The Mythology of All Races, Vol. 11: Latin-American

by Hartley Burr Alexander

"Thou night-time drinker, why dost thou delay?
Put on thy disguise—thy golden garment, put it on!
"My Lord, let thine emerald waters come descending!
Now is the old tree changed to green plumage—
The Fire-Snake is transformed into the Quetzal!
"It may be that I am to die, I, the young maize-plant;
Like an emerald is my heart; gold would I see it be;
I shall be happy when first it is ripe—the war-chief born!
"My Lord, when there is abundance in the maize-fields,
I shall look to thy mountains, verily thy worshipper;
I shall be happy when first it is ripe—the war-chief born!"

PLATE X.

Stone mask of Xipe Totec. The face is represented as covered by the skin of a sacrificed victim, flaying being a rite with which this god was honored. The reverse of the mask bears an image of the god in relief. The original is in the British Museum.

Less unattractive is the group of deities of flowers and dancing, games and feasting—Xochipilli ("Flower Lord"), Macuilxochitl ("Five Blossoms"), and Ixtlilton ("Little Black-Face"). Xochipilli is in part a divinity of the young maize, probably as pollinating, and is sometimes viewed as a son of Cinteotl. As is natural, he and his brothers are occasionally associated with the pulque-gods, the Centzontotochtin, of whom there were a great number—among them Patecatl, lord and discoverer of the ocpatli (the peyote) from which liquor is made, Texcatzoncatl ("Straw Mirror"), Colhuatzincatl ("the Winged"), and Ometochtli ("Two Rabbit")—deities who were supposed to possess their worshippers and to be the real agents of the drunken man's mischief. The more especial associate of the flower-gods, however, is Xochiquetzal ("Flower Feather"), who is said to have been originally the spouse of Tlaloc, but to have been carried away by Tezcatlipoca and to have been established by him as the goddess of love. Her throne is described as being above the ninth heaven, and there is reason to think that in this rôle she is identical with Tonacaciuatl, the consort of the creator-god, Tonacatecutli.[40] Her home was in Xochitlicacan ("Place of Flowers") in Itzeecayan ("Place of Cool Winds"), or in Tamoanchan, the Paradise of the West—the region whence came the Ciuateteo, the ghostly women who at certain seasons swooped down in eagles' form, striking children with epilepsy and inspiring men with lust. Xochiquetzal was, indeed, the patroness of the unmarried women who lived with the young bachelor warriors and marched to war with them, and who sometimes, at the goddess's festival, immolated themselves upon her altars. In a more pleasing aspect she was the deity of weaving and spinning and of making all beautiful and artistic fabrics, and she is portrayed in bright and many-coloured raiment, not forgetting the butterfly at her lips, emblem of life and of the seeker after sweets. In a hymn[41] she is named along with her lover, Piltzintecutli ("Lord of Princes"), who is presumed to be the same as Xochipilli:

"Out of the land of water and mist, I come, Xochiquetzal—
Out of the land where the Sun enters his house, out of Tamoanchan.
"Weepeth the pious Piltzintecutli;
He seeketh Xochiquetzal.
Dark it is whither I must go."

Seler suggests that this lamentation is perchance the expression of a Proserpina myth—of the carrying off into the underworld of the bright goddess of flowers and of the quest for her by her disconsolate lover.

Of far darker hue is the goddess whom Sahagun[42] calls "another Venus," Tlazolteotl ("Goddess of Uncleanliness"), the deity in particular of lust and sexual sin. To her priests confession was made of carnal sins and drunkenness, and by them penance was inflicted, including as a feature piercing the tongue with a maguey thorn and the insertion therein of straws and osier twigs. Sahagun remarks that the Indians awaited old age before confessing carnal sins, "a thing easy to comprehend, since, although they had committed their faults during youth, they would not confess before an advanced age in order not to find themselves obliged to cease from disorderly conduct before age came upon them; this, because of their belief that one who fell into a sin already once confessed could receive no absolution. From all of which," he continues, "it is natural to reach the conclusion that the Indians of New Spain believed themselves obliged to confess once in their lifetime, and that in lumine naturali, with no knowledge of the things of the faith." One of the titles of Tlazolteotl is "Heart of the Earth," and since she is represented in the same attire as the great mother of the gods, it is presumed that she is a special form of the Earth Mother, Teteoinnan, with emphasis upon her character as deity of fertility. Sometimes she is spoken of as Ixcuiname ("the Four-faced") and is regarded plurally as a group of four sisters who, according to Sahagun, represent four ages of woman's maturity. In the Annals of Quauhtitlan it is related that the Ixcuiname came to Tollan from Huasteca. "And in the place called Where-the-Huaxtec-weep they summoned their captives, whom they had taken in Huaxteca, and explained to them what the business was, telling them that, 'We go now to Tollan, we want to couple the Earth with you, we want to hold a feast with you: for till now no battle offerings have been made with men. We want to make a beginning of it, and shoot you to death with arrows.'" In Aztec paintings of the arrow sacrifice the victim is shown suspended from a ladder-like scaffold, whence the blood from the arrow wounds drips to earth. This blood was the emblem of the fertilizing seed, dropped into the womb of the goddess; and it is at least worthy of remark that the form of the Skidi Pawnee fertility sacrifice, in honour of the Morning Star, was identical, scaffold and all, with that in vogue in Mexico.

VI. THE POWERS OF DEATH

Earth, the Great Mother, is a giver of life, but Earth, the cavernous, is Lord of Death. The Mexicans are second to no people in the grimness of their representations of this power. As Tepeyollotl ("Heart of the Mountain"), earth's cavern, it is the spotted jaguar monster which leaps up out of the west to seize the declining sun, and its roars may be heard in the echoing hills. As Tlaltecutli ("Lord of the Earth") it is the hideous Toad with Gaping Jaws, which must be nourished with the blood of sacrificed men, precisely as the Sun above must be nurtured; for the Mexican idea of warfare seems to have been that it must be waged to keep perpetual the ascending vapours and the descending flow from the hearts of sacrificed victims, that Tonatiuh and Tlaltecutli might gain sustenance in heaven and in earth.[43]