Aztec mythology; Indian mythology -- Mexico; Mexico -- Religion
General.—In the Codex Borgia (sheet 25) he is painted as having a
white-and-red-striped body, and the black face with white-spotted
quincunx peculiar to him in his special form as evening star. The hair
is yellow, the locks rising in curls above the brow, and bound by a red
fillet. We can probably recognize him in the figure seen in sheet 19 of
Codex Vaticanus B, which bears a strong resemblance to that found on
sheet 57 of the same MS., confronting the Fire-god; but in the first
instance he is not shown with the black “half-mask” painting about the
eye. He has, however, the same warlike implements—shield, spears, and
atlatl—as in Codex Borgia, as well as a pouch for obsidian arrow-heads
and a small sacrificial flag. He is, however, almost universally
represented with a white or white-and-red-striped body and
face-painting, and the deep black “half-mask” edged with small white
circles which is usually shown in the pictures of Mixcoatl, Paynal, and
Atlaua, and which is described as “the stellar face-painting called
darkness.” He frequently wears long, tapering oval ornaments attached
to red leather thongs in place of the chalchihuitl jewels which so
often depend from the dress of the other gods, and the band which
supports these has four diverging ends terminating in a bunch of
feathers, as with Tonatiuh, Ueuecoyotl, and Xochipilli. The crown is
generally composed of black feathers having white spots, alternating
with longer yellow or red plumes. On the breast is seen an ornament
like that of Tezcatlipocâ. In Codex Borbonicus and Borgia he is
accompanied by the insignia of those warriors who died by sacrifice,
the blue crown with the three-cornered frontal plate, the axe-shaped
blue ear-plug, the blue nose-plug, the white paper shoulder-tie, and
the small blue dog which accompanied the dead man on his way to the
region of Mictlan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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