XOLOTL (right) AND TLALOC.
With sacrificial and fire-making symbols.
(From Codex Borbonicus, sheet 16.)
Codex Borgia.—In the picture of Xolotl on the left side of the middle lower part of sheet 55 a resemblance to Quetzalcoatl is noticeable. On his head is the peculiar wedge-shaped Huaxtec hat, painted half-red and half-blue, which is one of Quetzalcoatl’s characteristics. The bone dagger symbolic of self-torture and penance, and the snail-shell armlets he wears, are also reminiscent of Quetzalcoatl’s insignia. His face-painting, however, differs from that usually worn by Quetzalcoatl in Codex Borgia, as the front portion of his face is blue and the part near the ears red. His body-paint is blue. Nor does he have a large beard or fan-shaped nape-ornament, but is shown wearing the Wind-god’s breast-ornament made from a sliced snail-shell. He also shows a likeness to Quetzalcoatl in the manner in which his loin-cloth and fillet are rounded off. As a travelling god, Xolotl is depicted in Codex Borgia as holding a fan similar in its three-flapped wedge-shape to that of the other peripatetic deities, except that it has a handle shaped like a bird’s head [345]and is seemingly composed of blue cotinga-feathers. His travelling pack is symbolized by a flowering tree, which he bears on his back, while his travelling staff is painted turquoise colour, is decorated with the chalchihuitl ornament, and is completed with a flower. In the picture to the right of sheet 36 Xolotl presents almost a new aspect, although certain of his attributes bear some resemblance to those which we have already observed as being peculiar to him. He still carries a travelling-staff with a jewelled head, but in this representation its general character is more that of the rattle-stick. His body-paint remains the same and he retains his blue feather fan. His pack is distinguished by a flower to serve as a connection with the florescent tree carried by him, as described elsewhere. In this sheet he is represented as wearing a long beard and his face-paint in the region of the mouth is white. His face is altered by a peculiar type of nose, which gives him a disfigured appearance. The god of monstrosities on sheet 10 of Codex Borgia has a similar patch of white about his mouth, resembling in shape a human hand, a symbol which also characterizes the face-painting of Macuil Xochitl. Elsewhere in this MS. he is represented as crooked-limbed and blear-eyed.
Codex Vaticanus B.—In this MS. Xolotl is represented as having a dog’s head and again appears in the garb and ornaments of Quetzalcoatl. In Codex Borgia his ears have a rim of yellow, evidently intended to represent dead flesh, while in Codex Vaticanus the canine character is indicated by the cropped ears. In the nostrils is a blue plug, the ornament of the deceased warrior, denoting that this is the dog which accompanies his master to Mictlampa, Place of the Dead, and assists him to swim the river which encircles it. This distinguishing plug is seen in Codex Vaticanus, but not in Codex Borgia. The rest of the god’s attire is exclusively that worn by Quetzalcoatl, as described in the space devoted to that god.
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Ixtlilton. (From the Sahagun MS.)
Ixtlilton. (From the Sahagun MS.) (See p. 349.) |
Omacatl. (From the Sahagun MS.)
Omacatl. (From the Sahagun MS.) (See p. 352.) |
Xolotl. (From the Codex Borgia.)
MINOR DEITIES.
Aubin Tonalamatl.—In this MS. he again takes on a canine appearance and is clothed in many respects like Quetzalcoatl. This frequent similarity in dress between the gods may have [346]its origin in the diverse meaning of the word coatl, which, besides meaning “snake,” also denotes “comrade” or “twin.” This dog-like creature is usually portrayed as of a dark colour, black, with the distinctive cropped ear, while in Codex Borgia he is depicted with jaguar-claws. Xolotl has the face-painting of Quetzalcoatl in the Mexican MSS. proper, that is in the middle front it is yellow and black at the sides. He wears the two-coloured white and brown (jaguar-skin) head-loop with rounded-off ends, which latter form is also continued in the loin-cloth. Both these articles of dress he has in common with Quetzalcoatl.
