Cihuateotl (MH579r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Cihuateotl (“Female Deity” or "Female Divinity," attested here as a man’s name) shows a profile view of a woman's (cihuatl) head facing toward the viewer's right. The woman has the classic hairstyle (neaxtlahualli) with the hair twisted up into points above the forehead. Her visible eye is closed. She seems to have a large round ear plug. What makes this glyph a compound is the thick black mark on her cheek, which recalls the double-strike (huahuana) mark that serves as the "hua" syllabic phonogram in the word cihuatl. The -teotl part of this man's name is not represented visually.
Stephanie Wood
By this time (1560), teotl was often being expressed visually as an anthropomorphic face, which was a European introduction that stemmed from the colonizers' translation (for better or worse) of teotl as "deity" and the Christian "God" represented in part as the man, Jesus Christ. Perhaps the woman's face was seen by the scribe as sufficing here, but it is nothing like the other examples of teotl, below. What might come into play here is the way the nenetl (deity image) is often a female, given how the same word can mean female genitals and doll. In both Classic and Post-Classic sculptural remains one can find a female deity called Cihuateotl, which represented the spirits of women who died in childbirth.
There are too many examples to mention here of men's names that involve the word "cihuatl," such as this one does. But the examples would provide great fodder for a study of naming practices and gender.
Stephanie Wood
peo. civateotl.
Pedro Cihuateotl
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
woman, mujer, women, mujeres, eye closed, ojo cerrado, deities, deidades, fuerzas divinas, divinidades, fuerzas sagradas, nombres de hombres
cihuateo(tl), a weeping female supernatural, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cihuateotl
cihua(tl), woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cihuatl
teo(tl), a divine or sacred force, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teotl
nene(tl), a doll; a deity's image, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nenetl
La Divinidad Femenina, La Fuerza Divina
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 579r, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=237&st=image
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
