citlalin popoca (FCbk7f8v)
This compound glyph for a comet (citlalin popoca, “the star smokes”) shows a European style star with eight points. It is painted white. Whips and curls of brown smoke rise from the top of the star, which appears to be falling downward. Surrounding the star are short lines indicating rays of light, and these are washed over with layers of orange and yellow water colors.
Stephanie Wood
See below for another smoking star, i.e., comet, which also has eight points and curls of smoke rising from it. But that one is in a turquoise blue sky and accompanied by small round white circles that have the appearance of stars, too, but in an earlier, pre-contact style.
Stephanie Wood
Citlalin popoca,
citlalin popoca
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
star, stars, estrella, estrellas, cometa, cometas, cielo, humo, humear
citlalin, a star, when combined with popoca (to smoke), a comet, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/citlalin-2
popoca, to emit smoke, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/popoca
la cometa, o literalmente, la estrella humeante
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 7: The Sun, Moon and Stars", fol. 8v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/7/folio/8v/images/f1b0349a-78b... Accessed 23 June 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
