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The Religious Use of Various Stones: Mexico

In the native languages of Mexico and Central America the name chalchihuitl most frequently designates jadeite, but it appears sometimes to have been applied to other stones of a green or greenish-blue color, such as the so-called amazon-stone from the region of the Amazon River, and even occasionally to the turquoise. Thus the talismanic value of the chalchihuitl seems to have depended rather upon its hue and its rarity, than upon its mineralogical character; indeed, among primitive peoples, stones of the same, or closely similar color, although of different composition, often bore the same name, and were conceived to have the same virtues whether talismanic or therapeutic. Writing of the rich gifts sent by Montezuma to Cortes upon the latter's arrival at San Juan de Ulua (1519), Bernal Diaz de Castillo mentions "four chalchiuites, a kind of green stone of great value, and much esteemed by them [the Indians], more highly, indeed, than we esteem the emerald. They are of a green color." And he proceeds to state that each one of these stones was said to be worth a great weight of gold.

The statue of the earth-goddess Couatlicue, found in the village of Cozcatlan, Mexico, and now preserved in the National Museum of Mexico, shows, inserted in the cheek, a disk of jadeite. Green seems thus to have been the color sacred to this goddess, which may remind us of the attribution of the green emerald to Venus. Indeed, green as the color of foliage and plants must naturally have suggested itself as eminently appropriate for an earth-goddess, just as its significance as a symbol of life and generation connected it with the Goddess of Love.