Archive image from page 643 of Discovery Discovery discovery0304londuoft Year: 294 DISCOVERY native calendar. For example, in the Xagualist calendar for January-, the first day of the month was represented by a puma, the second b}- a snake, the eighth by a rabbit, the fourteenth by a toad, the nineteenth by a jaguar, and so on. The animal of the day was invoked by the priest, who offered up sacrifice to it, implored its good offices for the child, and then instructed the infant's mother to carry it to a certain lonely spot, where the nagual would appear and become attached to it for the rem
Archive image from page 643 of Discovery Discovery discovery0304londuoft Year: 294 DISCOVERY native calendar. For example, in the Xagualist calendar for January-, the first day of the month was represented by a puma, the second b}- a snake, the eighth by a rabbit, the fourteenth by a toad, the nineteenth by a jaguar, and so on. The animal of the day was invoked by the priest, who offered up sacrifice to it, implored its good offices for the child, and then instructed the infant's mother to carry it to a certain lonely spot, where the nagual would appear and become attached to it for the remainder of its life. of a particularly vindictive and disgruntled nature. Strangely enough, the same notion is to be met with in present-day Burma, where the spirit of the woman who leaves a new-born babe behind her is regarded as a peculiarly malevolent ghost. These witches are represented in the native paintings as dressed in the garments and insignia of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the Mexican patroness of witches. They wore a skirt on which cross-bones were woven, they carried the witch's broom of stiff grass, and their faces were smothered in ONE OF THE CIU.\TETEO, OR MEXICAN WITCHES, FROM THE CODEX BORGIA. She is about to sacrifice a child, and stands before an um filled with human hearts. She wears the cotton spindle of the earth-goddess, her skirt is decorated with lunar emblems and she is adorned by the lunar nose-plate. The ' Haunting Mothers ' Many of the worshippers of these beast-gods pre- tended to have the power of transforming themselves into the bodily shapes of their patrons, just as the witches of medieval Europe claimed the ability to take animal shape. It is indeed strange how closely the rites of Nagualism resembled those of the European witches' Sabbath. But it seems to have been an orgy in which the living and the dead mingled, for it was attended not only by those women who dabbled in unhoty rites, but by the great company of those deceased women who had
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