Mixcoatl seems to me one of that large class of conceptions which recur so frequently in all mythologies—the rain- and lightning-bearing cloud, which in the mind of the savage takes the form of a great monster, a dragon or serpent, vomiting fire and discharging water. The name Mixcoatl means “Cloud-serpent” and serves to substantiate this conception of him. But in the eyes of a hunting people he came, like other deities of the kind, to be regarded as the great hunter who casts the thunderbolt, the lightning-arrow, and therefore as the god-like prototype of the savage sportsman. Mixcoatl’s possession of the obsidian arrow-head, which became personified in Itzpapalotl, gives further weight to this idea.
Because he partook of the attributes of a sky-god, Mixcoatl almost inevitably became identified with the stellar deities dwelling in the heavens above. He is, indeed, Chief of the Centzon Mimixcoa, which has been translated “The Four Hundred Northerners,” the host of stars to the north of the Equator, in contradistinction to the Centzon Uitznaua, or “Four Hundred Southerners,” who were scattered by Uitzilopochtli immediately after his birth. But here a question of some difficulty