padresme (Azca31)
This unglossed painting of a group of friars (which we are labeling with the modified Spanish loanword, padresme) features a detail of two friars, probably Spaniards, facing toward the viewer’s right. Their heads are largely bald (shaved on top), leaving just a fringe around the perimeter. They wear gray robes with the hoods pulled down off of their heads. Their skin is a flesh tone. As the contextualizing image shows, they are observing a Nahua ritual involving four flying men suspended from a tall vertical pole.
Stephanie Wood
In the early seventeenth century, Chimalpahin wrote about some Dominicans observing a ritual such as this, using the term cuauhpatlanihuac. Some forms of the term start with cua-, possibly referring to the human head (cuaitl). But some terms start with cuauh-, which may refer to flying in imitation of eagles (cuauhtli). The term padresme was a Nahuatlized loan from Spanish, already plural with the “s”, but then given an extra plural with the -me (or -meh) suffix from Nahuatl.
Stephanie Wood
post-1550, possibly from the early seventeenth century.
Jeff Haskett-Wood
padres, frailes, clerigos, teopixque
padre, priest or father (often pluralized in Nahuatl as padresme), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/padre
cuauhpatlanihuac, the palo de voladores ritual, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuauhpatlanihuac
padres
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Azcatitlan is also known as the Histoire mexicaine, [Manuscrit] Mexicain 59–64. It is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and hosted on line by the World Digital Library and the Library of Congress, which is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.”
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15280/?sp=31&st=image
The Library of Congress is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.” But please cite Bibliothèque Nationale de France and this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
