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Jade - the bogies of the earth monster...?

24th Apr 2025

The toponym for Oztoma(n), Codex Mendoza fol. 18r (detail)

For the Mexica/Aztecs, what we consider rare and precious metals and minerals they believed, quite logically, to be the physical evidence of the presence of gods, long ago, here on the earth. Thus gold was the poo of the sun god, and silver the poo of the moon goddess. So what about precious jade and turquoise...? (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

According to leading ancient Mesoamerica scholar Gordon Brotherston, precious stones such as jade and turquoise were believed to be the bogies of the caiman/alligator/dragon earth monster, Cipactli. In his in-depth study Feather Crown: The Eighteen Feasts of the Mexica Year, referring to the place sign (‘toponym’) of one of the key garrison towns of the Aztec empire, Oztoma(n) (learn more about it from the link below), he writes:-
’Oztoma is shown [in the Codex Mendoza - see main picture above] as a caiman cave-mouth (ozto-) in profile, with a blue nose, plus a hand affix (ma-itl, for the phonetic element -ma). The blueness of nose is striking, is cast as stone, and has the colour of the product for which the southern province defended by Oztoma was the major supplier, turquoise, precious stones being conceived of as the hardened snot of the caiman earth-beast.’

He adds: ‘The turquoise tribute appears to have been mined in the southern province... this mineral (xiuh-) was otherwise said to have been brought all the way from Pueblo mines far to the north’.
Intriguingly, later in Mendoza (fol. 37r), one of the items listed as tribute from the province of Tepequacuilco - which included Oztoman - is strings of jade beads (chalchihuitl), not turquoise. Oztoman (‘Cave Made by Hand’) held a strategic position on a hilltop not far from the frontier with the Tarascan empire - it was reconquered by the Mexica several times. The area was known as a key source of salt. Just as turquoise came mostly from the far north, jade came mostly from the Motagua River, far south in Guatemala.
So, whether turquoise or jade, the presence of precious ‘bogies of the earth monster’ in the region was a rare exception.

Source:-
• Feather Crown: the Eighteen Feasts of the Mexica Year by Gordon Brotherston, British Museum Research Publication no 154, London, 2005, p. 33.

Picture sources:-
• All images from the Codex Mendoza (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) scanned from the James Cooper Clark 1938 facsimile edition, Waterlow & Sons, London.

Aztecs

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Jade - the bogies of the earth monster...?

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