Note 27 — Chapter III · THE GREAT GODS

Etymologically, there is good evidence that Uitzilopochtli originally represented the maguey. The word uitztli means “thorn,” and appears in such compounds as Uitzlampa, “Place of Thorns” (the South), and Uitznauatl, “The Thorn that speaks,” which, as we have seen, was another, and probably an older, title of the god. Uitzoctli, too, as Seler has indicated,27 means “pricking pulque,” newly fermented octli. It would seem, then, that the name Uitzilopochtli, until now generally translated as “Humming-bird-to-the-left,” and rendered by Seler “Humming-bird of the South,” must possess another significance for us. Opochtli certainly means both “south” and “left,” but it also means “wizard,” as in the compound tlahuipuchtli, “wizard who spits fire,” instanced by Torquemada,28 who states that some persons derived the god’s name from that word, combined with uitzilinin, “a humming-bird.”29 It is easy to see how the god came to be associated with the humming-bird, which suspends its nest from the foliage of the maguey. It would appear to the Mexicans to emerge from the leaves of that plant, and would come to be regarded as the form which the maguey-spirit took. Indeed, the humming-bird dress or disguise is that in which Uitzilopochtli is almost invariably represented in the codices. It was in the shape of a humming-bird that the god was said to have led the Aztecâ from their ancient home to the Valley of Anahuac, and his flights would probably be considered ominous and suggestive to augurs, like those of the Latin Picus. But it is possible that a certain degree of confusion arose between the elements uitzilinin (humming-bird) and uitztli (thorn), that this assisted the belief that he took the shape of a humming-bird and that the explanatory myth of the hero-god Uitziton refers to this bird in an anthropomorphic shape.