Mixcoatl’s temples in Mexico were the Mixcoapan tzompantli and the Mixcoateopan. In the first were preserved the heads of the victims sacrificed to the god. The ceremony of quecholli was commenced in the latter. NATURE AND STATUS Mixcoatl was primarily the great god of the Chichimecs and the Otomies, a god of the wild hunting tribes of the plains to the north. Numbers of these had settled in Mexico City and elsewhere within Anahuac, to which they had carried his worship with them. The tribal legends connected with him seem to imply that he was regarded in one of his phases, that of Iztac Mixcoatl, as the Chichimec Adam or Abraham, and he is even alluded to as the “father” of Quetzalcoatl and “brother” of Uitzilopochtli. The probabilities are that he was the god of a section of the Nahua who entered Mexico proper before the advent of the worshippers of Uitzilopochtli, and as he had similar characteristics to the latter deity, he became connected with him in the popular imagination. Mixcoatl seems to me one of that large class of conceptions which recur so frequently in all mythologies—the rain- and lightning-bearing cloud, which in the mind of the savage takes the form of a great monster, a dragon or serpent, vomiting fire and discharging water. The name Mixcoatl means “Cloud-serpent” and serves to substantiate this conception of him. But in the eyes of a hunting people he came, like other deities of the kind, to be regarded as the great hunter who casts the thunderbolt, the lightning-arrow, and therefore as the god-like prototype of the savage sportsman. Mixcoatl’s possession of the obsidian arrow-head, which became personified in Itzpapalotl, gives further weight to this idea. Because he partook of the attributes of a sky-god, Mixcoatl almost inevitably became identified with the stellar deities dwelling in the heavens above. He is, indeed, Chief of the Centzon Mimixcoa, which has been translated “The Four Hundred Northerners,” the host of stars to the north of the Equator, in contradistinction to the Centzon Uitznaua, or “Four Hundred Southerners,” who were scattered by Uitzilopochtli immediately after his birth. But here a question of some difficulty arises. Uitznaua may correctly be translated “southerners,” whereas Mimixcoa can scarcely be rendered otherwise than as the plural of “cloud-serpent.” The insignia of these latter deities, however, are certainly stellar. They wear the stellar face-mask and are in every way to be connected with the stars. It is clear, too, that Mixcoatl in one of his manifestations must be connected with the morning star. But I take this connection, as in the case of Quetzalcoatl, to have arisen at a period comparatively late. Again, we frequently find in Mexican myth that the stars are regarded as serpentine in character, and indeed, as in the case of the Tzitzimimê, partake of insect characteristics.