Superstitious? (3)

Whilst the Aztecs developed an efficient system of public ‘latrines’ (toilets) in Tenochtitlan - there were plenty of loos placed on canal bridges (the poo dropped down to special canoes waiting underneath for trained poo-gatherers to collect it and ship it all off to be fertilizer in the fields) - at home it was a different story. Without a ‘privvy’, you were forced to leave your house and walk by moonlight either to one of the public toilets or - more likely - to any patch of wasteland nearby. The risk? You might bump into Cuitlapanton, a midget girl (‘small like a sandal, a little cooking pot; a squat dwarf, pressed down like dung’), who went creeping (‘waddling’) along the ground. To see her was an omen of death to anyone vulnerable to such things: if you were brave enough not to believe in the power of the omen, then at the very least she only ‘terrified’ you...!

• Image scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro facsimile edition of the Florentine Codex, Madrid, 1994

• Info from The Florentine Codex, Book V (Eds. Charles E. Dibble & Arthur J. O. Anderson), School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1979 and Historia de la Vida Cotidiana en México, vol. I (Ed. Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo), Colegio de México, 2004.