second seed is badoh negro or badungas, the full Zapotec 
equivalent of badoh negro. The black seeds are long and 
somewhat angular. In Nahuatl they could hardly be 
called ololiuhqui, since this term means the ‘round things’ 
or ‘pellets’. 
The Nahua must have known them: what then did 
they call them? We believe the answer is to be found in 
Pedro Ponce’s Breve Relacion de los Dioses y Ritos de 
la Gentilidad, Par. 46, where he speaks of ololiuhqui, 
Capsule and seed of /pomoea violacea, enlarged two and one half times. 
peyote, and tltliltzin, all with the same magnetic proper- 
ties. The third, possibly a hapax in the corpus of surviv- 
ing classic Nahuatl documentation, is clearly not ololiuh- 
qui, since both are mentioned in the same sentence as 
distinct products. The word comes from the Nahuatl] root 
meaning ‘black’, with a reverential suffix. May we not 
assume that this was the name current in classic Nahuatl 
for the black seeds that Don Tomas found in wide use 
among the Zapotecs in the 1950’s? Apparently there is 
a further reference to badoh negro in the records of the 
Inquisition: a Negro slave who was also acurandero used 
[ 177 ] 
