In Mexican myth the earth is represented as a monster known as cipactli, the pictures of which have given rise to the assumption that it is either a crocodile, a swordfish, or a dragon. We shall probably not err if we place it in the last category and see in it that great earth-monster common to the mythologies of many races, and which is most conveniently called the “earth-dragon.”13 This sign cipactli became the first in the tonalamatl or Book of Fate, where it is connected with the creative deities and the Earth-mother, who was known by many names. Circumstances exist which seem to lend colour to the assumption that, as in other countries, the Mexican Earth-mother had at one time been regarded as forming the earth, the soil. At the terrible and picturesque festival of the Xalaquia (“She who is clothed with the sand”), the sacrificed virgin was supposed to enrich and recruit with her blood the frame of the worn-out goddess, who had been, says Seler, “merged in the popular imagination with the all-nourisher, the all-begetter, the earth.”14
Perhaps the best evidence that the idea of the Earth-mother was associated with the conception of the earth-dragon is afforded by the colossal stone figure of Coatlicue, one of her manifestations, which once towered above the entrance to the temple of