes. He presents a burnt-offering. The symbolic crossways and the owl are figured before him, the death-bird being surrounded with paper flags, the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation. Sheet 15: On this sheet he wears the death-symbols. At the nape of the neck he has a paper rosette, decorated with red and white cross-bands, the paper flag painted in the same way, broken in the middle and bent, and an ear-plug consisting of a human hand. His symbol in this place [328]is a bunch of malinalli grass. Sheet 79: In this representation of the Death-god we find the invariable skeleton head, but the body is painted, like that of the priests, in black. The nape-ornament is of paper, and the ear-plug is a human hand. The screech owl’s wing also appears. Opposite him is a corpse wrapped up in a cloth and corded with strings, a paper flag, used in the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation, and a cross, apparently made of knotted sheets of cloth or paper. His hair or wig is black and curly, some of the curls ending in eye-like circles with red centres. In this picture he sits opposite Tonatiuh, the Sun-god, and thus, perhaps, represents night in its black aspect, the eyes in his wig, as elsewhere, symbolizing the stars. Sheet 57: Here he is placed opposite the Death-goddess and wears the usual insignia. The ground on which their seats are placed is not simply yellow, as in the other sections, but consists of alternate fields of malinalli grass and fragments of skulls in the style of the hieroglyph of arable land. Both present each other with a naked human figure, symbolic of human sacrifice. Between them stands a receptacle painted black and studded with eyes, with red bands in the middle and yellow border. On the left of this stands a dish filled with blood and smoking hearts, on which the goddess is pouring fire from a vessel. On the right projects the body and tail of a dragon, which is seized by the god. In the centre is seen a skull swallowing a man who is falling headforemost into its throat, and above all is pictured the moon, without, however, the usual rabbit appearing in its circumference.
MICTLANTECUTLI.
(From Codex Borgia, sheet 13.)
Tepeyollotl.
(From Codex Nuttall, sheet 70.) (See page 332.)
FORMS OF THE UNDERWORLD DEITIES.
(See also under Quetzalcoatl, facing p. 119.)
Codex Fejérváry-Mayer.—Sheet 37: Here Mictlantecutli is placed opposite the Death-goddess. He has the usual insignia, but wears black garments, decorated with eyes and crossbones. His seat is made of ribs and a piece of skull, and he holds a dragon in both hands. Between him and his mate a man sinks into the yawning jaws of the earth, and above it is a dish with a stone sacrificial knife.
Codex Vaticanus B.—Sheet 21: He has the usual skeleton head, but in the arms and legs the bony structure is merely [329]indicated by a yellow colour and a black design. He is clothed with a jacket of green malinalli blades and wears in his ear a strip of unspun cotton. He has as back-device a pot, in which three flags are stuck. Sheet 34: In this sheet he is represented much as in Codex Borgia, sheet 15. Sheet 58: Here he is pictured as a black god, with a skull for head and seated on a chair made of blood, bones, and malinalli grass. He has the nape-shield and the flag inclining forward, and a nose like a sacrificial stone knife.
STATUE OF AN OCTLI (DRINK) GOD.
Found near Vera Cruz.
Codex Magliabecchiano.—Mictlantecutli is represented more than once in this codex, importantly on pages 73 and 79. In the first instance he is depicted with blue-grey body and enormous claws on hands and feet, the head plastered with the yellow patches and bloodstains he frequently shows. The head is that of a skull, with protruding yellow nasal-bone, but the ground-colour is blue, not bone-colour. He wears the “night-hair” occasionally associated with him, and his coiffure is decorated with small, black, festal bannerets, interspersed with what appear to be stellar eye-motifs. His maxtli appears to consist of a rope or twisted piece of cotton, and he wears wristlets and anklets of bright red cotton. The necklace is reminiscent of that worn by several of the Maya deities. He sits in the portal of a temple, and before him squat a number of men and women, regaling themselves on human flesh from several earthen vessels containing a head, a leg, and an arm. The second picture exhibits the penance done before him. In this place he is painted brown, with the same enormous talons, the death’s-head face, “night-hair” and bannerets (yellow), without, however, the accompaniment of the stellar eye-ornaments. These, however, appear to be reproduced upon the wrists, knees, and one ankle, and, perhaps, make this phase of the god a parallel to the Greek Argus, the “eye-spotted” night. On the breast depends an ornament which is not sufficiently clear to justify its description. On page 82 the god is depicted as wearing a garment covered with crosses, and on page 88 as standing on the skull-altar (see Tezcatlipocâ). His wavy hair is surrounded by a red and yellow cotton fillet, [330]and he is being anointed by a priest from a vessel of blood, whilst other priests stand before him with pots full of blood and human hearts. He wears a curious blue necklace almost of the “masonry” type seen in Egyptian, Greek, and Asiatic deific ornaments, and a cotton garment with red bows. A cotton web depends from his blue ear-plug.
