[45-*] Duran, Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, Tom. ii, p. 240. Sahagun adds that the octli was poured on the hearth at four separate points, doubtless the four cardinal points. Historia de Nueva España, Lib. i, cap. 18. De la Serna describes the same ceremony as current in his day, Manual de Ministros, p. 35. The invocation ran:—“Shining Rose, light-giving Rose, receive and rejoice my heart before the God.”
[45-†] A copy of these strange “Books of Chilan Balam” is in my possession. I have described them in my Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia, 1890).
[45-‡] See his remarks on “Apperception der Menschenzeugung als Feuerbereitung,” in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, Bd. vi, s. 113, seq.
[46-*] Sahagun, Historia de Nueva España, Lib. i, cap. 13. The Nahuatl text is more definite than the Spanish translation.
[46-†] See my Myths of the New World, p. 154, seq.
[46-‡] In the Nahuatl language the word xihuitl (xiuitl) has four meanings: a plant, a turquoise, a year and a comet.
[46-§] J. B. Carriedo, Estudios Historicos del Estado Oaxaqueño, Tom. i, p. 82, etc.
[47-*] Alva, Confessionario en Lengua Mexicana, fol. 9.
[47-†] Carriedo, Estudios Historicos, pp. 6, 7.
[47-‡] In the Revue d’ Ethnographie, Tom. iii, p. 313. Some very fine objects of this class are described by E. G. Squier, in his “Observations on the Chalchihuitl,” in the Annals of the Lyceum of Natural History, Vol. i (New York, 1869).