Latin-American Mythology (Illustrated Edition). Hartley Burr Alexander
Mother, is a giver of life, but Earth, the cavernous, is Lord of Death. The Mexicans are second to no people in the grimness of their representations of this power. As Tepeyollotl ("Heart of the Mountain"), earth's cavern, it is the spotted jaguar monster which leaps up out of the west to seize the declining sun, and its roars may be heard in the echoing hills. As Tlaltecutli ("Lord of the Earth") it is the hideous Toad with Gaping Jaws, which must be nourished with the blood of sacrificed men, precisely as the Sun above must be nurtured; for the Mexican idea of warfare seems to have been that it must be waged to keep perpetual the ascending vapours and the descending flow from the hearts of sacrificed victims, that Tonatiuh and Tlaltecutli might gain sustenance in heaven and in earth.43
But the grimmest figure is that of Hades himself, Mictlantecutli, the skeleton God of the Dead—also called, says Sahagun, Tzontemoc ("He of the Falling Hair"). Sahagun describes the journey to the abode of this divinity. When a mortal—man, woman, child, lord, or thrall—died of disease, his soul descended to Mictlan, and beside the corpse the last words were spoken:44 "Our son, thou art finished with the sufferings and fatigues of this life. It hath pleased Our Lord to take thee hence, for thou hast not eternal life in this world: our existence is as a ray of the sun. He hath given thee the grace of knowing us and of associating in our common life. Now the god Mictlantecutli, otherwise called Acolnauacatl or Tzontemoc, as also the goddess Mictecaciuatl, hath made thee to share his abode. We shall all follow thee, for it is our destiny, and the abode is broad enough to receive the whole world. Thou wilt be heard of no longer among us. Behold, thou art gone to the domain of darkness, where there is neither light nor window. Never shalt thou come hither again, nor needst thou concern thyself for thy return, for thine absence is eternal. Thou dost leave thy children poor and orphaned, not knowing what will be their end nor how they will support the fatigues of this life. As for us, we shall not delay to go to join thee there where thou wilt be." Similar words were spoken to the relatives: "Hath this death come because some being wisheth us ill or mocketh us? Nay, it is because Our Lord hath willed that such be his end." Then the body was wrapped, mummy-form, and a few drops of water were poured upon the head: "Lo, the water of which thou hast made use in this life"; and a vessel of water was presented: "This for thy journey." Next, certain papers were laid before the body in due order: "Lo, with this thou shalt pass the two clashing mountains." "With this thou shalt pass the road where the serpent awaiteth thee." "With this thou shalt pass the place of the green lizard." "Lo, wherewithal thou shalt cross the eight deserts." "And the eight hills." "And behold with what thou canst traverse the place of the winds that bear obsidian knives." Thus the perils of the underworld were to be passed and the soul, arrived before Mictlantecutli, was, after four years, to fare on until he should arrive at Chiconauapan, the "Nine-Fold Stream" of the underworld. Across this he would be borne by the red dog which, sacrificed at his grave, had been his faithful companion; and thence master and hound would enter into the eternal house of the dead, Chiconamictlan, the "Ninth Hell."
PLATE XI.
Green stone image of Mictlantecutli, the skeleton god of death and of the underworld. The original is in the Stuttgart Museum.
Yet not all who died pursued this journey. To the terrestrial paradise, Tlalocan, the abode of Tlaloc, rich with every kind of fruit and abundant with joys, departed those slain by lightning, the drowned, victims of skin-diseases, and persons who died of dropsical affections—a heterogeneous lot whose company is to be ascribed to the various attributes of the rain-gods. With them should be included victims sacrificed to these deities, who perhaps themselves became rain-makers and servants of the Lords of the Rain. More fortunate still were they who ascended to the mansions of the Sun—those who fell in war, those who perished on the sacrificial altar or were sacrificed by burning, and women who died in child-birth. Those warriors, it was said, whose shields had been pierced could behold the Sun through the holes; to the others Tonatiuh was invisible; but all entered into the sky gardens, whose trees were other than those of this world; and there, after four years, they were transformed into birds of bright plumage, drawing the honey from the celestial blossoms.
