Serpent labret with articulated tongue

Serpent labret with articulated tongue
Serpent labret with articulated tongue, with tongue extended
Material	Gold, copper, silver
Weight	1.81 ounces
Created	c. 1300–1521 AD
Present location	Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Registration	2016.64

The serpent labret with articulated tongue is a gold Aztec lip plug from the mid-second millennium AD. Designed to be inserted in a piercing below the lower lip, it depicts a fanged serpent preparing to strike, with a bifurcated tongue hanging from its mouth. The tongue, which is moveable and retractable, would have swung from side to side with its wearer's movements. According to a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the labret is "perhaps the finest Aztec gold ornament to survive the crucibles of the sixteenth century".^[1]

Labrets were associated with the nobility in Aztec culture, worn by rulers and meted out as honours; even then, gold labrets likely remained the province of the élite. Gold was a hallmark of divinity—"the excrement of the sun", left behind as it traversed the underworld at night—and eloquence a hallmark of nobility: the title for the leader of the Aztec Empire was huei tlahtoani, literally "Great Speaker". The serpent, too, may represent Xiuhcoatl, the fire serpent wielded as a weapon by the sun god Huītzilōpōchtli. Worn prominently on the face, the labret likely symbolised the wearer's status and eloquence, and possibly divine right.

The labret is dated to 1300–1521, the period during which the Aztecs flourished. Consisting of a gold–copper–silver alloy, it was made by lost-wax casting; although such goldwork is traditionally ascribed to Mixtec makers, the Aztecs, particularly by the time of the Aztec Empire, may have also had their own sophisticated goldworking workshops. The labret was known by 1937, when it was placed on long-term loan at the American Museum of Natural History; it spent much of its succeeding history in private hands but on display, then was purchased in 2016 by the Met.