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24th Dec 2021
Stone carving of a butterfly, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City
Who would have thought that that gentlest of creatures, the butterfly, could also be, in ancient Mesoamerica, a symbol of fire, war, paradise, flowers, heroes, of the souls of warriors who fell on the battlefield or in human sacrifice, of women who died in childbirth... Far more prevalent in the iconography of central Mexican cultures (than of the ancient Maya, for whom bats, in contrast, were more important), its symbolism goes back to Teotihuacan, and beyond... (Written by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
The great city-state of Teotihuacan has long been considered the source of the most realistic imagery of butterflies, a tradition dating back to the third century CE (Turner & Mathiowetz 2021: 11), but Taube has shown that ‘anthropomorphic personages with butterfly wings’ in Olmec iconography suggest that notions of a floral, butterfly-filled paradise (common throughout Mesoamerica and often referred to by scholars as a Flower World) ‘were well developed by the Middle Formative Period (900-400 BCE)’ (ibid: 8). A good illustration of how ubiquitous butterfly imagery was throughout Mesoamerica comes centuries later from the fortified city of Xochicalco, where a recent survey of stones there bearing animal carvings found that 40 out of 286 were of butterflies (Turner 2021: 167). Even today, butterflies rank among bees, grasshoppers and scorpions as the most commonly depicted invertebrates in Mexico’s deep-rooted folk mask culture (Cordry 1980: 208).
Connections between butterflies and flowers might seem predictable - fragile, colourful, joyous, graceful, vibrant living beings long associated with fertility, abundance, warm daylight, sensuality, and with deities overseeing this domain: Xochiquetzal (Flower Quetzal) and Xochipilli (Flower Prince) both commonly sport stylised butterfly nosepieces and/or headdress adornments. The former is depicted on a stunning feather-mosaic shield as a metamorphosed butterfly flying skywards (pic 2). The gentle, vulnerable quality of these symbols is confirmed by the fact that butterfly-shaped pectorals are never shown in the codices worn by warlike gods such as Huitzilopochtli or Tezcatlipoca (Olivier 2003: 71). However, the attraction of flowers and butterflies to the (light and heat of the) sun belies an aspect of their symbolism that comes as a shock, for the agitated quivering of a butterfly’s wings also resembles the flickering of flames...
... in the same way that flowers can be seen to ‘burst into flames’ while fire can ‘blossom’ (Hill 1977: 122). Séjourné goes further: ‘This brilliant insect IS fire... in the codices he represents flame’ (1978: 104) - and fire was an ancient Mesoamerican symbol of and, for the Mexica when combined with its opposite force water, metaphor for war. The parallel with flames is one thing, you may be thinking, but war...? One common theme could be bravery: ‘An Aztec text, recorded by Fray Andrés de Olmos, portrays the mundane event of a moth or butterfly falling into a flame as a heroic act of self-sacrifice. The passage also mentions that by this selfless act, the butterfly metamorphoses into a flame. Butterflies commonly represent fire in Central Mexican iconography...’ (Taube 2001: 107).
Warriors - just like flowers and butterflies - were expected to live short but glorious lives; it was the pioneering 19th century German scholar Eduard Seler who drew attention - referring to the appendix to chapter 3 in Book 3 of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex - to the notion that butterflies represented to the Aztecs the souls of dead heroes, of warriors who fell on the battlefield or died in sacrifice, or of women dying in childbirth (who were also considered warriors) (2004: 300). Butterflies and flowers were ‘central components in the solar war cult’ (Taube 2001: 107) and warriors can be seen bearing butterfly paraphernalia into battle, such as a butterfly-shaped pectoral on the chest (see pic 4).
This burst of glory - what today we might refer to as ‘going out with a bang’ - stems too in part from the dramatic life cycle of a butterfly, as it suddenly erupts from dormant chrysalis stage into vigorous life. Mirroring this, dead warriors were wrapped in cloth bundles and burned, their souls flying up to accompany the sun.
Again, this belief long pre-dates the Mexica: several scholars have argued that ‘the prevalence of butterflies in conjunction with martial and mortuary imagery at Teotihuacan indicates that fallen warriors became apotheosised as butterflies and birds’ (Turner & Mathiowetz 2021: 11). At Tula, home of Toltec culture, giant Atlantean statues depicting warriors clearly show butterfly pectorals on their chests (pic 5). Following the duality so fundamental to Mesoamerican cosmovision, male souls carried the sun in the morning up to its midday zenith, whilst their female counterparts did their share during the second half of the day (you can see this symbolically on the two fire serpents carved round the outside edges of the great Mexica Sunstone). Butterflies are daytime creatures, most active in the midday sun. Seler envisaged the female cihuateteo (souls of women who died in childbirth) as nighttime butterflies (colourful moths?). Both were believed to inhabit a special paradise, Tamoanchan (Chinchilla 2021: 107), described by Hill as ‘the garden world of incarnation’ (1977: 128) and by Pasztory as ‘the paradisiacal place of origin lost by humanity’ (1983: 201).
