Mictlan, the Aztec “hell” you did not go to for your sins

A note before going on. This article is about what the ancient Nahuas believed about death, not about how to live through grief, and it does not replace anyone who can be with you. If you are going through someone's death, or through thoughts of hurting yourself, talk to someone you trust or to a professional; findahelpline.com will point you to a helpline in your country.

In the Tibetan Bardo, the dead person is read to aloud so that they recognise what they see. In the Egyptian papyrus of Ani, the dead man has to know the names of a door and deny forty-two faults before his heart is weighed. In both cases, what the dead learned or did in life counts. This article crosses the ocean and finds a different answer: among the Nahuas of central Mexico — the people usually called Aztecs — what decided where a dead person went was not how they had lived, but how they had died.

I read two things. The first is Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's Spanish, in the edition printed in Mexico in 1829. The second is a 2006 article by the anthropologist Roberto Martínez González, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which summarises and discusses how Mexican anthropology understands the Nahua soul today. I did not read the Nahuatl, and what I did not read I say at the end. The translations of Sahagún into English are mine.

A friar, his informants and two columns

Sahagún was a Franciscan born in Spain in 1499 who reached New Spain in 1529, learned Nahuatl and spent more than fifty years studying Nahua culture.⁴ His work, the General History of the Things of New Spain, was made with Nahua elders and with authors who had been his students at the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco; he worked on it from 1545 until his death in 1590. The best-preserved manuscript, which is in Florence and is therefore called the Florentine Codex, is laid out in two columns: the Nahuatl, written first, on the right, and on the left a Spanish gloss or translation.⁴

That matters for everything that follows. What I read is the Spanish column, which is not always an exact translation of the Nahuatl, but what the friar chose to tell in his own language. And he told it in his own words: the place of the dead is for him "hell", its lord is "a devil", the place of the rain is "the earthly Paradise". It is the same pattern as in the two previous articles — the name by which we know a text about death is almost never the name its believers gave it — but here it is not in the title: it is inside every sentence.

Three places, and none of them is earned

The appendix to the third book begins like this: "the souls of the dead went to one of three places". The first is Mictlan, where Mictlantecutli and his wife, Mictecacioatl, lived. And who went there he says at once: "those who died of illness, whether they were lords, or nobles, or common people".¹

It is the sentence that stopped me most in everything I read. It does not say "the wicked", or "those who failed". It says those who died ill, whatever their rank. And the speech the elders addressed to the dead, which Sahagún copies in full, insists: "all of us will go there, and that place is for everyone, and it is very wide".¹

The second place is Tlalocan, the place of Tlaloc, the rain god, where, Sahagún says, "there is never a lack of green ears of maize, squashes, sprigs of amaranth, green chili, tomatoes, green beans in the pod, and flowers". To it went "those whom lightning kills, or who drown in the water", and those who died of certain illnesses — Sahagún names lepers, people with sores, the scabby, the gouty and the dropsical. These were not burned, as the others were: they were buried, with amaranth seeds on their cheeks and their foreheads painted blue.¹

The third is "the heaven where the sun lives". To it went those who died in war and captives killed by their enemies. Every morning, when the sun rose, they "raised their voices and shouted, striking their shields", and after four years they turned into birds of rich plumage that went about "sucking all the flowers, both in heaven and in this world, as the tzinzones do" — the hummingbirds.¹

In what I read of Sahagún, none of the three places is won or lost by how one lived. That does not mean life did not count: according to Martínez González, a person's conduct left marks on one of their parts, marks that had to be cleaned after death, in the underworld.³ But what separated one fate from another, in the text I read, was death.

The house of the sun, for women too

The sixth book adds those who were missing: women who died in their first childbirth. Sahagún counts them "with those who die in war": they went to the house of the sun, but not to its eastern part, like the warriors, but to the western one, which for that reason was called cioatlampa, "where the sun sets, because there is the dwelling of the women". The warriors went with the sun from its rising until midday; from there the women carried it, on a litter of quetzal feathers, to its setting.²

The midwife spoke to the woman who had died in childbirth as to a warrior: "you have fought valiantly: you have used the shield and the sword like a terrible and courageous one". And she sent her off towards the house of the sun: "Wake then, and rise, my daughter, for it is already day".² The friar also tells that young soldiers tried to steal the body to cut off the middle finger of the left hand and the hair, and carry them in their shields to war; that is why the husband and his friends watched over it for four nights in a row.² And in the middle of the passage his own reading slips out: when these women appeared to their husbands, he writes, "this was the devil's doing, to deceive".²

