Inre the temacpalitoti

The obvious question when faced with the recurring figure of "the dancer with a dead woman's forearm" is: why did people keep doing that?

Obviously it's because it worked particularly well. It's not hard to see why. The temacpalitoti is apparently able to put people into a sort of trance by means of a dance performed with a woman's severed arm. Well, we know from the recent example of Milton H. Erickson that a sorcerer's unusual handshake or greeting suffice to put a person into a trance with their strangeness. Clearly someone who ambushed you dancing a fucking corpse arm dance would be able to put the whammy on you with relative ease.

That a dead woman's arm exercised this kind of power over such a wide segment of the Aztec population might tell us something interesting about the social psychology of the Empire. What is the symbolic value of the dead woman's arm?