Aztec mythology; Indian mythology -- Mexico; Mexico -- Religion
Codex Borgia.—Sheet 14: This is one of the most striking
representations of the Death-god which has come down to us. Here he is
depicted as a skeleton with a skeleton’s thorax and a skull for head,
the arms and legs painted white with yellow spots picked with red, to
symbolize the bones of a newly flayed person. He has a large rosette at
the occiput and a flag, both painted in alternate white and red
cross-bands, and this motif is carried out in the ends of the
loin-cloth, and in the extremities of other bands and stripes. He
presents a burnt-offering. The symbolic crossways and the owl are
figured before him, the death-bird being surrounded with paper flags,
the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation. Sheet 15: On this
sheet he wears the death-symbols. At the nape of the neck he has a
paper rosette, decorated with red and white cross-bands, the paper flag
painted in the same way, broken in the middle and bent, and an ear-plug
consisting of a human hand. His symbol in this place is a bunch of
malinalli grass. Sheet 79: In this representation of the Death-god we
find the invariable skeleton head, but the body is painted, like that
of the priests, in black. The nape-ornament is of paper, and the
ear-plug is a human hand. The screech owl’s wing also appears. Opposite
him is a corpse wrapped up in a cloth and corded with strings, a paper
flag, used in the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation, and a
cross, apparently made of knotted sheets of cloth or paper. His hair or
wig is black and curly, some of the curls ending in eye-like circles
with red centres. In this picture he sits opposite Tonatiuh, the
Sun-god, and thus, perhaps, represents night in its black aspect, the
eyes in his wig, as elsewhere, symbolizing the stars. Sheet 57: Here he
is placed opposite the Death-goddess and wears the usual insignia. The
ground on which their seats are placed is not simply yellow, as in the
other sections, but consists of alternate fields of malinalli grass and
fragments of skulls in the style of the hieroglyph of arable land. Both
present each other with a naked human figure, symbolic of human
sacrifice. Between them stands a receptacle painted black and studded
with eyes, with red bands in the middle and yellow border. On the left
of this stands a dish filled with blood and smoking hearts, on which
the goddess is pouring fire from a vessel. On the right projects the
body and tail of a dragon, which is seized by the god. In the centre is
seen a skull swallowing a man who is falling headforemost into its
throat, and above all is pictured the moon, without, however, the usual
rabbit appearing in its circumference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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