Ahuizotl

Also Known As: Classical Nahuatl āhuitzotl, from atl “water”, huitztli “thorn” and the suffix -yotl, “the thorny one of the water”; also given in Spanish as ahuizote, and glossed “water dog”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It hunts from underwater with a human hand growing at the tip of its tail, and it lures the people it wants by imitating the crying of an abandoned child or by driving fish and frogs to the surface.
Role in Mythos: It serves the rain gods as the collector of drowned people, whose deaths are counted a summons to Tlaloc’s paradise rather than an accident.
Relation to Humans: It is the specific terror of anyone whose living is made at the water’s edge, and the Mexica held it responsible for drownings in the springs and lakes of the Valley of Mexico. Its victims were not pitied so much as envied, since the drowned were believed to go to Tlalocan, and their bodies were too holy for an ordinary person to touch.

Somewhere past the reeds, a baby was crying.

That was the last sound a good many people in the Valley of Mexico were said to have heard. The crying was not a baby. It came from the flooded mouth of a spring, and the person who went in to look for the child did not come out again.

The ahuizotl was described in the Florentine Codex by Nahua elders who spoke of it the way you speak of an animal your neighbours already know. Small, about the size of the little teui dog. Smooth and shining, with small pointed ears. Black like rubber, slippery, very smooth, long-tailed. Its hands were a raccoon’s hands, or a monkey’s hands. And then the detail that has kept it alive for five centuries: at the end of that long tail there was a hand, just like a person’s hand, opening and closing.

It lived in springs and in the water-filled caverns beneath them, in the cold dark where the light gives out a few feet down. Anyone who came to the entrance, or stepped into the water where it was waiting, was taken there. The codex is unhurried about what happened next. It sinks him, it plunges him into the water, it carries him to its home, it introduces him to the depths, the tail going on holding him, the creature going on seizing him.

The bodies came back up eventually, and they came back wrong. The eyes were gone. So were the teeth and the fingernails. Everything else was untouched: no wound, no tear, the skin whole and only slick and faintly bruised, as though someone had gone over it lightly with a stone. Those three things were what it wanted. The rest it left.

Its patience had limits. When a long stretch went by with nobody drowned, the ahuizotl went fishing for people. One method was the weeping. It would settle at the edge of its pool and cry like a small child, and whoever heard it thought there was an infant out there, abandoned, and went to help. The other method was cleverer and worked on professionals. It gathered fish and frogs and set them thrashing and leaping at the surface near its hiding place, a churn of silver and froth that looked exactly like the catch of a lifetime. Fishermen brought their canoes over and cast their nets. Then the tail came up over the side of the boat.

There was a third way, and it required nothing at all. Anyone who caught sight of the creature and was not seized with terror at the sight, and was not attacked, was going to die soon anyway. Seeing it was enough.

What happened afterward mattered more to the Mexica than the killing did. A drowned person was not an unlucky person. Drowning was the death that led to Tlalocan, the green paradise of Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue, and the ahuizotl was understood as a servant and a friend of the rain gods, sent to fetch whoever they had chosen. Some said the chosen were good people being rewarded. Others said they were people who had hoarded jade and precious stones, which belong to water, instead of giving them to the gods. Either way the corpse had been claimed by a deity and was too dangerous for a layman to handle. Only the priests of the Tlaloque were allowed to lift it out, and it was buried at an ayauhcalco, a mist house set among water. Anyone else who touched the body would either be the next one taken or spend the rest of his life crippled with gout.

One story turns the whole thing on its head. An old woman went out for water, caught an ahuizotl in her jug, covered the mouth of it with her petticoat and carried the thing back to show the village chiefs. They were not impressed. They told her she had sinned, because the animal was a subject and a friend of the rain gods, and they sent her back to put it where she had found it. She did.

Nobody hunted it on purpose.

