Ilamatecuhtli

Also Known As: Classical Nahuatl Ilamateuctli, “Old Woman Lord”, from ilamatl, an old woman, and teuctli, a lord; Sahagun also records the names Tonan, “our mother”, and Cozcamiauh
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds the seventeenth month of the Mexica solar year and the rite performed in it, and the sources credit her with no power outside those twenty days.
Role in Mythos: She is the goddess in whose honour a woman was killed at the feast of Tititl, and whose costume, mask and burning grain bin made up the whole of the ceremony.
Relation to Humans: Once a year a purchased slave woman was dressed as her, made to dance, and killed on the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli. Beyond that single festival no source describes any dealing between her and the living at all.

The sound arrived before she did. Strips of cured hide hung from her waist, each strip weighted at its tip with a small shell, and the shells knocked against one another as she walked, loud enough that Sahagun’s informants said you could hear her from a distance. The skirt had a name of its own, citlalli icue, her star skirt, and the little shells had a name too, cuechtli. Her sandals were white, with cotton woven into the toes. She danced alone in the cold, and while she danced she wept, because she knew what the afternoon was for.

She was Ilamatecuhtli only for that day. The name is a title rather than a personal one, built from ilamatl, an old woman, and teuctli, the word for a lord or a man of the high nobility, so it comes out as something like Old Woman Lord, a masculine rank of honour hung on a crone. Sahagun’s Nahua informants gave two more names in the same breath. One was Tonan, which he glosses in Spanish as “our mother”. The other was Cozcamiauh, a necklace of maize flowers. Three names, and not one story attached to any of them.

That is the honest shape of what survives. Almost everything known about her sits in a single book, the second book of the Florentine Codex, in the short calendar summary at chapter seventeen and the long account at chapter thirty-six. She does not appear in Book One, the book about the gods, at all. The later chroniclers who mention her were reading the same material Sahagun was, and the one independent picture of her, in the Codex Borbonicus, shows the costume rather than the goddess. There is no birth, no consort, no death, and no myth.

What there is instead is an inventory, and it is unusually precise. Her face was painted in two bands, black spread around the lips and downward, yellow ochre across the nose and forehead. Her hair was not hair. It was a wig called the tzompilinalli, eagle feathers twisted, arrayed and stitched to each other and to the piece, hanging down her back. Her shield was chalked white and pasted with eagle down, with a ring of eagle feathers sewn at its centre, a fringe of heron feathers below, and tassels along the rim shaped like the heads of grasshoppers. Paso y Troncoso, describing the Borbonicus painting in 1898, warned that the round white things on that fringe are feathers and not shells, however much they look like shells. In her other hand she carried the tzotzopaztli, the flat hardwood blade a weaver uses to beat the weft tight. Nothing in the record makes her face a skull.

Before noon the old men beat the drums for her and the singers intoned her song, and she danced by herself in front of everyone, sighing and crying, knowing there was only a short time left. Torquemada thought that worth setting down as an exception: this woman was permitted to grieve openly, where others taken up the same steps on other days were not.

When the sun went past its zenith they took her to the top of the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, with the impersonators of every god following her up in file, masked. They opened her chest, took the heart, then struck off her head. The head went to the man wearing Ilamatecuhtli’s own costume, who took it by the hair in his right hand and led the whole line of god-impersonators in a circuit of the temple summit, lifting and lowering it in time with the dance.

His mask looked two ways at once, a face on the front and a face on the back, with huge lips and big round protruding eyes, and above it a row of small paper banners standing up like a wreath of flowers. He danced going backwards, kicking his heels up behind him, propped on a cane whose head split into three prongs, the roots and stump uppermost and the point turned down. They called the staff yiotlahuitzil. They called the step motzineoa in Ilama tecutli. Ilamatecuhtli backs away.

Down at the foot of the steps, in the stone basin called the cuauhxicalco, stood a small structure of pine branches lashed into a frame and packed round with paper, built in the shape of a grain bin. It was hers. A fire priest came down dressed as a young warrior, in a netted cape with deer hooves rattling at his ankles, carrying a maguey leaf with a little paper flag standing on it, and set the leaf against the bin and lit it. Her grain bin burns, they said. Then the offering priests raced each other up the steps for a flower kept at the summit, the godly flower, and came down and threw it into the fire. That race had a name as well. Xochipaina. They run for flowers.

