CHAPTER IX

frequently described on those pages, but is skull-shaped, and represented as swallowing blood and a human heart. He holds, however, the usual spear-thrower, shield, hand-flag, and the hunter’s net-bag. The Codex Borgia pictures show, too, the incidence of the god’s other attributes, the oval, egg-shaped ornaments and the white-tipped black feathers, which, however, are here considerably shorter, and spread over the crown of the head only. Here also the first of the five figures is red-striped, the others being blue, red, and yellow, and red-striped. Like the figures in Codex Bologna, the first has the head of a skull painted with the face-paint of Tlauizcalpantecutli, with the quincunx of five disks on a dark ground. The other four figures wear masks, that part of their faces which is visible being coloured like the body and having the quincunx of five white disks. The second figure wears an owl naual, or mask, the third that of a dog, the fourth a rabbit-mask, and the fifth, like the first, a dead man’s skull, which, however, is portrayed in its natural colour and has no face-paint. The owl-mask of the second figure and the skull-mask of the fifth show that they represent the sequence of five periods of the planet Venus, five time-counts based on its period of visibility, and that,