The name says what people thought its body did. Atl is water and huitztli is a thorn, and the reading preserved by the historian Ángel María Garibay is that the creature’s wet fur spiked into points when it hauled out and shook itself. Fray Alonso de Molina, compiling his Nahuatl dictionary in 1571, gave up on the mythology entirely and wrote down only that an auitzotl was a certain little water animal, like a small dog. The naturalist Francisco Hernández, working in the same century, called it black or blackish, the size of a Maltese dog, a kind of otter, living in the fresh rivers of the hot country.

Naturalists have been trying to catch it ever since. The beaver has the swimming and the wrong teeth and no hand. The otter has the sharp teeth and the oily coat and the appetite, and would certainly take the softest parts of a floating body first, but the codex already had a word for the otter, aitzcuintli, and it is not this word. The water opossum has a prehensile tail and dexterous forepaws, and Alfredo López Austin identified an aquatic tlacuache down in Chiapas, though a shy nocturnal marsupial is a strange thing to build a drowning demon out of. The stone carvings do not settle it either. They show a smooth, heavy-bodied animal crouched on a thick coiled tail with the sign for water cut into its back, and in none of the surviving images is there a hand on the end of the tail. One such statue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City was catalogued for years as Xolotl, the dog-headed companion of Quetzalcoatl, before anyone noticed it was an ahuizotl.

Its powers were never the powers of a large predator. It was small, and it worked by patience, ambush and a good imitation of grief. The hand did the rest. What it could not do was come and get you. Everything it had depended on somebody choosing to walk to the water and lean over it, which is why the crying and the leaping fish existed at all, and why the only reliable defence was to stay dry and ignore whatever was making that noise out past the reeds. It was also not its own master. It belonged to the Tlaloque, could be carried home in a clay jug by a determined grandmother, and had to be returned when its owners’ representatives said so.

It outlived the empire regardless. The eighth ruler of Tenochtitlan took the creature as his name and his glyph, so that the animal is drawn again and again in the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis simply as a way of writing “Ahuitzotl”. Three centuries later, Mexican Spanish still used ahuizote for a person who torments you and will not let go, and two ferociously satirical newspapers, El Ahuizote and then El Hijo del Ahuizote, put the name on their mastheads and aimed it at the government. In the twentieth century a storyteller in Xaltocan was still describing an ahuizotl as a shapeshifting king who frightened the people, was driven out, and took all the region’s plants and animals with him when he went.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ahuizotl?

The Ahuizotl is a water monster from Aztec mythology, described in the Florentine Codex as a small, glossy black, dog-sized creature with pointed ears, monkey-like hands, and a long tail that ends in a human hand. It lived in springs and underwater caverns in the Valley of Mexico and drowned people who came to the water’s edge. Its name in Nahuatl means roughly “the thorny one of the water”.

How did the Ahuizotl catch its victims?

The Ahuizotl grabbed people with the hand at the tip of its tail and dragged them underwater. When it had gone a long time without a victim, it lured people in, either by crying like an abandoned baby until someone came to help or by making fish and frogs leap at the surface so that fishermen would bring their canoes close.

Why did the Ahuizotl take its victims’ eyes, teeth and nails?

Those were the parts it fed on. Bodies recovered from an Ahuizotl drowning were missing the eyes, teeth and fingernails while the rest of the corpse was unmarked, with the skin whole and only slightly bruised, and that combination was how the Mexica knew what had killed the person.

Was being killed by the Ahuizotl considered a good or a bad death?

It was considered a chosen death. The drowned went to Tlalocan, the paradise of the rain god Tlaloc, and the Ahuizotl was understood as a servant of the rain gods collecting whoever they had selected. The body was too sacred for an ordinary person to touch, so only priests of the Tlaloque could recover it, and it was buried at a mist house called an ayauhcalco.

Is the Ahuizotl based on a real animal?

Possibly, but nothing fits cleanly. The otter, the beaver and the water opossum have all been proposed, and the water opossum comes closest with its prehensile tail and dexterous forepaws, but the Nahuatl already had a separate word for the otter and no surviving Aztec carving of the Ahuizotl shows the famous hand on the tail.