The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus A also labours under a misapprehension regarding Itzpapalotl’s sex. He states: “Yxpapalotl signifies a knife of butterflies. He was one of those gods who, as they affirm, was expelled from heaven; and on this account they paint him surrounded with knives and wings of butterflies. They represent him with the feet of an eagle, because they say that he occasionally appears to them, and they only see the feet of an eagle. They further add that, being in a garden of great delight, he pulled some roses, but that suddenly the tree broke and blood streamed from it; and that in consequence of this they were deprived of that place of enjoyment and were cast into this world because Tonacatecutli and his wife became incensed, and accordingly they came some of them to the earth, and others went to hell. He presided over these thirteen signs; the first of which the house (calli) they considered unfortunate, because they said that demons came through the air on that sign in the figure of women such as we call witches, who usually went to the highways, where they met in the form of a cross.” In the song to Tlazolteotl, the fourth of the Sahagun series, we find the following strophes relating to Itzpapalotl: The stone-knife butterfly Who hovers over the cactus. Her food is on the Nine Plains, She was nurtured on the hearts of deer, Our mother, the Earth-goddess. The reference to the Nine Plains alludes to the circumstance that Itzpapalotl is a goddess of the Chichimec, or hunting people. The two first lines of this song are translated by Seler as follows: “O, she has become a goddess of the melon cactus, Our mother Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly.” The inference in these lines seems to be that whereas Itzpapalotl was formerly the goddess of a hunting tribe who sacrificed deer to her, she has now become the deity of the cultivated field and a settled agricultural community. This hypothesis would appear to gain strength from the text of the Anales de Quauhtitlan, where Itzpapalotl is spoken of as the foundress of the oldest Chichimec kingdom in Nequameyocan, “Place of the Wild Agave.” Camargo states [240] that the tribes issuing from Chicomoztoc, “The Seven Caves,” first came to Mazatepec, “The Deer Mountain,” then to the province of Tepeueuec, where a victim was sacrificed to Itzpapalotl by shooting him with arrows, a circumstance which in itself proves the goddess to have been associated with the earth. NATURE AND STATUS