to gain strength from the text of the Anales de Quauhtitlan, where Itzpapalotl is spoken of as the foundress of the oldest Chichimec kingdom in Nequameyocan, “Place of the Wild Agave.” Camargo states66 that the tribes issuing from Chicomoztoc, “The Seven Caves,” first came to Mazatepec, “The Deer Mountain,” then to the province of Tepeueuec, where a victim was sacrificed to Itzpapalotl by shooting him with arrows, a circumstance which in itself proves the goddess to have been associated with the earth.
NATURE AND STATUS
Like Mixcoatl, with whom she is closely associated, Itzpapalotl appears to have been originally one of the ancient stellar and lightning deities of the Chichimec or nomadic tribes of the northern plains. Later, on the abandonment of the hunting mode of subsistence and the acceptance of a more settled and agricultural mode of life by the tribes who worshipped her, Itzpapalotl would appear (as the allusion to her in the song to Tlazolteotl seems to show) to have become a goddess of the food-supply, the melon-patch, and the maize-crop. She was one of the Tzitzimimê, or demons of darkness, and as such symbolically took insect shape (cf. Xochiquetzal as a spider), but beneath her butterfly form there lurks the symbol of the old, fierce earth-mother with claws and merciless, protruding teeth, which were originally evolved from those of the cipactli, or earth-monster. It seems to me also that she bears about her the marks of the deer, and at