ThIS HERMAPHRODITE divinity is related to music, cheating, gossip, adult wisdom, and pleasure.
MEXICO (Infobae) – In the pre-Hispanic pantheon, Huehuecóyotl occupies a place as a bisexual god associated with his animal form’s ambivalent features coyote, hence the Nahua translation as the “old coyote” god. A figure in which music and dance are expressed, but also characteristics such as lust and carnal desire, giving way to the erotic dimension of the ancient Mexicas.
In the imagination of the Aztecs, the coyote was feared for its cunning and its developed sexual instinct in the imagination of intercourse and the rapid recovery to repeat the act, according to Fernando Díaz Infante, a scholar of pre-Hispanic culture.
Historian Lucía Aranda Kilian found in her 1991 fieldwork that the inhabitants of Pachiquitla, Xochiatipan, Hidalgo, still associated the sexual traits of Huehuecóyotl with their zoomorphic identity. In this Nahua community, they believed that if they killed a coyote, cut off its leg, and touched a woman with it, the latter would be genuinely in love.
According to the Vatican-Latin Codex 3738 1966: XXII, 61; XXIV, 65, it is narrated that Huehuecóyotl sinned at Tamoanchan, primordial place of gods and humans, by seducing Xochiquetzal; However, the version of Diego Muñoz Camargo (Tlaxcalan historian who lived from 1529 to 1599, son of a Spaniard and an indigenous woman) refers that the culprit of the transgression in that paradise was Tezcatlipoca because this god kidnapped the woman of Tláloc, a deity related to fertility.
This would define the impudent character of the “coyote god,” according to Guilhem Oliver, a doctor in Latin American Studies and researcher of indigenous peoples at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
In turn, the also historian refers that the lustful feature of Huehuecóyotl is given because it sponsors the sign cuetzpalin, “lizard,” in the Codex Borgia, that is, a phallic symbol known in Mesoamerica, according to the studies of Eduard Seler.
According to the UNAM expert, there are 17 representations of Huehuecóyotl in 12 different pictographic manuscripts, making the god an enigmatic figure.
As for the vocabulary, the expert from the National University analyzed that coyoquetza means “to stand up as a coyote,” according to Fray Alonso de Molina, a pioneer in linguistics and author of the first dictionary of Spanish to Nahuatl, printed in the New World in 1571.
The word would also allude to “taking oneself as an animal,” which lexicographer Rémi Simeon explained as “having relations with a woman imitating animals.
For Guilhem Oliver, the seductive aspect of the coyote would be proven in contemporary myths of the Nahuas in San Pedro Jícora, Durango, since the inhabitants describe the animal as a woman abductor. For their part, the Quiché of Guatemala would maintain the belief that the coyote bones, secretly kept in the pocket, made a widow give in to a suitor’s pleas.
On the other hand, and based on the Codex Telleriano-Remnsis, Guilhem Oliver refers that Huehuecóyotl was the one who put discord among men, just as he put it among the Tepanecas, reason why wars began in the world. About the warlike feature of the god appears illustrated next to the glyph yáoyotl in the Borgia codex. Besides this feature, the god would be cataloged as gossip or “malsin.”
Aranda Kilian explains that “the old coyote” is “related to Macuilxochitl: god of pleasure, of dance and games; one of the five gods of pleasure that accompanied the cihuateteo, that is, women who died in their first birth or war, who because of that fatality were turned into goddesses. These deities were feared because, at times, they came down to harm the children, causing them muscular pain; and to men, they induced lust and “carnal sins.
In the Atlas Duran and the Codex Borbonique, Huehuecóyotl is drawn waving a few rattles, and other characters play instruments beside him. Eduard Seler associates the musical gifts with the coyote, because of its howling feature. His regent date began with the sign ce xóchitl (1 Flower) when a party was held with dances, and numerous songs were sung. The Nahuas, Chichimecas, Triquis, Zapotecos, and Papagos represent the coyote as a musician who plays the drum, violin, guitar, or sings. According to Guilhem Oliver’s account of the artistic category of the god.
Source: Infobae
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