The interpreter of Codex Vaticanus A says of Mictlantecutli: “He descends for souls as a spider lowers itself with its head downwards from the web.” Later on he states that “he is the great lord of the dead below in hell, who alone after Tonacatecutli was painted with a crown.… They painted this demon near the sun, for in the same way as they believed that the one conducted souls to heaven, so they supposed that the other carried them to hell. He is here represented [that is in the codex] with his hands open and stretched towards the sun to seize on any soul that might escape from him.” Later he states that Ixcuina, “the goddess of salt, dirt, and immodesty,” was the wife of Mictlantecutli. The commentator of Codex Telleriano-Remensis seems to regard Mictlantecutli as rescuing souls from the realm of the dead. He says: “They place him opposite to the sun to see if he can rescue any of those seized upon by the lord of the dead.” The two interpretative codices were almost certainly edited, if not copied one from the other, by the same hand, and it is such passages as this which show the great dubiety existing in the minds of the priestly commentators regarding the precise nature of the Mexican deities.
Sahagun in the Appendix to his third book, the first chapter of which treats of burial, gives a prayer or address to the dead which mentions Mictlantecutli, and which states that he and his wife Mictecaciuatl await the deceased, who goes to dwell among the shadows, “where there is no light or window.” It is further explained that when he arrived in the realm of the god of the dead (which has already been described in the chapter on Cosmogony), he makes him an offering of the papers which he carries, of faggots or torches [331]of pinewood, and of perfumed reeds, cotton, mantles, and costly apparel.
Boturini and Brasseur give a great deal of matter regarding this god which is absolutely worthless, as does Leon y Gama, and the deity has been in some manner confounded with a god Teoyaomiqui, who seems to be quite supposititious in character and never to have had no other existence in the minds of Gama and his copyists.
Mictlantecutli, it would seem, is neither more nor less than a god of the dead, that is, his original conception was probably that of a prince of Hades, a ruler of the realm of the departed, who in time came to possess the terrific aspect and the punitive attributes of a deity whose office it was to torment the souls of the erring. The fact that he presides over the eleventh hour—the hour of sunset—shows that he was in a measure identified with the night, as certain aspects of his insignia would appear to show. In a manner he must be regarded as the earth, which in its form of the grave, yawns or gapes insatiably for the bodies of the dead. (See Mictecaciuatl.) He appears to have analogies with the Lords of Xibalba, or the Place of the Dead, alluded to in the Popol Vuh, of the Quiches of Guatemala.1
Codex Vaticanus B.—Sheet 90: She has a skull for head, with round eye and marked supraciliary arch, tousled, dark [332]hair studded with eyes symbolizing night and stars. The skull and body are painted yellow, and one breast is showing. Her wig has eyes for ornaments, and she wears the nape-ornament of paper usually placed on corpses. Her earring is also fashioned after the eye-motif. The feather balls at her wrists are set with eye-like jewels. She is engaged in thrusting a mummy-pack into the yawning jaws of the earth.
Codex Bologna (Cospi).—Sheet 27: The date “nine earth-monster” (chicunaui cipactli) stands here beside Mictecaciuatl as her hieroglyphic name.
Codex Borgia.—Sheet 57: Here she is represented opposite Mictlantecutli. She has a wig decorated with stars. The face is human, but the fleshless lower jaw resembles the sign malinalli. Her nape ornament of paper is painted red and white, and her costume is red with white cotton borders and an upper border of variegated white and yellow.
See Mictlantecutli.
