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-xolo[2] 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.

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IXTLILTON = “THE LITTLE BLACK FACE”

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ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

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.