Notes.
Reading edition
The god Yacatecutli, whose name means “lord of travelers,” or “the lord who guides,” was the divinity of the merchants. Sahagun (Historia, Lib. I, cap. 19) and Duran (Historia, cap. 90) furnish us many particulars of his worship.
The hymn is extremely obscure, containing a number of archaic words, and my rendering is very doubtful. The writer of the Gloss is, I think, also at fault in his paraphrase. The general purpose of the hymn seems to be that of a death-song, chanted probably by the victims about to be sacrificed. They were given the sacred food to eat, as described by Duran, and then prepared themselves to undergo death, hoping to go to “the beautiful house,” which the Gloss explains as Tlalocan, the Terrestrial Paradise.