Note 8 — Chapter IX · STELLAR AND PLANETARY DEITIES

This seems to me to indicate not so much that the god was identical with Mixcoatl, as Seler states, although he may have had connections with this deity, but that he typifies in some manner the evil influences of the rays of the planet Venus at certain times of the year. We know that the Mexicans, like many other peoples, believed that the stars emanated influences good and bad, and as Seler himself states in his essay on “The Venus Period in Picture-Writing,”8 “it is possible that we have on these pages simply an astrological speculation arising from superstitious fear of the influence of the light of this powerful planet. By natural association of ideas the rays of light emitted by the sun or other luminous bodies are imagined to be darts or arrows which are shot in all directions by the luminous body. The more the rays are perceived to be productive of discomfort or injury, so much the more fittingly does this apply. In this way the abstract noun miotl or meyotli with the meaning ‘ray of light’ is derived from the Mexican word mitl, ‘arrow’ … thus miotli is the arrow which belongs by nature to a body sending forth arrows, a luminous body.… When the planet appeared anew in the heavens, smoke-vents and chimneys were stopped up lest the light should penetrate into the house.… It is hardly possible to see anything else in these figures struck by the spear than augural speculations regarding the influence of the light from the planet suggested by the initial signs of the period.” Seler also points out that we possess the analogy of the periods in which the Ciuateteô, or “spectre women,” send down similar baleful influences from above.