Warriors carried butterfly symbols into battle in even more prominent form - as large, banner-style back devices, depicted in several folios of the Codex Mendoza (pic 6).
But it was the stylised butterfly pectoral and nose ornament that carried the longer pedigree, the latter - called xiuhpapalotl (turquoise butterfly) in Nahuatl - being found on early censers from Teotihuacan. Placed over nose and mouth, it may have represented the floral ‘breath soul’ of the deceased (Turner 2021: 154), not just of warriors but more widely of ancestors.
The inclusion of turquoise in the pectoral’s name is anything but random: prized symbol of preciousness, the stone’s striking beauty and its profound associations with the sun and with war(riors) matches that of the butterfly - a parallel found commonly in song metaphors, ‘where the glitter of iridescence in the wings of hummingbirds, butterflies and dragonflies and in precious stones and shells is a significant theme’ (Hill 1977: 118). Both fall into a category of creatures and features in nature that are emblematic of the passage from life to death. Hill explains: ‘Coloured flowers and other brightly coloured and iridescent natural phenomena, including dawn and sunset, rainbows, hummingbirds, butterflies and other colourful and iridescent insects, shells, crystals, and coloured lights and flames, are chromatic symbols’ (ibid: 117).
It is this theme of profound transformation - with all its paradoxical underpinnings - that lies at the heart of the butterfly’s symbolism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the very name of the deity most associated with the subject of this short study: Itzpapalotl, or ‘Obsidian Butterfly’. The name may sound magical (DH Lawrence once wrote ‘Say it and you will see it does good to your soul’), and yet ‘she is at the same time the dark, enduring rock and the frail, evanescent wing’ (Nicholson 1959: 90). She is indeed a fearsome deity, associated with war and sacrifice by obsidian knife, with the paradise of Tamoanchan, with the god Mixcoatl (‘Cloud Serpent’) and hence with the night, with the souls of dead warriors and with the Chichimecs, with the day sign Vulture - itself linked to fire, the underworld and death.... What a combination: gentle butterfly and potentially deadly obsidian.
Itzpapalotl has been described as ‘one of the most visually striking patrons in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis’ (Quiñones Keber 1995: 182) (see pic 8), ‘bearing macabre symbols of night and death’. Unusually she wears both skirt and loincloth, symbolic of female and male qualities, and the skull mask on her back is ‘typically worn by earth deities’. With her skeletal aspects and the several flint knives (tecpatl in Nahuatl) as adornments, she is certainly an intimidating, even bellicose being. As one of the thirteen Quecholli (Brotherston, 1995: 132, calls them ‘airborne creatures of augury’) - calendrical figures that match the day numbers in the ritual calendar and that possibly represent the thirteen heavens above the earth (Byland 1993: xxx) - Butterfly is the exception (all the others are birds), occupying the central position in the sequence. At its centre too is a (red) disc - a star or eye representing the soul of a dead warrior (Seler).
As the ultimate exemplar of transformation through flight, the butterfly must also be a supreme symbol of duality, as Michel Graulich explains: ‘Nothing illustrates the transmutation of the goddess in a better way: from obsidian... considered as cold, nocturnal and coming from the underworld, she becomes a white stone of celestial origin, containing a divine sparkle... Thus the goddess in a way becomes energy, the double, the nahualli [companion spirit] [of Mixcoatl]’ (Olivier 2003: 112).
With its mesmerising pattern of motion, the butterfly has perhaps inevitably also been linked to the fundamental Mesoamerican symbol Movement - and by extension to the ritual ballgame. Insect and symbol combine (pic 10) to evoke ‘undulant, circling, rocking, oscillating or rolling movement, representing the space-time continuum, that is, the passage of time in space’ (Hunt 1977: 59).
This has led some scholars to suggest that the offerings found in recent years in the Templo Mayor - such as the stone relief illustrated in Picture 10 - ‘could represent a physical reminder of the transformation of souls into birds and butterflies’, implying that the main Plaza in Tenochtitlan was ‘at once a dance plaza, a symbolic battlefield, a garden of butterfly souls surrounded by flowers, and the last place that war captives glimpsed before they were marched up the stairs to be sacrificed’ (González López and Vázquez Vallín 2021: 259).
