tecuacuilli (Mdz8r)
This element has been carved from the compound glyph for Tepecuacuilco. This element takes the shape of human head in profile, looking to our left. It may be a person taking on the guise of a divine force; perhaps he is a priest. It appears to be male with dark gray skin. He has dark hair with a white headband. At the back of the neck a ponytail is tied with a white tie in a knot, and the ponytail is wrapped with the same white tie from the back of the neck downward. Another strip of something white (a leather thong?) runs from the top of his head, down under the headband, and hangs down nearly as long as the ponytail.
Stephanie Wood
If the interpretation of tecuacuilli is correct, we are seeing a priest who presents himself as a divine force. Alfredo López Austin has described the tecuacuilli as a priest who has a shaved head, but this representation does not show a shaved head (see the attestations of our online dictionary, cited elsewhere in this record). There were priests called "tecuacuiltin" who represented a tecuacuilli, what Diego Durán called an ídolo (see: The History of the Indies of New Spain, 1994, p. 156). The Codex Mendoza has three of these priest-like figures, each one with slight variations, so it is worth examining the various attestations.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
priest, priests, idol, idols, images, statues, deity, deities
tecuacuil(li), statue, image, or figurine, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecuacuilli
a priest representing a deity
sacerdote que representa una deidad
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 8 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 25, of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