It was in the eastern heavens that the souls of warriors found their paradise. Here they met the Sun as he rose in the morning, striking their bucklers with joyous cries and accompanying him on his journey to the meridian, where they were encountered by the War Women of the western heavens, the Ciuateteo, or Ciuapipiltin, souls of women who had gone to war or had died in childbed. These escorted the Sun down the western sky, bearing him on a gorgeous palanquin, into Tamoanchan ("the House of the Descent").45 At the portals of the underworld they were met by the Lords of Hell, who conducted the Sun into their abode; for when it ceases to be day here, the day begins in the realm below. Possibly it was from this association with the underworld powers that the Ciuateteo acquired their sinister traits, for they were sometimes identified with the descending stars, the Tzitzimime, which follow the Sun's descent and become embodied as Demons of the Dark.
But the Sun has yet another comrade on his journey. As the soul of the dead Aztec is accompanied and guided into the nether world by his faithful dog, so the Sun has for companion the dog Xolotl. Xolotl is a god who presides over the game of tlachtli, the Mexican ball-game, analogous to tennis, in which a rubber ball was bounced back and forth in a court, not hurled or struck by hand, but by shoulder or thigh. As with other Indian ball-games, this was regarded as symbolic of the sun's course, and Xolotl was said to play the game on a magic court, which could be nothing else than the heavens. He was, moreover, deity of twins and other monstrous forms (for twins were regarded as monstrous), and it was humpbacks and dwarfs that were sacrificed to the Sun on the occasion of an eclipse, when it was deemed that the solar divinity had need of them. A myth narrated by Sahagun possibly explains or reflects this belief. In the beginning of things there was no sun and no moon; but two of the gods immolated themselves, and from their ashes rose the orbs of night and day, although neither sun nor moon as yet had motion. Then all the gods resolved to sacrifice themselves in order to give life and motion to the heavenly bodies. Xolotl alone refused: "Gods, I will not die," he said; and when the priest of the sacrifice came, he fled, transforming himself into a twin-stalked maize plant, such as is called xolotl; discovered, he escaped again and assumed the form of a maguey called mexolotl; and evading capture a third time, he entered the water and became a larva, axolotl—only to be found and offered up. A second version of the legend, recorded by Mendieta, makes Xolotl the sacrificial celebrant who gave death to the other gods and then to himself that the sun might have life. In still another tale, recorded also by Mendieta, it is the dog Xolotl who is sent to the Underworld for bones of the forefathers, that the first human pair might be created; but being pursued by Mictlantecutli, Xolotl stumbled, and the bone that he carried was dropped and broken into fragments, from which the various kinds of people sprang. Tales such as these are strongly reminiscent of the coyote stories of the northern continent, and it is possible that Xolotl himself is only a special form of Coyote, the trickster and transformer, especially as Ueuecoyotl ("Old Coyote"), borrowed from the more primitive Otomi, was a recognized member of the Aztec pantheon, as a god of feasts and dances, and perhaps of trickery as well.
Of all the recorded beliefs connected with the dead the most affecting is the brief account of the limbo of child-souls reported by the clerical expositor of Codex Vaticanus A. There was, he says,46 "a third place for souls which passed from this life, to which went only the souls of children who died before attaining the use of reason. They feigned the existence of a tree from which milk distilled, where all children who died at such an age were carried; since the Devil, who is so inimical to the honour of God, even in this instance wished to show his rivalry: for in the same way as our holy doctors teach the existence of limbo for children who die without baptism, or without the circumcision of the old law, or without the sacrifice of the natural man, so he has caused these poor people to believe that there was such a place for their children; and he has superadded another error—the persuading them that these children have to return thence to repeople the world after the third destruction which they suppose that it must undergo, for they believe that the world has already been twice destroyed." The belief in an infant paradise, with its Tree of Life whence the souls of babes draw nourishment, biding the day of their rebirth, is a pleasant relief from the nightmarelike quality of most Aztec notions—not