Note 2 — Chapter XI · VARIANTS OF THE GREAT GODS

Bancroft2 connects Yacatecutli with the Fire-god, with whom, indeed, Clavigero would seem to equate him, and in describing the return of the gods in the twelfth month, Sahagun makes both deities arrive together. Xiuhtecutli was certainly the god who was believed to settle disputes at law, but I am unable to connect Yacatecutli with him in any satisfactory manner. Yacatecutli, “the lord who guides,” seems to me a mere deification of the merchant’s staff, an artificial deity invented as the patron of a caste in an environment where it was not difficult to invent gods. By this I do not mean to convey the impression that the staff was necessarily his earliest form, but that, whatever his primitive shape, the merchant’s stick came to symbolize him.