“The Ciuapipiltin, the noble women, were those who had died in childbed. They were supposed to wander through the air, descending when they wished to the earth to afflict children with paralysis and other maladies. They haunted cross-roads to practise their maleficent deeds, and they had temples built at these places, where bread offerings in the shape of butterflies were made to them, also the thunder-stones which fall from the sky. Their faces were white, and their arms, hands, and legs were coloured with a white powder, ticitl (chalk). Their ears were gilded and their hair done in the manner of the great ladies. Their clothes were striped with black, their skirts barred in different colours, and their sandals were white.” He further relates (bk. vi, c. xxix) that, when a woman who had died in her first childbed was buried in the temple-court of the Ciuateteô, her husband and his friends watched the body all night in case young braves or magicians should seek to obtain the hair or fingers as protective talismans.
NATURE AND STATUS
That the witches’ sabbath was quite as famous or infamous an institution in ancient Mexico as in mediæval Europe is testified to by the numerous accounts of the missionary chroniclers, which are further corroborated by the native manuscripts. But in the days prior to the coming of the Spaniards, it was thought of as being celebrated by the dead rather than the living. The Ciuateteô, or haunting mothers, were those women who had died in their first child-bed, and who, out of envy for their more fortunate sisters and their offspring, continued to haunt the world at certain fixed [[356]]periods, wreaking their spite upon all who were so unlucky as to cross their path. They are represented in the ancient paintings as dressed in the garments and insignia of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the witch par excellence, with a fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, a golden crescent-shaped nasal ornament, empty eye-sockets, and the heron-feather headdress of the warrior caste, for the woman who died in child-bed was regarded as equally heroic with the man who perished in battle. The upper parts of their bodies were nude, and round the hips they wore a skirt on which cross-bones were painted. They carried the witch’s broom of malinalli grass, a symbol of death, and they are sometimes associated with the snake, screech-owl, and other animals of ill-omen. The face was thickly powdered with white chalk, and the region of the mouth, in some cases, decorated with the figure of a butterfly. These furies were supposed to dwell in the region of the west, and as some compensation for their early detachment from the earth-life, were permitted to accompany the sun in his course from noon to sunset, just as the dead warriors did from sunrise to noon. At night they left their occidental abode, the Ciutlampa, or “Place of Women,” and revisited the glimpses of the moon in search of the feminine gear they had left behind them—the spindles, work-baskets, and other articles used by Mexican women. The Ciuateteô were especially potent for evil in the third quarter of the astrological year, and those who were so luckless as to meet them during that season became crippled or epileptic. The fingers and hands of women who had died in bringing forth were believed by magicians, soldiers, and thieves to have the property of crippling and paralysing their enemies or those who sought to hinder their nefarious calling, precisely as Irish burglars formerly believed that the hand of a corpse grasping a candle, which they called “the hand of glory,” could ensure sound sleep in the inmates of any house they might enter.
Says Sahagun: “It was said that they vented their wrath on people and bewitched them. When anyone is possessed by the demons, with a wry mouth and disturbed eyes, with [[357]]clenched hands and inturned feet, wringing his hands and foaming at the mouth, they say that he has linked himself to a demon; the Ciuateteô, housed by the crossways, have taken his form.”
From this and other passages we may be justified in thinking that these dead women were also regarded as succubi, haunters of men, compelling them to dreadful amours, and that they were credited with the evil eye is evident from the statement that their glances caused helpless terror and brought convulsions upon children, and that their jealousy of the handsome was proverbial.
The divine patroness of these witches (for “witches” they are called by the old friar who interprets the Codex Telleriano-Remensis), who flew through the air upon their broomsticks and met at cross-roads, was Tlazolteotl, a divinity who, like all deities of growth, possessed a plutonic significance. The broom is her especial symbol, and in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (sheet 17) we have a picture of her which represents her as the traditional witch, naked, wearing a peaked hat, and mounted upon a broomstick. In other places she is seen standing beside a house accompanied by an owl, the whole representing the witch’s dwelling, with medicinal herbs drying beneath the eaves. Thus the evidence that the haunting mothers and their patroness present an exact parallel with the witches of Europe seems complete, and should provide those who regard witchcraft as a thing essentially European with considerable food for thought. The sorcery cult of the Mexican Nagualists of post-Columbian times was also permeated with practices similar to those of European witchcraft, and we read of its adherents smearing themselves with ointment to bring about levitation, flying through the air, and engaging in wild and lascivious dances, precisely as did the adherents of Vaulderie, or the worshippers of the Italian Aradia.
There are not wanting signs that living women of evil reputation desired to associate themselves with the Ciuateteô. Says the interpreter of Codex Vaticanus A: “The first of the fourteen day-signs, the house, they considered unfortunate, [[358]]because they said that demons came through the air on that sign in the figures of women, such as we designate witches, who usually went to the highways, where they met in the form of a cross, and to solitary places, and that when any bad woman wished to absolve herself of her sins, she went alone by night to these places, and took off her garments and sacrificed there with her tongue (that is, drew blood from her tongue), and left the clothes which she had carried and returned naked as the sign of the confession of her sins.”
The temples or shrines of the Ciuateteô were situated at cross-roads, the centres of ill-omen throughout the world. That they had a connection with the lightning is shown by the fact that cakes in the shape of butterflies and “thunder-stones” were offered them. But they were also connected with baneful astral or astrological influences, and are several times alluded to in the Interpretative Codices in this connection. The seasons at which they were most potent for evil were those connected with the western department of the tonalamatl, the five days which compose the first column of the third quarter disposed in columns of five members, ce mazatl, ce quiauitl, ce ozomatli, ce calli, ce quauhtli. [[359]]
[1] Bradford, American Antiquities, p. 333; Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, vol. i, p. 271; Von Tschudi, Beiträge, p. 29. [↑]