The four-year road

Mictlan was not reached all at once. Before burying or burning the dead, the elders gave them, one by one, pieces of cut paper, and with each one they told them what they would have to pass: two mountains that crash into each other, a road guarded by a snake, a green lizard, eight wastelands, eight hills and a wind made of blades. Because of that wind they burned the dead person's clothes and belongings, so that these would keep them warm.¹

At the end there was a river, and to cross it you needed a dog. It was killed along with the dead person, and it had to have reddish fur: the black dog and the white dog refused, because, in the story the friar records, one said "I have washed myself" and the other "I have stained myself black". After handing their offerings to Mictlantecutli, and "after four years had passed", the dead person reached the last place, Chicunamictla, where, Sahagún says, "the dead came to their end and ceased".¹

A person made of three

Up to here, "the soul" in the singular. But Mexican anthropology reads something else in the Nahua sources: a person made of three parts, which came apart at death. It is a modern reconstruction — above all by Alfredo López Austin, in Cuerpo humano e ideología ("The human body and ideology") — and I read it through the article by his student Martínez González, who summarises it like this:³

• The teyolia (from yoli, "to live"), in the heart: the main part, bound up with vitality, emotion and memory. It was the one that set out on the journey to the beyond; there the marks of life were cleaned, and what remained was "a kind of renewed seed, free of all personal history, ready to be placed once more in a woman's womb and live again".
• The tonalli (from tona, "to radiate"), concentrated at the crown of the head: a heat that came, ultimately, from the sun. It depended on the day of birth, which gave a name and a destiny; it left the body in dreams, and it could be lost through a fall or a fright, with the risk of falling ill and dying. At death, according to the evidence Martínez González gathers, it stayed in the body and returned to the earth, or was kept with the remains as a family relic.
• The ihiyotl, "breath": what, according to López Austin, the gods breathed into a person and breathing renewed. It is the least known of the three, and the article exists to revisit it.

Martínez González disputes one specific point of his teacher's: López Austin placed the ihiyotl in the liver, and he finds that, in the beliefs of today's Mesoamerican peoples, breath-souls are almost never located there. He brings it closer instead to the "shadow" those peoples speak of. And his proposal about death is this: the ihiyotl came loose from the body, lingered for a while around the grave or the places of the dead person — longer, depending on the kind of death — and little by little "wore away until it dissolved into the surroundings and became mere air".³ (The quotations from Martínez González are my translation from his Spanish.)

So at death it was not "the soul" that went somewhere. Three things came apart: one stayed in the earth, another dissolved into the air, and the third walked four years to Mictlan, or rose to the house of the sun, or entered the endless summer of Tlalocan, depending on how death had come.

What we do with this

The three texts in this section give three answers to the same question. In Tibet, the dead have to recognise what they see. In Egypt, they have to prove what they did not do. In the Mexico that Sahagún recorded, fate is not decided at a trial: death itself decides it, and what the dead carry are papers for each step, clothes against the wind and a dog that knows them.

Anima Mundis does not judge anyone either, and does not keep anything: the rooms of 3, 5 or 7 people dissolve after ten minutes, with no trace of who said what. The only thing counted, in the Observatory, is how many voices arrived and at what hour UTC.

What I could not read

I read, in Spanish, the 1829 edition of Sahagún promoted by Carlos María de Bustamante: from volume I, the three chapters of the appendix to the third book (those who went to hell, to the earthly Paradise and to heaven), and from volume II chapter XXIX of the sixth book (women who died in childbirth). The Spanish quotations follow the 1829 spelling; I only corrected obvious scanning errors. I did not read the Nahuatl column of the Florentine Codex, which is the first version, nor the English translation by Anderson and Dibble, which is under copyright. I did not read López Austin's book: I know it through the summary by Martínez González, who was his student. Many texts on the subject speak of a fourth place, Chichihualcuauhco, where nursing infants would go, beside a tree that suckles them; I did not find it in the parts of Sahagún's Spanish that I read, so I do not count it as checked. And I did not compare any of this with what Nahua peoples believe today, which is another story, with its own voices.