118 BUREAT OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull.28 



picture. It con.sists, as usual, of a crown of still' feathers, from which 

 rise long, slender, tiexi})le feathers. On the forehead is seen an open 

 jaw with prominent teeth, and at the back of the head a disk and a 

 bandlike piece with crosshatching. These three elements, and the 

 black stripes connected with them, seem to me like the rudiments of a 

 head decoration which occurs with great regularity in the pictures of 

 the sun god and its allied forms in Mexican picture writings, especially 

 in the Borgian codex, the Laud codex, etc. This head ornament con- 

 sists of a leather strap ornamented with disks of turquoise, or chal- 

 chiuitl, and has on the front part a kind of bird's head with open jaws 

 and prominent teeth. In J, figure 28, I reproduce the head of the sun 

 god according to the Laud codex, and I have marked the leather strap 

 (painted red in the original) with its bands at the back of the head 

 with crosshatching. 1 remark further that not only is this decoration 

 peculiar to the sun god and his allied forms, but that other deities 

 wear a different symbol in the same place. I have pictured in c and d 

 two other deities from the related Fejervary codex. The first, a dark, 

 aged, bearded god, perhaps the moon god, wears on his forehead a 

 sea-snail shell. The other, <7, the god Quetzalcoatl, vulgarly called 

 the "wind god'\ wears on his forehead the hieroglyph '"turquoise". 



Under the upper disk, fastened to the head strap, there is still a sec- 

 ond disk visible on the ligures in our picture, which is, of course, the 

 ear peg. I should prefer to explain the curved strip which is seen 

 under the lower edge as a lock of hair, in connection with what is 

 seen in h to d. Still it might be a ribbon or an ornament pendent from 

 the ear peg. Ends of locks of hair are also seen in the first of the two 

 figures, a, under the head strap above the forehead. The peculiarly 

 bordered and peculiarly painted portion at the back of the cheek prob- 

 abh^ indicates a special manner of painting the face. In the pictures 

 of the pulque gods, and also in those of Quetzalcoatl, and of the moon 

 god and others, the back part of the face is painted in a color different 

 from that of the front part. 



Like the majority of the Mexican mythologic characters, the fig- 

 ures in our picture wear a feather decoration on the back — their device. 

 This consists of a basketlike frame, something like that with which 

 the godXolotl is represented in the calendars of the Codices Telleriano- 

 Remensis and Vaticanus A, from which rise immense feathers, while 

 a mask is placed behind this, and one on the girdle in front. 



If we further examine the hieroglyphs, it is at once evident that in 

 the upper row three of the hieroglyphs, f, d, and b, figure 28, are 

 only recapitulations of the heads of the personages represented below. 

 The face is the same. The back part of the cheek is also specially 

 defined in the hieroglyphs, and marked by special coloring. Behind 

 this is the ear peg with its appendage. Above that rises the bandlike 

 piece with the crosshatched ornamentation — the loop of the head strap, 



