NATURE AND STATUS
This god, as Seler indicates,7 is a variant of the planet Venus, the morning star, who was regarded as the shooting god and who was perhaps identical with Mixcoatl. The Anales de Quauhtitlan says that: “When he appears he strikes various classes of people with his rays, shoots them, sheds his light on them,” and these several types of people thus shot are clearly to be seen in Codex Borgia, and in the corresponding places of the other manuscripts, where their sequence is, however, varied. That they stand in relation to the quarters of the heavens there can be no doubt, but these quarters vary with the several codices. Thus in Codex Borgia we find the jaguar occupying the north, while in Vaticanus B and Bologna we find it occupying the fifth or downward direction, and in this varying arrangement we probably see differences of local conception. The deities or figures at which the god hurled his spear are the jaguar, or Tezcatlipocâ, Chalchihuitlicue, the black Tezcatlipocâ (probably as Tepeyollotl), Cinteotl, the Tlatouani, or King, and the Yayotl, or the symbol of war; but these do not agree with the “classes of people” shot by the god as given by the Anales de Quauhtitlan, which states “that in the sign cipactli he shoots old men and women, in the sign coatl he shoots the rain, for it will not rain, in the sign atl, the universal drought, in the sign acatl, kings and rulers, and in the sign olin, youths and maidens.”
This seems to me to indicate not so much that the god was identical with Mixcoatl, as Seler states, although he may have had connections with this deity, but that he typifies in some manner the evil influences of the rays of the planet Venus at certain times of the year. We know that the Mexicans, like many other peoples, believed that the stars emanated