Tonahual (MH704r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Tonahual (perhaps “Our Nahualli” or “Our Animal Spirit”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a nude human figure in profile, facing right. One arm is bent at the elbow but reaching forward and slightly upward. Another larger arm reaches from behind the person and around the neck. The hand on this arm is much larger than the hand of the standing person.
Stephanie Wood
This drawing may intend to suggest that a spirit has grabbed ahold of a vulnerable person (given the nudity, which seems to suggest vulnerability in various glyphs in this manuscript as shown, below). Another glyph for Tonahual (MH659r) shows the heads of a man and a woman facing each other closely. What may be her arm (again, with a large hand) reaches toward him. This large, grasping hand in both examples of Tonahual could have a double reading, referring to possession (To-) and to the phonetic “hua” that could indicate “-nahual.”
Stephanie Wood
lurēzo tonaval
Lorenzo Tonahual
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
nahuales, posesivo, nombres de hombres
to- (first person plural possessive pronoun), our, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/node/175783
nahual(li), a shape-changing spirit, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nahualli
Nuestro Espíritu Animal
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 704r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=486&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).
