flags, which were generally put upon corpses prepared for cremation. She is sometimes seen to be thrusting a mummy into the earth, and there is a reference to her as the “earth-monster.”
It would, perhaps, be hardly too much to say that in ancient Mexico all magicians were regarded as Vampires, a tradition which long survived even after the conversion of the country so that one of the regular questions which the Spanish priests used to put to those of whose faith they were suspicious was: “Art thou a sorcerer? Dost thou suck the blood of others?” That such interrogations were not superfluous is shown by the terrible occurrence at the end of the sixteenth century when Cosijopii, formerly King of Tehuantepec, was discovered amid a throng of his ancient courtiers and a concourse of people taking part in an idolatrous ceremony of peculiar horror. Even in the seventeenth century the priests of the Province of Oaxaca learned that numbers of Indians congregated secretly at night to worship their idols. It is true that the famous letter of Bishop Zumárraga to the Chapter of Tolosa, written in 1531 says that: “quingenta deorum templa sunt destructa et plusquam uicesies mille figurae daemonum, quas adorabant, fractae et combustae.” But Fray Mendieta mentions certain idols of paper[57] which seemed to have been for a while preserved, and possibly new figures were clandestinely sculptured in the traditional manner to supply the place of those which had been so properly and so religiously destroyed. Such ceremonials were, of course, clear witchcraft, and the Mexican sorcerer or naualli seems to have been credited with taking the shape of a wer-coyote, the prairie wolf, as well as to have practised vampirism. So here too in Mexico we find a close connexion between the wer-animal and the Vampire. Sahagun notes: “The naualli or magician is he who frightens men and sucks the blood of children during the night.” It appears that these sorcerers lived in separate huts built of wood very brightly painted, and that those who wished to bargain with them were wont to resort to these accursed houses under the cover of dark. Not superfluously then does the Vade mecum of a missionary who was engaged in the work of evangelizing the native Mexicans include such questions as: “Art thou a diviner?” “Dost thou suck the blood of others, or dost thou wander about at night, calling upon the demons to help thee?”