Codex Telleriano-Remensis.—Here he is depicted with Tlazolteotl’s spindles in his hair and an ichcaxochitl of unspun cotton, as well as the head-loop previously described. Only in this MS. is he so adorned. The instrument of self-mortification, the bone dagger, juts out from above his forehead, whence issues a trickle of blood, sometimes delineated symbolically as a feather-ball string completed with a flower, and at others represented as real blood. He grasps an obsidian knife, which implement also projects from his mouth along with a flower, while a copal bag is portrayed in front of him. In some MSS., as in Codex Telleriano-Remensis and Vaticanus A, he is represented as wearing a mask on his girdle.
Xolotl seems to be represented on one of the wall-paintings at Mitla, where he is characterized by the physiognomy of an animal with projecting upper teeth. He wears Quetzalcoatl’s conical cap of jaguar-skin and his necklace of snail-shells. The dog’s ears seem in this place to be merged into tufts of feathers.
Two small pottery figures of Xolotl found in the Valley of Mexico insist strongly upon his animal character, but in neither of these is the precise bestial type ascertainable. [347]The first shows a face ending in a blunt snout and surmounted by a kind of wig, with ear-pieces rising on either side. What seems to be a collar of feathers surrounds the neck. In the other he is represented as a little bear, or dog, without clothing, but having Quetzalcoatl’s sliced snail-shell breast-ornament. A stone head of him found in the Calle de las Escalerillas in Mexico City on 29th October 1900 shows a blunt, almost ape-like animal face with large powerful molar teeth, dog-like canines, and large, sharp fangs, not unlike those with which Tlaloc was usually represented. Incised lines represent powerful muscular development in the region of the nose and jaws. The type is only generally and not particularly bestial, and it would seem that it was the aim of the sculptor to represent a ferocious animal countenance without laying stress upon the peculiarities of any one species.
The most important of the myths relating to Xolotl are those given by Sahagun and Olmos, which have already been described at length in the chapter on Cosmogony. The Codex Vaticanus A says of him: “They believe Xolotle to be the god of monstrous productions and of twins, which are such things as grow double. He was one of the seven who remained after the deluge, and he presided over these thirteen signs which they usually considered unlucky.” The Codex Telleriano-Remensis describes him in verbiage almost identical.
Juan de Cordova in his Zapotec Grammar writes: “When a solar eclipse occurred then they said that the world is coming to an end, and that the Sun-god wanted war, and that they would kill one another, whoever was first able to do this. Likewise they said that the dwarfs were created by the sun, and that at the time (that is during the eclipse) the Sun-god wanted the dwarfs as his property. And therefore wherever dwarfs or undersized persons were found in a house the people fell upon and killed them, and they hid themselves in order not to be killed, so that during that time few escaped from their fate.” [348]
One of the hymns or songs given in the Sahagun MS. says of Xolotl:
Old Xolotl plays ball, plays ball
On the magic playing-ground.
The Mexican game of tlachtli symbolized the movements of the moon (but more probably of both sun and moon). This, perhaps the favourite Mexican amusement, was a ball-game, played with a rubber ball by two persons one at each end of a T-shaped court, which in the manuscripts is sometimes represented as painted in dark and light colours, or in four variegated hues. In several of the MSS. Xolotl is depicted striving at this game against other gods. For example, in the Codex Mendoza we see him playing with the Moon-god, and can recognize him by the sign ollin which accompanies him, and by the gouged-out eye in which that symbol ends. Seler thinks “that the root of the name olin suggested to the Mexicans the motion of the rubber ball olli and, as a consequence, of ball-playing.” It seems to me to have represented both light and darkness, as is witnessed by its colours. Xolotl is, indeed, the darkness that accompanies light. Hence he is “the twin” or shadow, hence he travels with the sun and the moon, with one or other of which he “plays ball,” overcoming them or losing to them. He is the god of eclipse, and naturally a dog, the animal of eclipse. Peruvians, Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois, Algonquins, and Eskimos believed him to be so, thrashing dogs during the phenomenon, a practice explained by saying that the big dog was swallowing the sun, and that by whipping the little ones they would make him desist. The dog is the animal of the dead, and therefore of the Place of Shadows.1 Thus also Xolotl is a monster, the sun-swallowing monster, like the Hindu Rahu, who chases the sun and moon. As a shadow he is “the double” of everything. The axolotl, a marine animal found in Mexico, was confounded with his [349]name because of its monstrous appearance, and he was classed along with Quetzalcoatl merely because that god’s name bore the element coatl, which may be translated either “twin” or “snake.” Lastly, as he was “variable as the shade,” so were the fortunes of the game over which he presided.
