ANCIENT MEXICAN FEATHER ORNAMENTS" 



By Eduard Seler 



III the question raised by Mrs Nuttall as to whether the ancient 

 Mexican feather ornament in the Imperial Museum of Natural History 

 at Vienna, which came from the collection at the castle of Ambras, is 

 to be ret^arded as a standard, such as prominent Mexican warriors wore 

 strapped to their backs in battle and in dances, or rather as a headdress, 

 I have not declared for one theor}^ or another, and have taken part 

 oidy in so far as 1 was justified in believing Mrs Nuttall's proofs to rest 

 on mistaken premises. She maintains that the ornament in (juestion 

 should ))e considered as a headdress, and, indeed, only as the headdress 

 of Uitzilopochtli, which at the same time was also worn by the Mexi- 

 can king-. This view I am inclined to reject. 



As for the matter itself, Valentini has alread}^ pointed out in an 

 article in the American Antiquarian that headdresses similar to the 

 Vienna headdress are to be found here and there upon figures in the 

 Maya sculptures. Mrs Nuttall subsequently brought forward the figure 

 of a god from a picture manuscript which she was so fortunate as to dis- 

 cover in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Florence (and which is an older 

 and better copy of the codex attributed to Ixtlilxochitl than is in the 

 Aubiu-Goupil collection), a figure wearing a head ornament which 

 is indeed strikingly like the Vienna ornament as it now exists with 

 missing frontlet. But this is not the god Uitzilopochtli, as Mrs Nut- 

 tall asserts and as 1 also credulously repeated, but Tezcatlipoca. I 

 recently assured myself of this when I had an opportunity to examine 

 the original in Florence. 



This figure is surrounded hf impressions of a child's foot impiiiited 

 in the scattered meal, which announces the arrival of the young god 

 Telpochtli Tezcatlipoca, the first of the gods returning home to their 

 city. The god Tezcatlipoca is represented in exactly the same way in the 

 Codex Vaticanus A, and there denotes the twelfth feast of the year, the 

 feast Teotleco ("the god has arrived"). Finally, I have tried, in my 

 second article, to make it seem probable that the quetzalapanecayoti 

 ("quetzal-feather ornament of the people of the coast regions"), 



a Verhaiidhingen cUt Berliner Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologie, 1893, p. 4^. 



59 



