All this notwithstanding, in later times it was as the goddess of sensuality and lustfulness that Tlazolteotl made her strongest appeal to the Mexican imagination. We have already seen how this transition took place and how this attribute had its inception. In many climes the figure of the fruitful and abundant Earth-goddess has its bestial, revolting, and highly salacious side, and the Mexican earth-deity was no exception to the almost general rule. In several pictures her symbol is shown as a man devouring excrement (sin). She was the patroness of prostitutes, and by a transition, the ethical character of which seems to me obscure, she finally became the great pardoner of sexual misdeeds. Probably because they forfeited their lives in the act of bringing forth, she came to be regarded as the chieftainess of those women who, dying in childbed, went to inhabit the Ciutlampa, the house of the women in the west. These female spirits were regarded by the Mexicans as the equal of warriors who had died heroically in battle, and issued daily from their paradise to accompany the sun in his afternoon course. It is typical of these Ciuateteô, or deified women, that in their jealousy of living people and their offspring, they exerted a noxious influence upon mortals, especially upon children, at certain seasons, and as the interpreter of Codex Telleriano-Remensis states, they are identified with European witches, flying through the air and meeting at cross-roads. Now the broom is the symbol of the European witch, as it is of Tlazolteotl, and in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (sheet 17) we have a picture of Tlazolteotl as representative of the Ciuateteô, naked and riding upon a broomstick. In Codex Borgia (sheet 12) and Codex Vaticanus B (sheet 30) beside her is figured a house with an owl standing at the door, while in front hangs a string of dried medicinal herbs, the whole representing the dwelling of a sorceress or medicine-witch, for Tlazolteotl was also patroness of the medical women, who danced at her festival, and Sahagun (bk. i, c. viii) expressly states that she was venerated by the “physicians,” that is, the medicine-men and wizards. Probably by reason of her fecundity Tlazolteotl was also regarded as a divinity who presided over human birth. She is frequently portrayed as the great parturient and represents the womb [185] (Vaticanus B, sheet 51). But she does not breathe the spirit into the newly-born child or transport it from the upper regions as does Quetzalcoatl, her office being the lower one of presiding over the child-bed, a task which she shares with other Mexican deities of vegetation and production.