chichimeca

[Susan Gilchrist]

Thinking about it a different way, I wonder if the
Coyoacan picture<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b73-1599-trial-Cholula-1519.0.jpg>relates
to the wolf
of Gubbio <http://www.assisiweb.com/foto/Pienza_SF_PB200102b.jpg>
and the story of the
wolf<http://www.wtu.edu/franciscan/pages/intro/gubbio.html>in the
Little
Flowers of
St. Francis <http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/flowers1.htm>.
In other words the horrible dogs the soldiers
brought with them must have made it hard for
Dominicans to explain the word play in "domini
canes" and even worse for Franciscans to tell the
story of how St. Francis was able to persuade a
wolf to be nice to people. Plus as the person on
the Dominican website explained, dogs can
stand for priests in general.
So maybe the rope that's attached to the dog in
the picture (or possible to the person the dog is
attacking?) hasn't got anything to do with
"chichi-mecatl" and instead is there to make it
clear that the situation is under the control of the
soldier. It's worse than a wild animal, represented
by the well-behaved coyote in the place sign (or
the dog glyph for one person's name).
That would make sense in European terms where
it would be commonplace to say men were capable
of worse behavior than animals. The idea of a
picture that's recognizable is something that I think
is also a European element (as in Pliny's biography
of Apelles), since the dog is drawn in a European
way.
I was thinking about the Coyoacan picture in terms
of the good dog-bad dog opposition in Murner's
Logica Memorativa<http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/hoeltgen/fig11.html>,
which might be something that
actually was brought to Mexico fairly early.
I'm still puzzled by the word chichi, even as a loan
word from another language. Were there just wolves,
coyotes, and the dogs we call chihuahuas? Did people
call European dogs perros?
Thank you to John Sullivan for the reference to the
gourd tree in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca and to
Pablo Garcia for the reference to the Gran
Chichimeca Xolotl.
Susan Gilchrist
http://elboscoblog.blogspot.com/
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