"The two brave captains, undaunted by the arrogant words by which she attempted to terrify them, responded: 'If you are as valiant as you describe yourself to be, we are not less so; but you are a woman and it is not meet that it should be said of us that we took up arms against women;' and without speaking further they left her, much affronted that a woman should challenge and defy them. And they kept silence about this occurrence so that their people should not know of it." Señor Alfredo Chavero (appendix, p. 125, to Duran's Historia, Mexico, 1880), commenting upon this passage, says: "It is impossible to doubt that this tradition refers to an important event in the history of the Aztec tribe.... I think it contains the record of a religious struggle."
The full significance of the narrative will become clear, I think, when the following points are dwelt upon. One thing is certain: here is a historical personage, a woman, who was termed _the sister_ of Huitzilopochtli, who evidently exerted a high authority and whose titles were actually the names of the highest female divinity. Sahagun (book VI, chap. 37) states that Quilaztli, a goddess, the same as Cihuacoatl, was the mother of all and was also named Tonant-zin="our mother." What is more significant still is that, in all historical records antedating the Conquest, a man bearing the feminine title of Cihuacoatl=serpent woman, is distinctly and repeatedly mentioned as the coadjutor of the Mexican ruler. Mr. Ad. Bandelier, in his careful study "On the social organization and mode of government of the Ancient Mexicans" (Twelfth Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of Am. Arch, and Ethn., Cambridge, 1879) to which I refer the reader, discusses the relative positions of Montezuma and the Cihuacoatl and states: "there is no doubt about their _equality_ of rank though their duties were somewhat different" (p. 665). This equality is illustrated by the records that both rulers shared the same privileges regarding dress. Thus they alone wore sandals and the Cihuacoatl is termed "the second or double of the king, his coadjutor" (Duran, chap. XXXII, p. 255 and Tezozomoc, chap. XL, p. 66). The latter author, however, gives the full "sacred title" as Tlil-Potonqui Cihuacoatl, literally, "the black-powdered woman-serpent" and we thus learn that, whilst Montezuma's garments were habitually blue like Huitzilopochtli, his coadjutor, like Tezcatlipoca, was associated with black. It is well known that some of the Mexican priests always smeared their bodies with black, which was therefore their special mark.