This is clearly an officiating ritual with supernatural attributes. They correspond to those of the duck, a bird to which Mesoamerican thought attributed notable qualities to from the underworld to the celestial plain. The figure is a musician and perhaps a dancer also. He is largely covered by his attire, but can be recognized as a male figure because in the plastic art of the shaft tomb culture, musical instruments are played by men. The personage beats and scrapes the flat part of a turtle shell. Although a fragment of its hand and the striker has been lost, it is assumed that this was a dear antler.
What visually stands out the most is the large hemispherical helmet and duck mask. On its longitudinal axis the helmet has three long flat-tipped crests. The configuration of the head could indicate that the species represented is the Lophodytes cucullatus, a diving duck with a continuous crest in the form of a fan, called ehecatototl, “bird of wind”, in the Florentine Code. The rest of the attire consists of a necklace with a circular pendant with two small openings to hang it, resembling a stone object or the shell of a bivalve mollusk.
He wears a V-neck shirt with no sleeves and tassels on the arms; a type of skirt with a triangular front-side, which at the back has lost another element of the bird: the tail. The legs appear uncovered, except for a pair of disk adornments that appear horizontally and only go around a section of the limbs. A pair of the same type of adornments is visible on each arm. The face of the duck reminds us of the god of wind, which in the Mexica vault is called Ehécatl, and is one of the dedications of Quetzalcoatl, since images of this deity only show a mouth mask with a beak.
Beyond the association with divinity, the symbolic values of this bird refer to the composition of the cosmos and the interaction between their vertical strata. As revealed by Gabriel Espinosa Pineda, in the Mesoamerican world view the duck is tied to the wind, like with other aquatic birds which on the one hand are expert divers, but on the other, their anatomy makes it difficult for them to walk, thus, its natural element is the air or water, frequently under it. As the sea and large bodies of water are associated with the underworld, they penetrate below the earth, and given that the lower level of the cosmos has an aquatic nature, the water is perceived as rising from below, not falling from above. Even the clouds come from within the earth, from the underworld.
In addition to water, wind is another flow originating from this stratum. It rises above to blow the clouds and announce rain; using this logic, aquatic birds, which possess attributes of the wind, are capable of penetrating the underworld and emerging flying up into the air, almost without ing through the earth. We must consider that it is most likely that this image was deposited in a space with mythical underworld values: an artificially made underground cave, that is, a shaft and chamber tomb. From a cultural point of view, the presence of the man-duck in that setting seems natural.
In addition to its direct ties to the overworld, the fact that it is playing a turtle shell alludes to the central axis, given that it symbolizes the dry surface of the earth. The image evokes the connection between the three main levels of the universe, with emphasis on the movement of water, inasmuch as the represented musical ritual sought to propitiate rain. The same man-duck, by connoting the wind which lifts the clouds that herald the rain to the sky, underlines this intention by beating the turtle shell since, as Michel Quenon and Genevieve Le Fort point out, the sound produced simulates thunder, which clearly precedes rainfall. Such an idea that drums made from turtle shells would serve to summon storm clouds and rain has been expressed as relating to Mayan culture.
The same concept has been recorded between the Coras and Huicholes. Both peoples settled in the west comprise a cultural substrate which, from my perspective, is inherited from the shaft tomb culture. The Naayarite and Wixaritari offer overwhelming current evidence of the continuity of the world view that characterizes Mesoamerica. The musician-duck image we address here, which from the aquatic underworld makes water flow upward by beating on the turtle shell, evidences in turn that in the art of that ancient culture a very original style of the typical Mesoamerican ideology was expressed. One of the purposes of the musical ritual would have been agricultural fertility.
