potent drug, or apply unguents to their bodies when they desired to travel afield. Says Acosta—
"Some of these sorcerers take any shape they choose, and fly through the air with wonderful rapidity and for long distances. They will tell what is taking place in remote localities long before the news could possibly arrive. The Spaniards have known them to report mutinies, battles, revolts, and deaths, occurring two hundred or three hundred leagues distant, on the very day they took place, or the day after.
"To practise this art, the sorcerers, usually old women, shut themselves in a house, and intoxicate themselves to the degree of losing their reason. The next day they are ready to reply to questions."
But all the terrors of Spanish ecclesiasticism could not put an end to the practice of magic among the Mexicans. The minor feats of sorcery flourished in every Mexican town and village. Sahagun tells us how a class of professional conjurers existed who could roast maize on a cloth without fire; produce a spring or well filled with fishes from nowhere; and after setting fire to and burning huts, restore them to their original condition. The conjurer, asserts the chronicler, might on occasion dismember himself and then achieve the miracle of self-resurrection!
Perhaps a higher caste of the naualli were the naualteteuctin, or "master magicians” who were also known as teotlauice, or "sacred companions in arms." Entrance to this very select order might only be attained after severe and prolonged tests of initiation. The head and patron of the society was the god Quetzalcoatl, or "Feathered Serpent,” a deity of that mysterious elder race, the Toltecs, who had been forced from the soil of Mexico by the inroads of the less cultured Aztecs and allied tribes.
Divination and the kindred arts were professed by the tonalpouhque, or diviners, whose principal instrument was the tonalamatl, the "book of days,” or calendar. When a child was born, one of these priest-seers was called in and requested
