Tlazolteotl was the Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust, midwives, filth, and adultery. She inspired vicious desires but also forgave sin and cleaned it away -- but only once. She caused disease, especially sexually transmitted ones. She was depicted with ocher-colored symbols of divine excrement around her mouth and nose, and her ingestion of dirt symbolized the purification of sin through her ingestion of it. (The Nahuatl word for sacred, "tzin," comes from "tzintli," the buttocks; religious rituals included offerings of "liquid gold" and "divine excrement," which Cecilia F. Klein translated as "holy shit.") The black paint on her mouth and chin was bitumen, a byproduct of decomposed organic material, and was chewed by unmarried females. As Ixcuinan (Deity of Cotton) she was a quadrupartite goddess composed of 4 sisters: Tiyacapan (the first born, portrayed as a young temptress), Teicuih (the younger sister,a destructive goddess of gambling and uncertainty), Tlahco (the middle sister, capable of absorbing human sin), and Xōcotzin (the youngest sister, a terrifying hag who preyed on youths); when conceived of as individual deities, they were goddesses of luxury. Ixcuinan usually had 2 spindles of unspun cotton in her headdress, thus connecting her to weaving, which had sexual connotations (as in the riddle: “What is it that they make pregnant, that they make big with child in the dancing place?" the answer to which is "spindles;" the dancing place is the bowl where the spindles were set). In many depictions Tlazolteotl was portrayed as a woman giving birth. Her son by Piltzintecuhtli (the solar deity) was the maize deity Centeotl ("dried maize still on the cob" + "deity"). In the "Codex Borbonicus" in the Bibliothèque de l'Assemblée Nationale in Paris, Tlazolteotl wears black and red, symbolizing the fertility of menstrual flow, decorated with crescent moons which resemble vulvas; she is conceiving a child wearing a headdress, earrings, and necklace just like her mother, thus embodying the cycle of life, and the child's footprints lead back to the head, the place of conception. In addition, Tlazolteotl wears the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim, with extra hands hanging below, a symbol of death feeding life.
Tlazolteotl was the Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust, midwives, filth, and adultery. She inspired vicious desires but also forgave sin and cleaned it away -- but only once. She caused disease, especially sexually transmitted ones. She was depicted with ocher-colored symbols of divine excrement around her mouth and nose, and her ingestion of dirt symbolized the purification of sin through her ingestion of it. (The Nahuatl word for sacred, "tzin," comes from "tzintli," the buttocks; religious rituals included offerings of "liquid gold" and "divine excrement," which Cecilia F. Klein translated as "holy shit.") The black paint on her mouth and chin was bitumen, a byproduct of decomposed organic material, and was chewed by unmarried females. As Ixcuinan (Deity of Cotton) she was a quadrupartite goddess composed of 4 sisters: Tiyacapan (the first born, portrayed as a young temptress), Teicuih (the younger sister,a destructive goddess of gambling and uncertainty), Tlahco (the middle sister, capable of absorbing human sin), and Xōcotzin (the youngest sister, a terrifying hag who preyed on youths); when conceived of as individual deities, they were goddesses of luxury. Ixcuinan usually had 2 spindles of unspun cotton in her headdress, thus connecting her to weaving, which had sexual connotations (as in the riddle: “What is it that they make pregnant, that they make big with child in the dancing place?" the answer to which is "spindles;" the dancing place is the bowl where the spindles were set). In many depictions Tlazolteotl was portrayed as a woman giving birth. Her son by Piltzintecuhtli (the solar deity) was the maize deity Centeotl ("dried maize still on the cob" + "deity"). In the "Codex Borbonicus" in the Bibliothèque de l'Assemblée Nationale in Paris, Tlazolteotl wears black and red, symbolizing the fertility of menstrual flow, decorated with crescent moons which resemble vulvas; she is conceiving a child wearing a headdress, earrings, and necklace just like her mother, thus embodying the cycle of life, and the child's footprints lead back to the head, the place of conception. In addition, Tlazolteotl wears the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim, with extra hands hanging below, a symbol of death feeding life.
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