At the same time he seems to me to have affinities with the Zapotec and Maya lightning-dog peche-xolo2 and may represent the lightning which descends from the thunder-cloud, the flash, the reflection of which arouses in many primitive people the belief that the lightning is “double,” and leads them to suppose a connection between the lightning and twins, or other phenomena of a twofold kind. As the dog, too, he has a connection with Hades, and, said myth, was dispatched thence for the bones from which man was created.
He is also a travelling god, for the shadows cast by the clouds seem to travel quickly over plain and mountain. As the monstrous dwarf, too, he symbolized the palace-slave, the deformed jester who catered for the amusement of the great, and this probably accounts for the symbol of the white hand outspread on his face, which he has in common with Xochipilli and the other gods of pleasure. He bears a suspicious resemblance to the mandrake spirits of Europe and Asia, both as regards his duality, his loud lamentation when as a double-rooted plant he was discovered and pulled up by the roots, and his symbol, which may be a reminiscence of the mandrake.
[350]
Codex Fejérváry-Mayer.—Sheet 24: Here the god is represented opposite Macuilxochitl. He wears on his head a white-fringed cloth, such as is worn by Tezcatlipocâ, having on the top a bunch of downy feathers with a crest of four plumes ending in white tips. He has a collar made of vertebræ or animals’ claws, and on the upper arm a ring, furnished on one of its sides with a projection tapering to a point. The body is white and the face is painted black and white round the mouth. Seler in his Commentary on this MS. (p. 127) thinks that the white ball or disk covered with a radial design, and held by the god in his right hand, is perhaps a symbol for ilhuitl (“day,” “feast”), and should be compared with the parti-coloured, whorl-like disk which the dancer in Codex Telleriano-Remensis (sheet L, verso 1) holds in his hand, and which represents the sign of the eighth annual feast, the ueitecuilhuitl. The crest worn by him, which is composed of black feathers, is the crest embellished with quetzal-feathers and stone knives, as in the Sahagun MS. and the Codex Magliabecchiano.
Codex Borgia.—Sheet 62: In this representation he faces the goddess Xochiquetzal. He wears the face- and body-paint of a priest, with a white angular patch about the mouth, sprinkled with ulli gum. His crest is similar to that described above. The breast-ring seems to be imbedded in a motif bearing a resemblance to the tlachinalli fire-and-water symbol, and its significance in this place is hard to define. From the wrists droop elaborate feather ornaments, depending from a bracelet of stone knives. We seem to see the Dance-god in this place in his ceremonial condition, as the ruler of the dance which preceded human sacrifice. Sheet 64 shows him similarly attired, but without the priest’s body-paint. He seems about to enter the dance-house of the warriors, and a courtesan bears him company.
Codex Borbonicus.—Sheet 4: Here he is shown opposite Ueuecoytl, the coyote god, engaged in the motions of the dance. Perhaps this position is more eloquent of motion than any other in the Mexican MSS. In this place he appears [351]to be almost identified with Macuilxochitl (q.v.), to whose statuettes in the Museo Nacional de Mexico, the figure bears a strong resemblance.
