“I am Quilaztli, your sister and of your tribe ... you know this and yet you think that the dispute or difference you have with me is like an ordinary one, such as you might wage with any ordinary base woman, who possessed little spirit or courage. If you indulge in this thought you are deceiving yourselves, for I am valiant and manly and my titles will oblige you to acknowledge this. For besides the ordinary name of Quilaztli, by which you know me, I also possess four titles, by which I know myself: the first of these is Cihuacoatl=the Woman-serpent (or twin); the second is Quauh-Cihuatl=the Eagle-woman; the third is Yao-Cihuatl=the Woman-warrior and the fourth is Tzitzimi-Cihuatl, the Woman of the Underworld. From the properties [pg 061] or qualities conveyed by these titles you can appreciate who I am; what power I yield and what harm I can do you and if you want to test the truth of this, here is my challenge!”
“The two brave captains, undaunted by the arrogant words by which she attempted to terrify them, responded: 'If you are as valiant as you describe yourself to be, we are not less so; but you are a woman and it is not meet that it should be said of us that we took up arms against women;' and without speaking further they left her, much affronted that a woman should challenge and defy them. And they kept silence about this occurrence so that their people should not know of it.” Señor Alfredo Chavero (appendix, p. 125, to Duran's Historia, Mexico, 1880), commenting upon this passage, says: “It is impossible to doubt that this tradition refers to an important event in the history of the Aztec tribe.... I think it contains the record of a religious struggle.”
The full significance of the narrative will become clear, I think, when the following points are dwelt upon. One thing is certain: here is a historical personage, a woman, who was termed the sister of Huitzilopochtli, who evidently exerted a high authority and whose titles were actually the names of the highest female divinity. Sahagun (book vi, chap. 37) states that Quilaztli, a goddess, the same as Cihuacoatl, was the mother of all and was also named Tonant-zin=“our mother.” What is more significant still is that, in all historical records antedating the Conquest, a man bearing the feminine title of Cihuacoatl=serpent woman, is distinctly and repeatedly mentioned as the coadjutor of the Mexican ruler. Mr. Ad. Bandelier, in his careful study “On the social organization and mode of government of the Ancient Mexicans” (Twelfth Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of Am. Arch, and Ethn., Cambridge, 1879) to which I refer the reader, discusses the relative positions of Montezuma and the Cihuacoatl and states: “there is no doubt about their equality of rank though their duties were somewhat different” (p. 665). This equality is illustrated by the records that both rulers shared the same privileges regarding dress. Thus they alone wore sandals and the Cihuacoatl is termed “the second or double of the king, his coadjutor” (Duran, chap. xxxii, p. 255 and Tezozomoc, chap. xl, p. 66). The latter author, however, gives the full “sacred title” as Tlil-Potonqui Cihuacoatl, literally, “the black-powdered woman-serpent” and we thus [pg 062] learn that, whilst Montezuma's garments were habitually blue like Huitzilopochtli, his coadjutor, like Tezcatlipoca, was associated with black. It is well known that some of the Mexican priests always smeared their bodies with black, which was therefore their special mark.
To my idea the foregoing data, with circumstantial evidence too diffuse to be conveniently produced, clearly indicate that at one time, in the early history of the Aztec race, it had been governed jointly by a male and a female ruler on a footing of perfect equality, the one being the living representative of the Above or masculine elements and the other personifying the Below or feminine elements. The fact that Cihuacoatl is named “the sister” of Huitzilopochtli shows that the female ruler was not necessarily his wife, although she was his coadjutor in her own right. Both rulers were respectively served by four persons presumably of their respective sex. Besides these Duran (chap. 3) records that “there were also other seven teotls=lords, who were much reverenced on account of the seven caves out of which the seven tribes had come.”
We thus perceive that at one time the chief authority was vested in a man and a woman, his sister, who enjoyed a perfect equality. Four persons administered the government of each ruler and each of the seven tribes had “its honoured representative.” For how long this organization had existed it is impossible to tell. Dissension arose and division supervened, but to the time of the Conquest the identical form of government was in force with the remarkable difference that the title and office of the Cihuacoatl, originally held by a woman, were held by a man, whom I do not hesitate to identify as one of the two “supreme pontiffs,” whose emblem of office was the flint knife, the offspring of Cihuacoatl, the earth-mother.
