That the witches’ sabbath was quite as famous or infamous an institution in ancient Mexico as in mediæval Europe is testified to by the numerous accounts of the missionary chroniclers, which are further corroborated by the native manuscripts. But in the days prior to the coming of the Spaniards, it was thought of as being celebrated by the dead rather than the living. The Ciuateteô, or haunting mothers, were those women who had died in their first child-bed, and who, out of envy for their more fortunate sisters and their offspring, continued to haunt the world at certain fixed periods, wreaking their spite upon all who were so unlucky as to cross their path. They are represented in the ancient paintings as dressed in the garments and insignia of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the witch par excellence, with a fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, a golden crescent-shaped nasal ornament, empty eye-sockets, and the heron-feather headdress of the warrior caste, for the woman who died in child-bed was regarded as equally heroic with the man who perished in battle. The upper parts of their bodies were nude, and round the hips they wore a skirt on which cross-bones were painted. They carried the witch’s broom of malinalli grass, a symbol of death, and they are sometimes associated with the snake, screech-owl, and other animals of ill-omen. The face was thickly powdered with white chalk, and the region of the mouth, in some cases, decorated with the figure of a butterfly. These furies were supposed to dwell in the region of the west, and as some compensation for their early detachment from the earth-life, were permitted to accompany the sun in his course from noon to sunset, just as the dead warriors did from sunrise to noon. At night they left their occidental abode, the Ciutlampa, or “Place of Women,” and revisited the glimpses of the moon in search of the feminine gear they had left behind them—the spindles, work-baskets, and other articles used by Mexican women. The Ciuateteô were especially potent for evil in the third quarter of the astrological year, and those who were so luckless as to meet them during that season became crippled or epileptic. The fingers and hands of women who had died in bringing forth were believed by magicians, soldiers, and thieves to have the property of crippling and paralysing their enemies or those who sought to hinder their nefarious calling, precisely as Irish burglars formerly believed that the hand of a corpse grasping a candle, which they called “the hand of glory,” could ensure sound sleep in the inmates of any house they might enter. Says Sahagun: “It was said that they vented their wrath on people and bewitched them. When anyone is possessed by the demons, with a wry mouth and disturbed eyes, with clenched hands and inturned feet, wringing his hands and foaming at the mouth, they say that he has linked himself to a demon; the Ciuateteô, housed by the crossways, have taken his form.”