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DEITIES AND RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS 



297 



design resembling a butterfly about the mouth, whose face, painted 

 in many colors, looks out of the open jaws of a bird with a tall 

 and erect crest. We succeeded in bringing home a complete spec- 

 imen of this sort, which is now in the Royal Museum of Eth- 

 nology in Berlin, and a copy of this (front and side views) is given 

 on plate xlii, reproduced by pliotographic process. The worship 

 of this deity, who, in character is evidently identical with the idol of 

 the Zapotec Teotitlan del valle, seems to have been remarkably wide- 

 spread. Countless stone images of this deity, of whose bird's-head 

 mask only the towering crest remained, have been found in the moun- 

 tains of the slope toward the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in those 

 strijjs of territory which succumbed to the so-called Chichimec inva- 

 sion, the expansion of the higliland Naliua tribes. In the capital, 

 Mexico, this deity was known under the name of Macuil-xochitl, 

 " 5 flower ", and was regarded as the deity of luck in gaming." He 

 lias a dark brother, to whom the name Ixtlilton, " the little black- 

 face ■*', was given in Mexico, and to him they turned for help when 



a h 



Pre. 68. Gods Maciiil-xocliitl and Ixtlilton, from Mexican codices. 



their children were ill. I have reproduced (in c and </, hgnre 67) the 

 representations of these two deities as they are given in the Sahagun 

 manuscript of the Biblioteca del Palacio. These pictures also show 

 tliat there is left of the bird's-head mask only the erect feather crest, 

 with a wing as an ornament or device to be worn on the back. 



A characteristic group, wliich evidently represents these same two 

 deities, is found in the Fejervary codex, page 21, the fourth in a set of 

 six pairs of gods {a, figure 68). These two deities have a somewhat 

 different form in the j^arallel passage of Codex Yaticanus B, page 

 58, which is reproduced in h, figure 68. 



That the deity of the Zapotec Teotitlan del valle was considered 

 by the Mexicans the same as their Macuil-xochitl appears to follow 



"I have given more careful proof of this in my work Das Tonalamall der Au- 

 binschen Sammlung (Compte rendu 7&me Session du Congr&s international des 

 Americanistes, Berlin, 1888), p. 723 and following, and in my Altniexikanlsche Studien 

 fVeri'ilTentlichungen aus dem Koniglichen Museum fiir Viilkerkunde zu Berlin, Band I, 

 Heft 4) pp. 162-164. 