Historical evidence shows that this alteration had not been made without bloodshed and renewed difficulties. Thus it is related that, long after the Mexicans had separated from the sister of Huitzilopochtli and her adherents, they were induced to “ask the daughter of the ruler of Culhuacan to become the Queen of the Mexicans and mother of their god. She conformed with their request but was subsequently killed by her subjects, who flayed her body and dressed a youth in her skin taken from well-known authentic native sources, are attractively rendered in the “Newe Welt und Amerikanische Historien” (Johann Ludwig Gottfriedt. Frankfurt-a.-M., 1613, pp. 54 and 55).
Again, after the Mexicans had been settled at Tenochtitlan for some time, they desired to make an alliance with the King of Culhuacan and therefore “chose to nominate, as their ruler, Acamapichtli, who was the son of a Mexican chieftain by a daughter of the Culhuacan ruler” and evidently lived with the latter. For it is related that, on giving his consent, the king of Culhuacan stated that if only a woman (of his family) had been nominated he would have refused (to trust her to the Mexicans). The farewell words he addressed to Acamapichtli are worthy of quotation: “Go my son, serve thy god, be his representative. Rule the creatures of the god by whom we live; the god of day, of the night and of the winds. Go and be the lord of the water and land owned by the Mexicans.”
As it is subsequently stated that Acamapichtli and his queen were received at Tenochtitlan with great honors, it would seem as though the Mexicans who, from some deeply-rooted religious idea, considered it essential to have a female ruler of the line of the king of Culhuacan, obtained their desire only by accepting a male member of her family as a protection and safeguard for her sacred person. It may be that for the reasons of safety and preservation the female ruler, who was the living representative of the Cihuacoatl, gradually retired into absolute seclusion whilst a man of her kin assumed, in public, her title and prerogatives.
Unless it is assumed that this was the case, it seems impossible to explain why Acamapichtli is designated in the Codex Mendoza (Kingsborough, vol. i, pl. ii) as having begun to rule in the year I Tecpatl or flint (approximately corresponding to A.D. 1364) with the title of “Woman-serpent”=Cihuacoatl. From this date the title seems always to have been borne by a man. When human sacrifices had become a prominent feature of the native cult and it became a duty of the Cihuacoatl to perform the bloody rite, it is obvious that it became impossible for a woman to fill the position.
We obtain, however, glimpses of the shadowy form of an invisible and venerable female ruler who is at the head of the “House of Women,” watches over the welfare of the women of the tribe and officiates as a priestess, with her assistants, at births, baptisms and marriages. In order to account for the obscurity which surrounds [pg 064] her, it should be noticed that the mere fact that the ideas of darkness and seclusion became indelibly associated with the female sex, would naturally and inevitably cause women to be housed up, veiled and condemned to comparative inaction and immobility. A primitive stage in the growth of the above idea is shown in the case of the Huaxtecas, the women of which tribe wore abundant covering whilst the men, on religious principle, wore none. A careful study of the conditions surrounding the Cihuacoatl or high priest shows that he also conformed to the exigencies of his position when he acted as the representative of the hidden forces of Nature, of the female principle. He and the entire priesthood smeared their bodies with black, cultivated long hair, and wore, during the performance of certain religious ceremonies, a wide and long garment reaching to the ground. It is noticeable that the designs on the garments of the priests, in the B. N. MS., are invariably executed in red and yellow, the symbolical colors of the north and west, combined with black the symbol of the union of both, the Below. In this connection it is noteworthy that in Mexican pictography the faces of women are usually painted yellow—the color of the West=the female region. The association of darkness, concealment and secrecy, with the female principle, is exemplified by the fact that a building in the enclosure of the Great Temple of Mexico, named the “house of darkness,” was dedicated to the earth-mother=Cihuacoatl (Sahagun, appendix to book II). Other temples of hers are described as being cave-like, underground, dark, with a single low entrance, the door of which was sometimes sculptured in the form of the great open jaws of a serpent. Only priests were allowed to penetrate into these mysterious chambers where sacred and secret rites were performed and a sacred fire was also kept burning in an adjoining chamber. Evidence, which I shall produce further on, establishes that the high-priest Cihuacoatl dwelt, at times, in a house named “place of darkness” and annually sacrificed a human victim in honor of the lord of the underworld, in an edifice called “the navel of the earth.”