FORMS OF TLAZOLTEOTL.
ASPECT AND INSIGNIA
Codex Borgia.—Sheet 74: Here Tlazolteotl is depicted as naked, and accompanied by a snake. A patch of rubber appears near the mouth, and her head is bound by a fillet of unspun cotton. Behind the neck a feather ornament is seen, made of the blue plumage of the quail, and she also wears the golden nasal Huaxtec ornament usually seen in [[157]]connection with the octli-gods. In the Codex Vaticanus B her naked body is painted white, with yellow longitudinal stripes, and she has the bifurcated nose-ornament of Xipe. Significantly, perhaps, the shape of her eye recalls that of the god of flaying, whose eye is usually a mere slit in the flayed human skin which he wears, and through the mask of which he is supposed to be looking. She wears the cotton fillet and ear-plug typical of her.
Sahagun MS.—In this place she has a disk of liquid rubber on the face, with which substance her mouth is also painted, an elaborate cotton headdress, crowned with feathers, a tunic of sac shape with a fringe divided into compartments, a skirt with bands joined by diagonal lines, and she holds in her right hand the broom symbolic of her feast, and in her left a shield decorated with four concentric circles.
General.—In the tonalamatl of the Aubin-Goupil collection, wherever she is depicted as seventh of the nine lords of the night, her face is white, its upper portion being surrounded by a yellow band. In the Codex Borbonicus she is occasionally painted all yellow or all white, and this yellow colour symbolizes that of the ripe maize ear. In the song about her given by Sahagun, we observe that she is alluded to as “the yellow blossom” and the “white blossom,” otherwise the yellow or white maize—the maize at different stages of its growth.
(From Codex Borgia, sheet 55.)
As Teteô innan. (From Sahagun MS.)
FORMS OF TLAZOLTEOTL.