In order to comprehend this, however, it is first necessary to study carefully the myths relating to its origin. Torquemada (lib. VI, chap. 41) cites the authority of Friar Andreas de Olmos for the following native account of the creation of man, which was differently recounted to him in each province. He states that the majority of the natives, however, agreed that “there was in heaven a god named ‘Shining Star’ (Citlal-Tonac) and a goddess named ‘She of the starry skirt’ (Citlal-Cue), who gave birth to a flint knife (Tecpatl). Their other children, startled at this, cast the flint down from the sky. It fell to earth at the place named ‘Seven caves’ and ‘produced 1,600 gods and goddesses,’ ” a figure of speech which evidently expressed the idea that, in coming in forcible contact with the soil the flint gave forth sparks innumerable which conveyed vitality to numberless beings. It is evidently the same idea of “life sparks” being called into existence by the union of heaven and earth which underlies the Texcocan version of the creation of man recorded as follows by Torquemada (_op. et loc. cit._). “The sun ... shot an arrow towards the land of Acolma near the boundary of Texcoco. This made a hole in the ground whence issued the first man....” [Illustration.] Figure 25. The illustrated version of the above myths, given in the Vatican Codex I, designates the celestial progenitor of human life as Quetzalcoatl, also named Tonaca-Tecuhtli=the lord of our subsistence, Chicome-xochitl=“Seven roses or flowers” and Citlalla-Tonalla=“The Milky Way,” literally, The shining stars. The dual divinity is figured (fig. 25, no. 4) as two persons with the shaft of an arrow over each of their heads and with the symbol Tecpatl=flint, between them as the issue of their union. In the Borgian Codex (fig. 25, no. 1), a barbed arrowpoint, instead of the Tecpatl, figures between the celestial parents. Their union is symbolized by a covering, the shape of which, in further representations (fig. 25, nos. 3 and 5) in the same MS., offers resemblance to the tau-shaped windows which are such a common feature in Maya and also in Pueblo architecture (fig. 25, no. 2_b_). The preceding data, which could be amplified, seem to show that the natives associated the tau-shape not merely with the idea of the Male and Female principles, but also with the Above and the Below, or Heaven (air and water) and Earth (earth and fire). I shall have occasion, further on, to refer again to the symbolism of the native tau. The above illustrations, however, definitely prove that the flint knife and the arrow (with a flint point, presumably), were indiscriminately designated as the medium by means of which the spark of life was created and imparted to earth-born beings.