Sahagun MS.—The face-paint is black and the god wears a feather comb set with flint knives. He has a collar of animal claws, most of which are those of the jaguar, and on his back he wears a wing-fan with the sun-banner fixed on it. Round his shoulders is a paper with the sun-signs painted on it. His feet are ornamented with bells and shells, and he wears “sun-sandals.” On his arm he carries a solar shield and in his hand he bears a staff with a heart.
Practically all that is known regarding this god is recounted by Sahagun, who says of him: “They made to this god an oratory of painted planks, a sort of tabernacle, in which his image was placed. He had in this oratory many jars full of water, and covered with plates, and this water was called tilatl, or black water. When an infant fell ill they took it to the temple of Ixtlilton and opened one of these jars, made him drink it, and the malady left him. If one wished to give a feast to the god he took his image home. This was neither painted nor sculptured, but was a priest who wore the ornaments of the god. During the passage he was censed with copal. Arrived at the house, he was met with singers and dancers, which dancing is different in a manner from ours.
“I speak of that which we call areyto, and which they call maceualiztli. They assembled in great numbers, two and two or three and three, and formed a circle. They carried flowers in the hand, and were decorated with plumage. They made at the same time a uniform movement with their bodies, also with their feet and hands, in perfect combination and very worthy to be seen. All their movements accorded with the music of the drums. They accompanied the instruments with their sonorous voices, singing in accord the praises of the god to whom they made the festival. They adapted [352]their movements to the nature of their songs, for their dances and their intonation varied considerably.
“The dance continued, and the ‘god’ himself, having danced for a long time, descended to the cave where the octli was stored in jars. He opened one of these, an operation which was known as tlayacaxapotla (‘the new opening,’ or ‘the opening of the new’). Then he and those who accompanied him drank of the octli. They then went to the court of the house, where they found three jars filled with the black water, which had been covered for four days. He who played the rôle of god opened these, and if he found them full of hairs, dust, charcoal, or any other uncleanness, it was said that the man of the house was a person of vicious life and bad character. Then the god went to the house, where he was given the stuff called ixquen, for covering the face, in allusion to the shame which covered the master of the house.”3
From the foregoing it is clear that Ixtlilton was a god of medicinal virtue, the deity who kept men in good health or who assisted their recovery from sickness, therefore the brother of Xochipilli-Macuilxochitl, god of good luck and merriment. His temple, composed of painted boards, would seem to have borne a resemblance to the hut of the tribal medicine-man or shaman. A sacrifice was made to him when the Mexican child first spoke.
Sahagun MS. (Biblioteca del Palacio).—The regions of the forehead, nose, and mouth are “festively” painted. He wears a feather helmet and a crown of spear-shafts. His overdress has the cross-hatching which usually indicates water, and is edged with red, decorated with the eye-motif. Before him is a small shield with a plain, white surface, its lower rim edged with white feathers or paper, and in his hand he carries the “seeing” or “scrying” implement, that some of the other gods, noticeably Tezcatlipocâ, possess.4 [353]
This god appears to have been partly of a convivial nature and presided over banquets and festivities generally. On the occasion of a public or private rejoicing he was borne thither by certain priests. If the banquet was suitable he praised the host, but otherwise rebuked him, and it is said that, if irritated in any way, he would turn the viands into hair (as did certain of the fairies of Brittany, when annoyed or insulted). The night before a festival a cake like a large bone was made, and this, it was feigned, was a bone of the deity himself. This cake was eaten and octli was drunk, after which spines of the maguey were thrust into the stomach of the idol. There can be little doubt that, as Sahagun states,5 Omacatl was solely and simply a god of festivities.
