the phenomenon, a practice explained by saying that the big dog was swallowing the sun, and that by whipping the little ones they would make him desist. The dog is the animal of the dead, and therefore of the Place of Shadows.1 Thus also Xolotl is a monster, the sun-swallowing monster, like the Hindu Rahu, who chases the sun and moon. As a shadow he is “the double” of everything. The axolotl, a marine animal found in Mexico, was confounded with his name because of its monstrous appearance, and he was classed along with Quetzalcoatl merely because that god’s name bore the element coatl, which may be translated either “twin” or “snake.” Lastly, as he was “variable as the shade,” so were the fortunes of the game over which he presided.
At the same time he seems to me to have affinities with the Zapotec and Maya lightning-dog peche-xolo2 and may represent the lightning which descends from the thunder-cloud, the flash, the reflection of which arouses in many primitive people the belief that the lightning is “double,” and leads them to suppose a connection between the lightning and twins, or other phenomena of a twofold kind. As the dog, too, he has a connection with Hades, and, said myth, was dispatched thence for the bones from which man was created.
He is also a travelling god, for the shadows cast by the clouds seem to travel quickly over plain and mountain. As the monstrous dwarf, too, he symbolized the palace-slave, the deformed jester who catered for the amusement of the great, and this probably accounts for the symbol of the white hand outspread on his face, which he has in common with Xochipilli and the other gods of pleasure. He bears a suspicious resemblance to the mandrake spirits of Europe and Asia, both as regards his duality, his loud lamentation when as a double-rooted plant he was discovered and pulled up by the roots, and his symbol, which may be a reminiscence of the mandrake.