tlecuezalotl (FCbk12f1r)

This iconographic example, featuring a black and white sketch of a towering tongue of fire (tlecuezalotl), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. The contextualizing image shows a group of five Nahua men, three on the viewer’s right and two on the left, wearing cloaks and loincloths, facing a large tongue of fire full of tiny flames, shooting up into the sky, which is filled with starts. The Nahuatl text relays that the towering tongue of fire (tlecuezalotl) was wide at the bottom (on the ground) and narrow at the top (in the sky), and it resembled the “light of dawn.” Alonso de Molina’s Spanish translation calls it a “bonfire” and “flames of fire.” The whole scene is depicted in a rectangular box, and the tongue of fire goes completely from the bottom lines to the top lines. In all there are probably more than twenty flames that comprise this fire. They look almost like feathers. The text explains that this was a frightening omen that occurred ten years before the Spaniards landed on the coast of Mexico. The men watching this huge fire were pointing at it and, according to the keywording team of the Digital Florentine Codex, they were ululating (making a sound while hitting their lips with their hands), which was called tenhuitequi in Nahuatl. The scene of this omen has a gray grounding band of earth and a gray sky band. The sky band contains seventeen white stars, painted in a European way, each one with six or seven points.