ASPECT AND INSIGNIA
Codex Borgia.—Sheets 47–48: Five figures here represent the Ciuateteô and are dressed in the style of Tlazolteotl, with the fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, and the golden nasal crescent worn by that goddess and the octli-gods. In each case the eye has been gouged out and hangs out of the socket, as with Xolotl. They wear on their heads a feather ornament like the heron-feather plume of the warrior caste, but consisting of five white feathers or strips of paper above a bunch of downy feathers. At the nape of the neck the figures wear a black vessel as their device, in which lies a bunch of malinalli grass. The upper part of the body is naked, and round the hips is wrapped a skirt showing cross-bones on its surface and a border painted in the manner of the variegated coral snake. The resemblance between all five figures is close. Only the face-, arm-, and leg-painting is different. In the case of the first the colour is white striped with red, in the second blue, in the third yellow, in the fourth red, and in the fifth black. All hold in one hand a broom of malinalli grass, and in the other a black obsidian sacrificial knife, a bone dagger, and an agave-leaf spike, both furnished with a flower symbolic of blood. They inhale the smoke which ascends from a black incense or fire-vessel standing on the ground before them. A rubber ball lies in the vessel of the first figure; with the second the vessel is replaced by a cross-way, and the ascending smoke by a centipede issuing from the mouth of the goddess. With the third a skeleton is seated in the dish, holding a heart in one hand and a sacrificial knife in the other. The ascending smoke is replaced by two streams of blood passing into the mouth of a skeleton, one of which comes from the mouth of the figure, the other from her right breast. With the fourth