The toothed vagina motif is not an iconographic peculiarity of Tetitla—it appears in cultures as distant from one another as ancient Greek, Japanese, Amazonian, and Mesoamerican, which has led researchers to consider it one of the archetypal images of humanity's relationship with the earth as a simultaneously creative and destructive force. In all these traditions, the teeth do not represent aggression but the earth's capacity to swallow and to give birth in the same act: what descends into the earth dies, and what emerges from it is born—and that ambivalence is precisely what the symbol condenses. The shells alternating with the scrolls in this mural reinforce that reading: the shell is a symbol of the aquatic origin of life in Mesoamerica. The five drops shared by the central shell link the image to the precious liquid—water and blood—which in the Mesoamerican worldview are manifestations of the same vital principle.