Tlepapalotl (MH649v)

Louise Burkhart (The Slippery Earth, 1989, 207) writes of tlepapalotl as "the moth that flies into the fire and dies" and "was used in indigenous moral discourse to denote the angry person who seeks conflict with others." There is a verb identified by Barry Sell called tlepapalochihua, meaning "to plunge into the fire like a butterfly." The Gran Diccionario Náhuatl gives tlepapalotl as a "butterfly of the night" (my translation of the French from Wimmer 2004). In Seler’s study of the Aubin Tonalamatl, he makes potential associations between the tlepapalotl and tlachinolli. See Eduard Seler, The Tonalamatl of the Aubin Collection, 1901, p. 72; and, in his study of Codex Vaticanus No. 3773 (Codex Vaticanus B), published in 1903, he says that the tlepapalotl "is a synonym of the tlexochtli," p. 29.