At seven years old the boy is taken to learn to fish, while the girl spins; and so on with different occupations for one year after another. At nine years old the father is allowed to punish his son for disobedience, by sticking aloe-points all over his naked body, while the daughters only have them stuck into their hands; and at eleven years old, both boy and girl were to be punished by holding their faces in the smoke of burning capsicums.
At fifteen the youth is married by the simple process of tying the corner of his shirt to the corner of the bride’s petticoat (thus literally “splicing” them, as my companion remarked). And so on; after scenes of cutting wood, visiting the temples, fighting and feasting, we come to the last scene of all, headed “seventy years,” and see an old man and woman reeling about helplessly drunk with pulque; for drunkenness, which was severely punished up to that age, was tolerated afterwards as a compensation for the sorrows and infirmities of the last period of life.
Astrological charts formed a large proportion of these picture-writings. Here, as elsewhere, we may trace the origin of astrology. The signs of the days and years were represented, for convenience sake, by different animals, and objects, like the signs of the Zodiac which we still retain. The signs remained after the history of their origin was lost; and then—what more natural than to imagine that the symbols handed down by their wise ancestors had some mysterious meaning, connected with the days and years they stood for; and then, that a man’s destiny had to do with the names of the signs that “prevailed” at his birth?
There is little to be seen here or elsewhere, of one kind of work in which the Mexicans excelled perhaps more than in any other, the goldsmith’s work. Where are the calendars of solid gold and silver—as big as great