In Codices Fejérváry-Mayer and Vaticanus B the face-paint of this god is red, and in the latter MS. has the alternate red and yellow cross-bars of the red Tezcatlipocâ. In Codex Borgia the body is painted black, but in this MS., as well as in the Aubin tonalamatl, the upper part of the face resembles that of Quetzalcoatl in its decoration, the profile being of a [333]light colour, while the temporal region is painted differently, these colours in the Aubin tonalamatl being separated by a black line. But whereas the temporal colouring in the Vienna MS. is green, in Codex Borgia it shows the alternate black and yellow of Tezcatlipocâ’s face-paint. In Codex Borgia, sheet 14, a beard is worn and a plug is in the nostrils. The region of the mouth has the painting of a jaguar’s skin. The hair is puffed up in two pads, symbolic, perhaps, of the mountainous region with which the god is connected. In Codex Telleriano-Remensis he wears the broad necktie of the rain-gods, only painted in green and not in blue, and in Codex Borgia shows Tlaloc’s colours in the loin-cloth, fillet, and neck-ornament. In this MS., too, he is represented as blowing the conch-shell, and here, as well as in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, he stands before a building which has the cone-shaped, high-pitched straw roof of the houses in the tierras calientes, crowned with a jagged motif. As ruler of the third day-sign and third week he is represented as a jaguar pure and simple in the Aubin tonalamatl, Telleriano-Remensis and Borbonicus codices, which is merely a disguise for the personality of Tezcatlipocâ, as is shown by the face of that god looking out from the jaguar’s head in Telleriano-Remensis.
In Codex Borbonicus he is more unmistakably represented as Tezcatlipocâ, for the hands and feet projecting from underneath the jaguar skin are striped like those of that god, and one of the feet wears Tezcatlipocâ’s sandal, the itzcoatl (or obsidian snake), whilst the other is torn off and replaced by his smoking mirror. The jaguar of Codex Borbonicus has other portions of the insignia of Tezcatlipocâ about him, such as the aztaxelli, or feather head-ornament, and the anauatl, or white mussel-shell ring. In the Codex Borbonicus a large marine shell or conch-shell appears to be symbolical of Tepeyollotl. The god is alluded to by Sahagun as among the unlucky symbols. He figures as one of the faces of the double-headed Quaxolotl.
The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus A says: [334]
“They considered Tepeyolotli the lord of these thirteen signs in which they celebrated his festival, during the four last of which they fasted, out of reverence, on account of the earth’s having remained after the deluge. But as its conditions were disordered or filthy, they did not consider the sacrifices of these signs as good or clean, but, on the contrary, as unclean, and they applied to them an appellation which in common phraseology we might explain by the term ‘sacrifices of filth.’ These last four signs in which they fasted were likewise out of reverence and in honour of Suguequezal (Xochiquetzal), the wife of Tonacatecotle, whose name signifies the lifting up or raising up of the Roses, for they say that goddess caused the earth to flourish. This proper name might be written Tiscuelutli, which is the Heart of the Mountain, which means the echo.”
The interpreter of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis says:
“The name refers to the manner in which the earth was preserved after the deluge. The sacrifices of these thirteen days were not deemed good; they might be interpreted in Spanish ‘sacrifices of dung.’
“The sign under which number one is written caused paralysis and evil humours. Two was appropriated to drunkards; and three was applied to the earth. Tepeolotlec presided over those thirteen days in which they celebrated a festival; and during the last four days of which (where the hands are marked) they fasted. Tepeolotlec means Lord of Animals.
“The four days of the fast were in honour of Suciquecal, who was the man who remained in the earth which we now inhabit. Tepeolotlec is the same as the echo of the voice when it reverberates in a valley from one mountain to another. They bestowed the appellation of the tiger on the earth because the tiger is a very courageous animal, and they say that the deluge ceased at the reverberation caused by the echo in the mountains.”
The commentators of the Interpretative Codices briefly [335]explain Tepeyollotl as “echo” and “earth.” As Seler states,2 it is most probable that he is a cave-god, an alien barbaric deity, perhaps identical with the god whom the Maya tribes of Chiapas called Votan or “heart.” Seler also believes him to be Tezcatlipocâ in his form as an apparition.3 It is strange that it is only in the works of the interpreters that he is mentioned at all, and we can discover no precise locality where his worship was celebrated. The interpreters also designate him “Lord of the Animals,” and add that the name of jaguar is given to the earth, because the jaguar is the wildest of beasts. It may be as Seler declares, that “in order to understand and explain this figure we have to start from the jaguar (ocelotl).” The Indians of the Vera Paz district in Guatemala, when they met this beast, instead of attacking him or running away, knelt down and began to confess their sins,4 and it is probable that some such species of worship was paid Tepeyollotl, who by his mouth-painting, and as ruler of the third day-sign and third week, in the Codex Borgia, is certainly depicted as a jaguar. But it seems possible, too, that this beast, perhaps because it dwelt in caves, and because of its terrible nightly roaring, may have symbolized for the Mexicans the earth itself in its dangerous aspect of earthquake.5 The Nagualists, a politico-religious secret society of post-Conquest origin, paid especial reverence to the jaguar, whom they regarded as a beast-patron or totemic guardian. It is clear that their conception of him arose out of that of Tepeyollotl. [336]