30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreWhy no bears in Aztec mythology?
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Joan Cline: Since bears - varieties of both black and Griz - are native to Northern Mexico and would seem to have thrived in the mountainous highlands I am hoping that you may be able to explain why they do not appear as one of the dominant species in Aztec mythology or calendar. Page 5 of Earthly Things, Book 11, of the Florentine Codex addresses their possible presence in a footnote to the definition of the word Cuitlachtli. (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
Picture 1 shows the cuitlachtli in the Florentine Codex. Commentators have offered different suggestions over the years as to its meaning: from grizzly bear to black bear to wolf. The text in the Codex itself reads:-
’It is of woolly, tangled, snarled fur, of dark, bushy tail. When it is already old, its tail is tingled. Everywhere its fur is matted. It is droplet-eared; round, broad of face, as if man-faced; thick, short of muzzle. Much does it wheeze; a great hisser is it. When it hisses to terrify one, it is as if a rainbow comes from its mouth. Very clever is it - a great stalker, a crouching spy. It stalks one; preys, hisses at one.’
In his pioneering book Las Imagénes de Animales en los Manuscritos Mexicanos y Mayas (originally in German, written in 1909) Eduard Seler devotes a couple of pages to this mysterious creature, which he suggests was a warrior figure associated by the Mexica, along with the eagle and the jaguar, with the sun. It played a significant role during the feast of Xipe Totec, god of spring, fertility and vegetation. In the festival, a man imitating the beast was in charge of tying captured warriors to the round gladiatorial stone around which they had to fight. The only glyph for the animal that Seler could locate was this (pic 2) tiny drawing from one of Alexander von Humboldt’s manuscripts. Seler concludes that it is a nocturnal creature, and links its tail symbolically to the rope used to tie the warriors to the stone. He suggests it could be an oso de Michoacán or what today Mexicans call a ‘honey bear’.
In her entry on Fauna in the authoritative Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America: an Encyclopaedia, Kitty Emery writes: ‘Bears, restricted to the highlands of Mexico, are represented by a single genus. Almost extinct in this area today, they may be the basis for the legendary Nahuatl monster cuetlachtli, a participant in the Mexican “gladiatorial sacrifice”.’ She adds, in a personal communication, a word of caution in this area: ‘taxonomic identifications of Mesoamerican fauna in iconography is notoriously tricky because the ancients often combined attributes of several creatures to depict emotions, characteristics, legends, and other things - they were less interested in representative art of whole creatures.’
So, it seems, ‘your guess is as good as ours’... We hope others may elucidate further.
Picture sources:-
• Pic 1: image from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 2: image scanned from Las Imagénes de Animales en los Manuscritos Mexicanos y Mayas by Eduard Seler, Casa Juan Pablos, Mexico City, 2004
• Pic 3: photo from Wikipedia (Mexican grizzly bear).
Comments (5)
Giovanni Padrone
3rd Jun 2024
In reality, the design of the Codex Florentine is very reminiscent of the Mexican ‘loberro’, i.e. the dog-wolf hybrid selected from the Teotihuacans to the Mexica. The reconstruction made by R. Valadez and others (I myself created my own 3D version) looks exactly like that animal. There is no doubt that it’s not a bear: the Spanish of the 16th century may have been bad designers, but they knew how to distinguish a bear from any other animal, including a Canid.
Eric Gonzalez
19th Aug 2021
I have read that in Mesoamerican astronomy the constellation for the bear was considered to be the Jaguar.
Mexicolore
We think you’re right. In her highly recommended little book ‘El culto a los astros entre los mexicas’, Mexican scholar Yólotl González Torres references the ‘Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas’ (written in the 1530s), which suggests that Ursa Major (The Great Bear) is Tezcatlipoca, who appears in the sky in the form of a jaguar. She notes that there are images of jaguar-stars in the Codex Bodley and other manuscripts.
Luke
4th Jul 2019
I know the term “cuetlachtli” translates as both “wolf” and “bear” in Nahuatl online dictionary and other sources, but with my previous question I meant what would be a literal, etymological translation of the term, is one is available. I’ve just looked into it, and it seems the cui- or cue- part signifies “to have sex with-” while the tlachtli part is the name of their famous ball-game and also a name for the ball court. Vry curious if they named the bear and wolf “have sex with/in a ball game/ball court!” But maybe the cui- part had proverbial meaning, as we say to, ahem, mess someone up/hurt them badly, and the ball-game reference implied a sporting context in reference to a cuitlacthi -skin wearing men being an attendant in the gladiatorial sacrifice to Xipe Totec mentioned above. So, if that’s the case, and the Nahuatl name for a bear/wolf is a reference to someone wearing the animal pelt during a sacrifice, I wonder what they called a bear/wolf BEFORE people started doing that? Anyway, I’m asking all as research for writing fiction, and the information and further sources provided here is great.
Luke
1st Aug 2018
What does the Nahuatl term “cuetlachtli” actually mean? Do we know what it translates as?
Mexicolore
Yes, it means wolf.
Joan Cline
4th Oct 2017
Thanks so much for your informative reply! I am the historical novelist behind the pseudonym William Sarabande, author of the Random House/Bantam Books eleven volume series of historical novels, “The First Americans”, and am currently drafting a new stand alone novel set in Mexico immediately following the fall of Tenochtitlan. As in all of my fiction, I rely heavily on research when shaping my characters, plot lines, and descriptive narrative. In short: the devil is in the details, so if there were bears in the highlands surrounding the great Valley of the Mexica in the times of which I write, I do not wish to set my characters journeying in these locations without evidencing at least some small concern about an animal that might prove a danger to them. As to why Bear - the dominant animal in all native American cosmologies outside of Mexico - is absent from the pantheon of Aztec gods, I remain mystified, for surely the animal was known to them on their journeys south out of Aztlan. Again, thank you for sleuthing on my behalf when those in Academia have so far chosen to ignore my query on this subject. Your site is an inspiration!
Mexicolore
That’s what we’re here for! Thanks so much for your positive feedback - it honestly keeps us going. And good luck with the new novel: we’d love to read it...!
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