CHALCHIHUITLICUE. (From the Sahagun MS.) UIXTOCIUATL. (From the Sahagun MS.)

PRIESTHOOD

Veytia[34] states that King Nauhyotl instituted a college of priests expressly for the service of this goddess. These were celibate and wore long and ample robes of a sombre colour. They went bare-footed in the sanctuary, fasted frequently, and were given to penitence and contemplation. Their high-priest was called Achcauhtli,[35] and the entire cult was modelled on that of Quetzalcoatl. This did not prohibit them, however, from the sacrifice of human beings.

NATURE AND STATUS

Chalchihuitlicue was the female counterpart of Tlaloc, and the goddess of water and moisture. Sahagun (bk. i, c. ii) says of her: “She was supposed to have her existence in the sea, the rivers and lakes, and had power to take the lives of those who ventured upon them, and to raise tempests.” [[261]]

The name means “She whose raiment consists of green gems,” or “She of the jewelled robe,” and is allegorical of the brilliant surface of flowing rather than stagnant water. She is, says Seler, “an appropriate representative of the sign ‘Snake.’ For the moving, flowing water has everywhere and at all times been likened to the serpent. In cultural centres which are dedicated to the Water-goddess—the Pilon de Azucar, for instance, which has been explored by Hermann Strebel—the ground swarms as well with images of snakes as of frogs.”[36]

In Codex Borgia she is seen with a bunch of dried herbs above her, evidently indicating that she had a medicinal side to her character. Certain pictures of her—that, for instance, in the Aubin tonalamatl already described—seem to point to her as the goddess of change in human affairs, of speedy ruin, and this conception was, no doubt, brought about by the ever-changing character of the element she symbolized. She is, indeed, the goddess of water in its mutable and kaleidoscopic form.

There is, however, every reason to believe that she had a still more profound significance in Mexican theology, and this is made clear if we examine the prayer to her preserved by Sahagun in which she seems to represent the purifying and cleansing influence of water as an agency to wipe away the original sin with which it was thought man came into the world.

That the goddess had also a lunar significance is plain from the allusion to her as the mother of the Centzon Mimixcoa, or stars of the Northern Hemisphere, and the great importance attached to the prayers offered up to her in connection with child-bearing. As has been hinted, she had also a medicinal aspect. The child sacrificed to her at the etzalqualiztli festival was slain at the hill known as Yauhqueme (“covered with mugwort”), and, as instanced in the case of Tlaloc, this plant is the especial medicine-herb of the Greek Artemis. In Codex Borgia, indeed, she is associated with a herb which may possibly be the mugwort or wormwood, and [[262]]Seler thinks she is to be regarded as the giver of “healing draughts of physic.”

Atlaua. (See p. 263.) Napatecutli. (See p. 264.) Opochtli. (See p. 266.)