and their hair done in the manner of the great ladies. Their clothes were striped with black, their skirts barred in different colours, and their sandals were white.” He further relates (bk. vi, c. xxix) that, when a woman who had died in her first childbed was buried in the temple-court of the Ciuateteô, her husband and his friends watched the body all night in case young braves or magicians should seek to obtain the hair or fingers as protective talismans.
NATURE AND STATUS
That the witches’ sabbath was quite as famous or infamous an institution in ancient Mexico as in mediæval Europe is testified to by the numerous accounts of the missionary chroniclers, which are further corroborated by the native manuscripts. But in the days prior to the coming of the Spaniards, it was thought of as being celebrated by the dead rather than the living. The Ciuateteô, or haunting mothers, were those women who had died in their first child-bed, and who, out of envy for their more fortunate sisters and their offspring, continued to haunt the world at certain fixed periods, wreaking their spite upon all who were so unlucky as to cross their path. They are represented in the ancient paintings as dressed in the garments and insignia of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the witch par excellence, with a fillet and ear-plug of unspun cotton, a golden crescent-shaped nasal ornament, empty eye-sockets, and the heron-feather headdress of the warrior caste, for the woman who died in child-bed was regarded as equally heroic with the man who perished in battle. The upper parts of their bodies were nude, and round the hips they wore a skirt on which cross-bones were painted. They carried the witch’s broom of malinalli grass, a symbol of death, and they are sometimes associated with the snake, screech-owl, and other animals of ill-omen. The face was thickly powdered with white chalk, and the region of the mouth, in some cases, decorated with the figure of a butterfly. These furies were supposed to dwell in the region of the west, and