[Aztlan] venus dog lord xolotl

[martha noyes]

I wanted to floow up on the Venus Dog Lord question I had and the answers several of you helped with.



I found Franke Neumann's "The Dragon and the Dog: Two Symbols of Time in Nahuatl Religion," in Numen, Vol. XXII, 1975 in which he talks about Xolotl and Venus at the time of the creation of the fifth sun.



In order to make the new sun begin to move, each of the gods (planets) had to die.  Xolotl, the dog form of the twin brother of Venus, was the last to die.  Quetzalcoatl takes the form of Xolotl and goes to the underworld where he retrieves human bones from which to make humankind again.   Neumann wrote:  “Quetzal-coatl may also be translated as ‘precious twin.’  This indicates that the morning and evening star are one and the same: the planet Venus, represented in the morning by Quetzalcoatl and in the evening by his twin brother, Xolotl . . . Xolotl is closely connected with the underworld and the dead.”  



He went on to say that although Xolotl is sometimes represented as whole dog, but that more often as the head of a dog with his ears eaten away.