If ‘the Aztec flower world was both garden and battlefield’ (Turner 2021: 312), we should end by emphasising the life-affirming reproductive associations that butterflies have always carried with them in Mesoamerica, expressed simply by Kelley Hays-Gilpin:-
’The corn grows because the butterflies, flowers and people encourage it to do so with song and prayer that bring rain and warmth’ (2021: 316).
Sources/references:-
• Byland, Bruce E. (1993): Introduction and Commentary in The Codex Borgia - A Full-Colour Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, Dover Publications Inc.
• Brotherston, Gordon (1995): Painted Books from Mexico, British Museum Press
• Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo (2021): ‘The Goddess in the Garden: An Exploration of Gender in the Flower Worlds of the Pacific Coast of Guatemala’ in Mathiowetz & Turner, op cit
• Cordry, Donald (1980): Mexican Masks, University of Texas Press
• Foch, Élisabeth (2008): Bestiaire Aztèque, Petra Ediciones/Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
• González López, Ángel and Vázquez Vallín, Lorena (2021): ‘The Flower World in Tenochtitlan: Sacrifice, War and Imperialistic Agendas’ in Mathiowetz & Turner, op cit
• Hays-Gilpin, Kelley (2021): ‘Epilogue: “It’s Raining Feather-Flower Songs: Commentary on Current Flower Worlds Research’, in Mathiowetz & Turner, op cit
• Hill, Jane (1992): ‘The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan’ Journal of Anthropological Research 48(2): 117-144
• Hunt, Eva (1977): The Transformation of the Hummingbird, Cornell University Press, London
• Nicholson, Irene (1959): Firefly in the Night, Faber and Faber, London
• Olivier, Guilhem (2008): Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God, University Press of Colorado
• Pasztory, Esther (1983): Aztec Art, Harry N. Abrams, New York
• Quiñones Keber, Eloise (1995): Codex Telleriano-Remensis, facsimile edition, University of Texas Press
• Séjourné, Laurette (1978): Burning Water - Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico, Thames & Hudson Ltd.
• Seler, Eduard (2004) Las Imágenes de Animales en los Manuscritos Mexicanos y Mayas (1st. ed. in German, 1909-10), Casa Juan Pablos, Centro Cultural S.A. de C.V.
• Taube, Karl and Miller, Mary (1993): The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames & Hudson Ltd.
• Taube, Karl (2001): ‘Butterfly’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures ed. Davíd Carrasco, vol. 1, Oxford University Press
• Turner, Andrew D. and Mathiowetz, Michael D. (2021): ‘Introduction - Flower Worlds: A Synthesis and Critical History’ in Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, eds. Michael D. Mathiowetz & Andrew D. Turner, University of Arizona Press
• Turner, Andrew D. (2021): ‘Beauty in Troubled Times: The Flower World in Epiclassic Mexico, A.D. 600-900’ in Mathiowetz & Turner, op cit.
Picture sources:-
• Main: Platform with Butterflies and Symbols of Sacrifice and Warfare, stone, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City - photo by Ana Laura Landa/Mexicolore
• Pic 1: image scanned from Pre-Hispanic Cooking by Ana M. de Benítez, Ediciones Euroamericanas, Mexico City, 1974, p.43
• Pic 2: image scanned from Códice Tepetlaoztoc (Códice Kingsborough) Estado de México, Estudio de Perla Valle, El Colegio Mexiquense, Toluca, 1994
• Pic 3: image scanned from our own copy of the ADEVA facsimile edition of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, Graz, Austria, 1987
• Pic 4: image scanned from Mockeries and Metamorphoses (see above)
• Pic 5: photo and drawing from Wikipedia (Atlantean figures)
• Pic 6: images scanned from our own copy of the James Cooper Clark facsimile edition of the Codex Mendoza (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), London, 1938
• Pic 7: image scanned from our own copy of the Codex Borbonicus (ADEVA facsimile edition, Graz, Austria, 1974)
• Pic 8: image scanned from Los Dioses Supremos by Salvador Mateos Higuera, Enciclopedia Gráfica del México Antiguo, Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Mexico, 1992
• Pic 9: image scanned from The Codex Borgia - A Full-Colour Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, Dover Publications Inc., 1993
• Pix 10 & 12: images scanned from Flower Worlds (see above)
• Pic 11: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 13: image scanned from Mexican Masks by Donald Cordry, University of Texas Press, 1980.
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Stone carving of a butterfly, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City
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