Ilamatecuhtli

The drums began when the sun tipped past its height, and the woman who had become the goddess climbed the temple steps to die. She wore a white skirt, and over it a second skirt cut from strips of hide, each strip weighted at its end with a small shell, so that every movement she made answered itself with a dry rattle. That overskirt carried its own name. They called it the citlalicue, the star skirt, and the sound of it was meant to be the sound of the night sky turning. In one hand she held a round shield feathered at the rim, and in the other a weaving batten, the flat wooden blade a woman used to pack threads tight on the loom. She held it the way a soldier holds a sword.

This was Ilamatecuhtli, the Old Woman Lord, and the Mexica met her once a year at the cold heart of the dry season. Her name is built plainly from the Nahuatl for an old woman and the word for a lord or noble, a title that lands somewhere near Old Princess or Old Lady. She was the earth grown ancient. Through the wet months the ground had been a young mother, heavy with maize and green shoots, but by her month the fields had gone yellow and hard, the moisture had left the soil, and the mother had dried into a crone with the year’s death in her face. The Mexica did not soften this. The earth gets old too.

She rarely stands alone in the record. Ilamatecuhtli is one mask worn by a much larger figure, the aged and terrible aspect of the great earth goddess the Mexica knew under many names, among them Cihuacoatl, the Snake Woman, and Teteoinnan, the mother of the gods. Cihuacoatl herself is most often shown as a fierce old woman with a skull for a face, gripping a warrior’s shield and spears, and childbirth in that tradition was reckoned a kind of battle, so that a midwife’s work and a warrior’s were spoken of in the same breath. Under her other title, Citlalicue, She of the Star Skirt, the same goddess spread the Milky Way across the dark and, with her consort, set the stars in place and gave rise to a brood of fearsome sky-beings. The threads run together. To follow Ilamatecuhtli very far is to find yourself holding several goddesses at once, all of them old, all of them close to death and the making of life both.

Her appearance is the appearance of winter given a body. The face is whitened and drawn tight, closer to a skull than a living woman. The eagle feathers of her headdress stand up stiff and twisted, sewn one to another so that they read as her hair. The shield in the oldest description was chalk-white and pasted with eagle down, hung at its edges with heron feathers and little tassels shaped like the heads of grasshoppers. Nothing about her is soft. Even the loom-batten in her fist, an ordinary household tool, becomes a weapon in her grip, because the destiny she weaves for a person is not a comfort but a fixed and finished thing.

The ritual that carried her name was among the plainer and grimmer of the Mexica year. A woman was chosen to be her living image, dressed in the white skirt and the shell-fringed star skirt, given the shield and the weaving blade and the feathered crown. Before she died she danced, and the old men beat the drums while the singers intoned the goddess’s song. When the sun had passed its zenith they took her to the top of the temple and cut open her breast, and then they severed her head. The head was handed to a priest who went before the crowd, and he carried it in his right hand and danced with it held high. Behind him came another impersonator of Ilamatecuhtli, stepping backward, throwing his legs up behind him, leaning on a cane split at its end into three points like a small trident. The whole strange procession said one thing in the language of gesture. The old earth has died, and the seed she carries is already on the move.

That was the meaning folded into the horror. Her severed head stood for the seeds lying under the dead ground, waiting through the cold for the rains to call them up. Her death was a planting. This is where her powers and her limits meet, because Ilamatecuhtli’s real dominion was never over growing things but over the pause between them, the dormancy and the dark and the certainty that the year would age and fail. She commanded the barren season the way a younger goddess commanded the harvest. She could weave a life to its end. She held the threshold that the dead and the newly born both cross, which is why the midwives claimed her.

Her weakness, if the word fits a goddess, is written into that same cycle. Her power is the power of an ending, and an ending cannot hold. She had to die every year, on the temple, by the knife, so that the earth could turn young again without her. She is never permanent and never quite her own, always dissolving back into the greater mother she is only one face of. The Old Woman Lord rules the moment the world goes cold and still, and rules nothing at all once the first green pushes back through the crust.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ilamatecuhtli in Aztec mythology?

Ilamatecuhtli, whose name means “Old Woman Lord,” is an Aztec goddess of the earth, death, and dormancy in her aged form. She is treated as the crone aspect of the great mother goddess, closely identified with Cihuacoatl and with Citlalicue, the goddess of the star-strewn Milky Way. She was honored in the winter month of Tititl.

What was the Tititl festival and what happened in it?

Tititl was an Aztec winter-season month dedicated to Ilamatecuhtli as the dying old earth. In its central rite a woman dressed as the goddess in a white skirt, shell-fringed star skirt, feathered shield, and weaving batten danced before being taken to the top of the temple, where her heart was cut out and her head severed. A priest then danced holding her severed head, a gesture meaning the old earth had died and its seed was ready to sprout again.

Why does Ilamatecuhtli carry a weaving batten?

Ilamatecuhtli holds the tzotzopaztli, the flat wooden blade women used to beat threads tight on the loom, because she is a weaver of human destiny whose finished cloth stands for a fixed and completed fate. In her hand the everyday tool reads as a weapon, matching her fierce, skull-faced depictions and her link to the warlike earth goddess Cihuacoatl.

Is Ilamatecuhtli the same as Cihuacoatl and Citlalicue?

Ilamatecuhtli is not a fully separate deity but one title of a larger earth-and-mother goddess who appears under several names. As Cihuacoatl she is the skull-faced Snake Woman linked to midwives and warriors, and as Citlalicue, “She of the Star Skirt,” she created the stars and the Milky Way. Ilamatecuhtli is specifically her ancient, dried-out winter form.

What was Ilamatecuhtli the goddess of?

Ilamatecuhtli governed the earth in old age, the death of the fertile season, and the dormant seed waiting underground for spring. She presided over death and the barren winter rather than the harvest, and as a grandmother figure to midwives she was associated with the crossing points of birth and death.

Related Entries

Cōātlīcue, Cihuateteo, Huitzilopochtli, Coyolxauhqui, Itzpapalotl, Tlazolteotl, Xochiquetzal, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Xolotl, Xipe Totec, La Llorona