Weapons, etc.—He carries the atlatl, or spear-thrower, and net-bag of the wild hunting tribes, bow and arrows, sometimes tipped with down, also a bag or pouch, in which he carries his arrowheads of obsidian. Like Mixcoatl he is sometimes clothed in the device of the two-headed deer, in which he went to war.
MYTHS
Mixcoatl has already been alluded to in the précis of the early chapters of the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas given in the chapter on Cosmogony, where the circumstances of his birth are touched upon. In chapter x of the same work he is identified with Amimitl, another Chichimec deity, seemingly without reason. The Anales de Quauhtitlan speaks of him as one of the three who “sought [[314]]the hearth-stone,” and as one of the priests of the Fire-god. As Iztac Mixcoatl, according to Motolinia,[3] he dwelt with his wife, Ilancuêyê, in Chicomoztoc, the “Land of the Seven Caves,” the primeval land of the tribes, and from them sprang the forefathers of the natives. By a second wife, Chimamatl, he begot the god Quetzalcoatl. In the Tlaxcaltec legend reproduced in the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas,[4] mention is made of a two-headed deer which fell from heaven and was honoured as a god by the people of Cuitlauac, and it is told how, clothed in its form or disguise, Camaxtli or Mixcoatl subdued the surrounding tribes.
Iztac Mixcoatl was, indeed, the Chichimec Adam, the father of the tribe. A hymn to the gods of the hunt, of whom Mixcoatl was the chief, is as follows:
Song of the Cloud-serpents
I
Out of the seven Caverns he sprung (was born).
II
Out of the land of the prickly plant he sprung.