The next morning the city played a game called nechichicuahuilo. Men and boys filled small net bags with reed down, with shredded paper, with green maize leaves pressed into balls, tied them to a cord about half a fathom long, hid them under their capes, and hit every woman they met in the street. Boys beat girls with them until the girls cried. It was ordered that nobody put a stone inside a bag, which tells you plainly that somebody had.

Modern accounts hand her a great deal more than this. They make her the earth in old age, the dying year, the dormant seed waiting under a hard field, and they merge her with Citlalicue, the star-skirted creator who spread the Milky Way. The codex will not support the second of those. It is her skirt that is called star skirt, and Citlalinicue appears elsewhere in the same manuscript as a separate figure, ruling a day sign in Book Four and invoked with her husband Citlallatonac by a midwife over a newborn in Book Six. Two names, one shared word, and the manuscript keeps them apart. As for the agricultural reading, Sahagun records the burning granary and the maize-flower name and offers no explanation of either. The interpretation may well be right. It is not in the source.

Even the month is not securely hers. Elena Mazzetto has pointed out that where the Sahaguntine texts give Tititl to Ilamatecuhtli, the commentators on the Codex Telleriano-Remensis put Ichpuchtli and Mixcoatl there instead, which suggests the pairing belongs to Tenochtitlan rather than to central Mexico as a whole. The name Tititl was already unsettled in the sixteenth century and stayed that way. Duran took it from a verb meaning to stretch. Torquemada read it as a pinched, tight season of frost and raiding. Boturini said belly. Gama derived it from titixia, to glean a field after the harvest is in.

So her powers are the powers of a fixed date. For twenty days at the coldest, driest, meanest end of the Mexica year, she has a costume that anyone can put on, a mask that watches the road behind as well as the road ahead, a fire, and the absolute claim on one woman’s life. Her limits are the same fact seen from the other side. She never acts. She is worn, carried, burned and set down again, and the sources give her no realm to rule when the feast ends and Izcalli begins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ilamatecuhtli in Aztec mythology?

Ilamatecuhtli is an Aztec goddess honoured in Tititl, the seventeenth month of the solar year. Her name is a title meaning roughly “Old Woman Lord”, combining the Nahuatl words for an old woman and for a male noble. Bernardino de Sahagun records two further names for her, Tonan, meaning “our mother”, and Cozcamiauh.

What happened at the festival of Tititl?

A slave woman bought by the stewards was dressed in Ilamatecuhtli’s costume and made to dance alone through the morning while old men drummed for her. After the sun passed its zenith she was taken up the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, her heart was cut out and her head struck off, and a masked man wearing the goddess’s own costume carried the head by the hair and led the other god-impersonators in a dance around the temple summit.

What did Ilamatecuhtli look like?

The Florentine Codex describes a white skirt and blouse under a leather over-skirt cut into strips with a small shell at each tip, called the star skirt. Her face was painted black below the nose and yellow ochre above it, and her hair was a wig of eagle feathers called the tzompilinalli. She carried a chalk-white shield fringed with heron feathers in one hand and a weaver’s batten in the other. No source gives her a skull face.

Is Ilamatecuhtli the same goddess as Citlalicue?

No, though the two are often merged in modern accounts. Ilamatecuhtli’s over-skirt is called citlalli icue, her star skirt, while Citlalinicue is a separate figure in the same manuscript who rules a day sign and is invoked with her husband Citlallatonac in a midwife’s prayer. The identification rests on the shared word rather than on anything the sources say.

What was Ilamatecuhtli the goddess of?

The sixteenth-century sources never say. They give her a month, a costume, a mask, a rite and a burning grain bin, and offer no statement of her domain. The common modern description of her as the aged earth or the dormant winter seed is an interpretation built on the granary and on her maize-flower name, not something Sahagun or his informants wrote down.