in the temple and made music during the entire day in honour of Coatlicue. These flowers were the first-fruits of the year, were offered up by the master florists, who had a great devotion to the goddess, and none of the blossoms in their gardens might be smelt until these bouquets had been offered up in the temple of Coatlicue. They made for this feast tamallis called tzatzapaltamalli (“sharp-tasting herb cakes”).
NATURE AND STATUS
Coatlicue is, in one of her aspects, undoubtedly the flower-covered earth of spring, from whom, as it were, the sun (Uitzilopochtli) is reborn. Her serpent-skirt is probably symbolic of the circumstance that, at the season which she represents, the earth is clothed with the rain as with a garment. The myth which makes her a pious widow is obviously of late, and probably of hierophantic, origin. In my view Uitzilopochtli is chiefly her son in his naualli or disguise of a humming-bird. The humming-bird sucks from the breasts of earth as a child from its mother’s. But the myth is highly conglomerate, and, as we possess it, is obviously the result of the fusion of several varying conceptions of the two principal figures. Coatlicue’s appearance as a serpent in her great statue which has been described above, and her name of Coatlantonan, “Our Serpent Mother,” in my view tend to identify her with the earth in its form of dragon, serpent, or cipactli, regarding which hypothesis the reader is referred