Codex Borgia.—Sheets 47–48: Five figures here represent the Ciuateteô and are dressed in the style of Tlazolteotl, with the fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, and the golden nasal crescent worn by that goddess and the octli-gods. In each case the eye has been gouged out and hangs out of the socket, as with Xolotl. They wear on their heads a feather ornament like the heron-feather plume of the warrior caste, but consisting of five white feathers or strips of paper above a bunch of downy feathers. At the nape of the neck the figures wear a black vessel as their device, in which lies a bunch of malinalli grass. The upper part of the body is [354]naked, and round the hips is wrapped a skirt showing cross-bones on its surface and a border painted in the manner of the variegated coral snake. The resemblance between all five figures is close. Only the face-, arm-, and leg-painting is different. In the case of the first the colour is white striped with red, in the second blue, in the third yellow, in the fourth red, and in the fifth black. All hold in one hand a broom of malinalli grass, and in the other a black obsidian sacrificial knife, a bone dagger, and an agave-leaf spike, both furnished with a flower symbolic of blood. They inhale the smoke which ascends from a black incense or fire-vessel standing on the ground before them. A rubber ball lies in the vessel of the first figure; with the second the vessel is replaced by a cross-way, and the ascending smoke by a centipede issuing from the mouth of the goddess. With the third a skeleton is seated in the dish, holding a heart in one hand and a sacrificial knife in the other. The ascending smoke is replaced by two streams of blood passing into the mouth of a skeleton, one of which comes from the mouth of the figure, the other from her right breast. With the fourth figure are represented a bunch of malinalli grass and a variegated snake. Nothing here enters the mouth of the Ciuateteô, but from it issues a similar snake, and another hangs on each of her arms. Before the last figure, in the dish is perched a screech-owl, and a stream of blood passes from the mouth of the figure to that of the owl.
Codex Vaticanus B.—Sheets 77–79: Five figures are here also depicted which bear a resemblance to Tlazolteotl, but are without the golden nasal crescent. With the last four the same curling locks of hair are seen as in the case of the Codex Borgia figures, but the first figure is pictured with the hair bristling up on one side, as worn by the warrior caste. The eye too is hanging out, and the headdresses and nape-vessels resemble those in Codex Borgia. In the majority of cases the skirt is white with two diagonal red stripes crossing each other. Only with the first figure is it painted red with white cross-bones. The last figure has a skirt made of strips of malinalli grass fastened by a girdle made of [355]a skeletal spinal column, on which is set a dead man’s skull as back-mirror. All five wear the men’s loin-cloth besides the skirt. They carry the symbols of sacrifice and mortification as in the Codex Borgia, and similar incense-vessels stand before them.
Sahagun says of the Ciuateteô:
“The Ciuapipiltin, the noble women, were those who had died in childbed. They were supposed to wander through the air, descending when they wished to the earth to afflict children with paralysis and other maladies. They haunted cross-roads to practise their maleficent deeds, and they had temples built at these places, where bread offerings in the shape of butterflies were made to them, also the thunder-stones which fall from the sky. Their faces were white, and their arms, hands, and legs were coloured with a white powder, ticitl (chalk). Their ears were gilded and their hair done in the manner of the great ladies. Their clothes were striped with black, their skirts barred in different colours, and their sandals were white.” He further relates (bk. vi, c. xxix) that, when a woman who had died in her first childbed was buried in the temple-court of the Ciuateteô, her husband and his friends watched the body all night in case young braves or magicians should seek to obtain the hair or fingers as protective talismans.
