as Cihuatlampa, "the place or part of
the women." The souls of the women who had earned immortality were
supposed to dwell there, whilst the souls of the men resided in the East.
In the appendix to book III of Sahagun's Historia, it is described how,
according to the native belief, the souls of the male warriors hailed the
daily appearance of the sun above the eastern horizon, and escorted it to
Nepantla, the zenith. Here the souls of the women awaited it and assumed
the duty of escorting the sun to the western horizon, the symbol for which
was calli=the house. The above passage indicates that the native
philosophers imagined across the middle of the sky a line of demarcation,
separating the portions of the heaven respectively allotted to the male
and female souls. For four years after death these souls retained their
human form, and then, after passing through nine successive heavens,
entered into the celestial paradise where they assumed the forms of
different kinds of butterflies and humming-birds. The names of these are
enumerated in the Nahuatl text of Sahagun's Laurentian MS. (book III).(5)
The symbolism of the humming-bird has already been explained by a passage
cited from Gomara's Historia. In this connection it is extremely
interesting to find the humming-bird represented in the B. N. MS., as
sucking honey from a flower, which is attached by a cord, covered with
bird's down, to a bone, the symbol of death.

This peculiar but expressive group of symbols figures only on the
head-dresses of deities wearing certain other symbols, amongst which we
find the Eca-cozcatl and Eca-xonequilli the image of Ursa Minor, already
described.

The merest indication of the association of a circumpolar constellation
with the idea of death (disappearance) and resurrection (re-appearance) is
of special interest, since the ancient Mexicans located the Underworld,
the "place of the dead," in the North. Reflection showed, however, that
such an association could only have suggested itself to the minds of
star-observers living in southern latitudes, approximate to the equator,
or in localities where the northern horizon was more or less shut off from
view by intervening mountains. In such places Polaris would appear
comparatively close to the boundary-line of the northern sky so that the
Ursa constellations and Cassiopeia would be invisible to the local
astronomers at midnight during that period of the year when one or the
other of the