into wine (the opactli or peyote); since without this root no quantity of wine, no matter how much they drank, would produce intoxication. Patecatle taught them the art of making wine, for wine was made according to his instructions; and as men when under the influence of wine are valiant, so they supposed that those who were born during this period would be courageous. They considered these thirteen days all as fortunate, for Patecatle, the god of wine, the husband of Mayaquel, who was otherwise called Cipaquetona, he who was saved from the deluge, ruled over them. They placed the eagle and the lion near him as a sign that their sons would be valiant men.”
NATURE AND STATUS
Patecatl was originally a Huaxtec god. Tradition said that the tribal ancestor of this people was the first drunkard. In the Sahagun MS. Patecatl is called “the finder of the stalks and roots of which octli is made,” that is those roots which were added to the octli to enhance its intoxicating or narcotic strength. Motolinia states that those roots were called oc-patli or octli-medicine, and the interpreter of the Codex Magliabecchiano confirms the passage, as do the interpreters of the Codex Vaticanus A and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis.
I fail to find corroboration elsewhere of the interpreter’s statement that Patecatl was “saved from the deluge.” He seems to me to bear a general resemblance to Apollo, as recently explained by Dr. Rendel Harris,10 that is, he seems to have been named in accordance with some conception of him in which he was thought of as coming from a “Land of Medicines” (in his case the Huaxtec country, which was also the Tlillan Tlapallan, the “Land of Writing” or of Civilization). The herbal conception of many Greek and other deities—that is, their actual development from plants, the evolution of the god from the medicinal herb—is now well authenticated, as can be seen from a perusal of Dr. Harris’s remarkable work. Nor is the proven development of many deities from mineral substances any less remarkable.