Face-paint.—Blue and yellow horizontal stripes, the yellow known as piloechinolli (“face-painting of children”) made of children’s excrement, in allusion, perhaps, to his character of a young or new-born god. He occasionally wears the stellar mask,[2] like Mixcoatl and Camaxtli.
Body-paint.—Blue.
Dress.—Usually the humming-bird mantle, pictographic of his name. His head is surmounted by a panache of feathers. On his breast is a white ring made from a mussel-shell, like those of Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipocâ, and Paynal, which is called eteocuitlaanauauh (“his golden ring”) or eltezcatl (“his breast mirror”). Perhaps the best representation of him is in Codex Borbonicus (sheet 34). [[67]]
Weapons.—Shield (teueuelli), made of reeds, with eagle’s down adhering to it in five places in the form of a quincunx. He carries spears tipped with tufts of down instead of stone points (tlauacomalli), the weapons of those doomed to a gladiatorial death, the fire-snake xiuhcoatl as an atlatl, or spear-thrower, and the bow, which he was supposed to have invented or introduced into Mexico. The flag held by him on some occasions represents the panquetzaliztli festival in Codices Telleriano-Remensis and Vaticanus A.
COYOLXAUHQUI, SISTER OF UITZILOPOCHTLI.
(See p. 324.)
Variations.—He is frequently to be observed wearing the insignia of the stellar gods of war and hunting (Mixcoatl, Camaxtli).
According to Seler (Commentary on the Codex Vaticanus B, p. 91), Uitzilopochtli figures in that MS. as showing “in a general way the devices and the dress-badges of the fire-god,” differing, however, in colour and painting. When found along with Tezcatlipocâ as Ruler of the Southern Heaven, in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (sheet 25), he is seated on a jaguar-skin seat, enveloped in a long robe of a light blue colour, with balls of downy feathers. He wears the aztaxelli or forked heron-feather ornament on his head and has the yellow face-paint alluded to above. In the Sahagun MS. (Bib. del Palacio) he is represented as wearing on his back the “dragon’s head” alluded to in the text. In the Duran MS. (2 o, plate 2 a), drawn by a European hand, the humming-bird headdress forms a helmet-mask, and in the Codex Ramirez (Juan de Tobar), in which the figure is Europeanized almost out of recognition, the same is the case, but the shield-marking is incorrect, consisting as it does of seven tufts of down instead of five.
Clavigero (tom. ii, pp. 17–19) says of Uitzilopochtli’s insignia: “Upon his head he carried a beautiful crest, shaped like the beak of a bird, upon his neck a collar shaped like ten figures of the human heart. His statue was of an enormous size, in the posture of a man seated on a blue-coloured bench, from the four corners of which issued four snakes. His forehead was blue, but his face was covered with a golden mask, while another of the same kind covered [[68]]the back of his head. In his hand he carried a large blue, twisted club, in his left a shield in which appeared five balls of feathers disposed in the form of a cross, and from the upper part of the shield rose a golden flag with four arrows, which the Mexicans believed to have been sent to them from heaven. His body was girt with a large golden snake, and adorned with lesser figures of animals made of gold and precious stones, which ornaments and insignia had each their peculiar meaning.”