That the witches’ sabbath was quite as famous or infamous an institution in ancient Mexico as in mediæval Europe is testified to by the numerous accounts of the missionary chroniclers, which are further corroborated by the native manuscripts. But in the days prior to the coming of the Spaniards, it was thought of as being celebrated by the dead rather than the living. The Ciuateteô, or haunting mothers, were those women who had died in their first child-bed, and who, out of envy for their more fortunate sisters and their offspring, continued to haunt the world at certain fixed [356]periods, wreaking their spite upon all who were so unlucky as to cross their path. They are represented in the ancient paintings as dressed in the garments and insignia of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the witch par excellence, with a fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, a golden crescent-shaped nasal ornament, empty eye-sockets, and the heron-feather headdress of the warrior caste, for the woman who died in child-bed was regarded as equally heroic with the man who perished in battle. The upper parts of their bodies were nude, and round the hips they wore a skirt on which cross-bones were painted. They carried the witch’s broom of malinalli grass, a symbol of death, and they are sometimes associated with the snake, screech-owl, and other animals of ill-omen. The face was thickly powdered with white chalk, and the region of the mouth, in some cases, decorated with the figure of a butterfly. These furies were supposed to dwell in the region of the west, and as some compensation for their early detachment from the earth-life, were permitted to accompany the sun in his course from noon to sunset, just as the dead warriors did from sunrise to noon. At night they left their occidental abode, the Ciutlampa, or “Place of Women,” and revisited the glimpses of the moon in search of the feminine gear they had left behind them—the spindles, work-baskets, and other articles used by Mexican women. The Ciuateteô were especially potent for evil in the third quarter of the astrological year, and those who were so luckless as to meet them during that season became crippled or epileptic. The fingers and hands of women who had died in bringing forth were believed by magicians, soldiers, and thieves to have the property of crippling and paralysing their enemies or those who sought to hinder their nefarious calling, precisely as Irish burglars formerly believed that the hand of a corpse grasping a candle, which they called “the hand of glory,” could ensure sound sleep in the inmates of any house they might enter.
Says Sahagun: “It was said that they vented their wrath on people and bewitched them. When anyone is possessed by the demons, with a wry mouth and disturbed eyes, with [357]clenched hands and inturned feet, wringing his hands and foaming at the mouth, they say that he has linked himself to a demon; the Ciuateteô, housed by the crossways, have taken his form.”
From this and other passages we may be justified in thinking that these dead women were also regarded as succubi, haunters of men, compelling them to dreadful amours, and that they were credited with the evil eye is evident from the statement that their glances caused helpless terror and brought convulsions upon children, and that their jealousy of the handsome was proverbial.
The divine patroness of these witches (for “witches” they are called by the old friar who interprets the Codex Telleriano-Remensis), who flew through the air upon their broomsticks and met at cross-roads, was Tlazolteotl, a divinity who, like all deities of growth, possessed a plutonic significance. The broom is her especial symbol, and in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (sheet 17) we have a picture of her which represents her as the traditional witch, naked, wearing a peaked hat, and mounted upon a broomstick. In other places she is seen standing beside a house accompanied by an owl, the whole representing the witch’s dwelling, with medicinal herbs drying beneath the eaves. Thus the evidence that the haunting mothers and their patroness present an exact parallel with the witches of Europe seems complete, and should provide those who regard witchcraft as a thing essentially European with considerable food for thought. The sorcery cult of the Mexican Nagualists of post-Columbian times was also permeated with practices similar to those of European witchcraft, and we read of its adherents smearing themselves with ointment to bring about levitation, flying through the air, and engaging in wild and lascivious dances, precisely as did the adherents of Vaulderie, or the worshippers of the Italian Aradia.
There are not wanting signs that living women of evil reputation desired to associate themselves with the Ciuateteô. Says the interpreter of Codex Vaticanus A: “The first of the fourteen day-signs, the house, they considered unfortunate, [358]because they said that demons came through the air on that sign in the figures of women, such as we designate witches, who usually went to the highways, where they met in the form of a cross, and to solitary places, and that when any bad woman wished to absolve herself of her sins, she went alone by night to these places, and took off her garments and sacrificed there with her tongue (that is, drew blood from her tongue), and left the clothes which she had carried and returned naked as the sign of the confession of her sins.”
The temples or shrines of the Ciuateteô were situated at cross-roads, the centres of ill-omen throughout the world. That they had a connection with the lightning is shown by the fact that cakes in the shape of butterflies and “thunder-stones” were offered them. But they were also connected with baneful astral or astrological influences, and are several times alluded to in the Interpretative Codices in this connection. The seasons at which they were most potent for evil were those connected with the western department of the tonalamatl, the five days which compose the first column of the third quarter disposed in columns of five members, ce mazatl, ce quiauitl, ce ozomatli, ce calli, ce quauhtli. [359]