their minds except as a renewal of the universe, it may have been that they regarded that element as a vehicle or a symbol of recreation. Out of this conception, too, arose the belief that Xiuhtecutli renewed the year, from which circumstance he takes his title “Lord of the Year.” Izcalli, too, the name of one of his festivals, means “growth,” or perhaps “continuance,” and seems to be connected in some manner with this belief.
His rulership of the ninth day and the ninth week, of which the symbol is atl, water, seems directly opposed to all our ideas of his character, but, as Seler points out, the Mexicans thought of water “primarily as a derivative concrete element, which originally means something like ‘the shooting thing,’ derived from the verb a, which was in fact used in the sense of ‘to shoot, to throw the spear.’ ” It is