NATURE AND STATUS

This god appears to have been partly of a convivial nature and presided over banquets and festivities generally. On the occasion of a public or private rejoicing he was borne thither by certain priests. If the banquet was suitable he praised the host, but otherwise rebuked him, and it is said that, if irritated in any way, he would turn the viands into hair (as did certain of the fairies of Brittany, when annoyed or insulted). The night before a festival a cake like a large bone was made, and this, it was feigned, was a bone of the deity himself. This cake was eaten and octli was drunk, after which spines of the maguey were thrust into the stomach of the idol. There can be little doubt that, as Sahagun states,[5] Omacatl was solely and simply a god of festivities.

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CIUATETEÔ = GODDESSES
CIUAPIPILTIN = PRINCESSES

ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

Codex Borgia.—Sheets 47–48: Five figures here represent the Ciuateteô and are dressed in the style of Tlazolteotl, with the fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, and the golden nasal crescent worn by that goddess and the octli-gods. In each case the eye has been gouged out and hangs out of the socket, as with Xolotl. They wear on their heads a feather ornament like the heron-feather plume of the warrior caste, but consisting of five white feathers or strips of paper above a bunch of downy feathers. At the nape of the neck the figures wear a black vessel as their device, in which lies a bunch of malinalli grass. The upper part of the body is [[354]]naked, and round the hips is wrapped a skirt showing cross-bones on its surface and a border painted in the manner of the variegated coral snake. The resemblance between all five figures is close. Only the face-, arm-, and leg-painting is different. In the case of the first the colour is white striped with red, in the second blue, in the third yellow, in the fourth red, and in the fifth black. All hold in one hand a broom of malinalli grass, and in the other a black obsidian sacrificial knife, a bone dagger, and an agave-leaf spike, both furnished with a flower symbolic of blood. They inhale the smoke which ascends from a black incense or fire-vessel standing on the ground before them. A rubber ball lies in the vessel of the first figure; with the second the vessel is replaced by a cross-way, and the ascending smoke by a centipede issuing from the mouth of the goddess. With the third a skeleton is seated in the dish, holding a heart in one hand and a sacrificial knife in the other. The ascending smoke is replaced by two streams of blood passing into the mouth of a skeleton, one of which comes from the mouth of the figure, the other from her right breast. With the fourth figure are represented a bunch of malinalli grass and a variegated snake. Nothing here enters the mouth of the Ciuateteô, but from it issues a similar snake, and another hangs on each of her arms. Before the last figure, in the dish is perched a screech-owl, and a stream of blood passes from the mouth of the figure to that of the owl.

Codex Vaticanus B.—Sheets 77–79: Five figures are here also depicted which bear a resemblance to Tlazolteotl, but are without the golden nasal crescent. With the last four the same curling locks of hair are seen as in the case of the Codex Borgia figures, but the first figure is pictured with the hair bristling up on one side, as worn by the warrior caste. The eye too is hanging out, and the headdresses and nape-vessels resemble those in Codex Borgia. In the majority of cases the skirt is white with two diagonal red stripes crossing each other. Only with the first figure is it painted red with white cross-bones. The last figure has a skirt made of strips of malinalli grass fastened by a girdle made of [[355]]a skeletal spinal column, on which is set a dead man’s skull as back-mirror. All five wear the men’s loin-cloth besides the skirt. They carry the symbols of sacrifice and mortification as in the Codex Borgia, and similar incense-vessels stand before them.

MYTHS

Sahagun says of the Ciuateteô: