Mictlan

Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean (Aztec/Nahua)
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A cold, lightless realm at the base of the underworld where the newly dead undertake a four-year passage through nine hazards until body and self alike are worn away into final rest.
Role in Mythos: It is the destination of nearly everyone who dies an ordinary death, and the storehouse of ancestral bones from which Quetzalcoatl fashioned the people of the present age.
Relation to Humans: Entry to Mictlan turned not on how a person had lived but on how they had died, so most souls made the descent regardless of virtue or rank. The living prepared their dead for the road, burning grave goods and a dog to carry the soul across the underworld river.

North was the direction of the dead. Not the west where the sun goes down, but the cold quarter the Nahua called Mictlampa, a place of flint and darkness and wind that came off nothing warm. Beneath the flat earth and its stacked heavens lay nine descending layers of shadow, and at the bottom of them all sat Mictlan, the house that almost everyone came home to. It was not a punishment and it was not a reward. It was simply where the road ended for the vast run of people who ever lived.

Getting there took four years, and the road was built to take a person apart. The dead did not arrive so much as travel, passing first through a gap where two mountains ground together and slammed shut, timing the crash. They climbed a slope of loose obsidian, walked into a gale that carried flint blades and stripped the skin, crossed plains where banners of black stone marked the way and an arrow lay waiting. In one of the crossings a jaguar lay ready to open the traveler’s chest and eat the heart. At the far edge ran a wide dark river, and there a reddish dog swam out, recognized the one it had waited for, and ferried the soul across on its back. This is why a hairless Xoloitzcuintli was burned or buried alongside the corpse. Without it, the soul stood on the near bank and did not cross.

On the far side sat Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl, the skeletal lord and lady of the place. He wore a collar of human eyes and flared ornaments of bone at his ears, his liver bared beneath the ribs, his teeth set in the fixed grin of a skull. To reach him a soul spent its grave goods as tolls, the food and cloth and small treasures the living had sent, until it came before him carrying nothing, which was the whole idea. What happened then was not torment. It was dissolution. The body finished rotting, the self came apart, and the person was gone. Rest meant ending.

Not everyone was bound for it. How a person died decided where they went, and to die badly enough to escape Mictlan was a kind of honor. Warriors killed in battle and captives who died on the sacrificial stone rose in the east and walked the sun up to noon. Women who died giving birth, counted as fallen soldiers, carried it down the western sky. Those taken by water, by lightning, by the fevers and swellings the rain god claimed for his own went instead to Tlalocan, a dripping green paradise where it never stopped being spring. The old who died in their sleep, the sick, the ordinary, the unlucky in no particular way, went north and down.

The tidy modern list that hands each of the nine layers a clean Nahuatl name and a fixed place in a sequence is, for the most part, a later reconstruction, assembled by scholars out of sources that do not actually line up. The Nahua elders who spoke to Sahagun in the sixteenth century described less a numbered staircase than a scattered country of the dead known by many names: the place we all go to, the place of the fleshless, the region of those who have vanished. The single surviving picture of nine stacked levels comes from one colonial manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus A, and where it can be set beside the Florentine Codex the two disagree about which trial belongs where. The obstacles are ancient. The neat staircase is mostly ours.

For all its trials, Mictlan mattered to the living most of all because it held the bones. When the fourth world ended and the gods kindled the fifth sun over an empty earth, Quetzalcoatl went down to fetch the raw stuff of a new humanity from the one who kept it. Mictlantecuhtli agreed to surrender the ancestral bones, then named a condition meant to be impossible: sound my conch and circle my realm four times. The shell had no holes. Quetzalcoatl called worms to bore it through and bees to fill it with sound, and it sang. The lord of the dead gave in, thought better of it, and ordered the bones seized back. His servants dug a pit; startled by quail, Quetzalcoatl pitched into it and fell as though dead, and the bones scattered and broke. He gathered the pieces anyway, uneven now, which is why people do not all stand the same height. He carried them up to Tamoanchan, where the goddess Cihuacoatl ground them like maize, and the gods opened their own bodies and bled onto the meal until it stirred and lived. Every person walking is made of stolen bone and borrowed divine blood, on loan from the north.

The realm offered no door a living person could use. Four years in, the road simply ran out, and so did the traveler; its force was patience rather than cruelty, and it never had to give chase. Only a god passed through it in both directions, and even Quetzalcoatl came back broken and without a clean way out. For everyone else the descent went one way, the dog waited at the water, and the cold reached all the way to the bottom.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mictlan?

Mictlan is the underworld of Aztec (Nahua) mythology, the lowest and northernmost region of the cosmos, ruled by the skeletal god Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl. It was the destination of most people who died ordinary deaths, who journeyed four years through nine hazards to reach a final rest that meant the dissolution of the self.

Who goes to Mictlan?

Admission to Mictlan depended on how a person died, not on how they had lived. Those who died of old age, illness, or other ordinary causes went to Mictlan, while warriors, sacrificial victims, and women who died in childbirth followed the sun, and people taken by water or lightning went to the paradise of Tlalocan.

What are the nine levels of Mictlan?

The nine levels of Mictlan were a series of trials the dead crossed over four years, including clashing mountains, a slope of obsidian, a wind full of cutting blades, and a wide river crossed with the help of a dog. The popular numbered list of named levels is largely a modern reconstruction, since the colonial sources that describe the underworld do not fully agree on the order or the names.

Why is a dog associated with Mictlan?

A reddish Xoloitzcuintli dog carried the soul of the dead across the wide river that blocked the way into the depths of Mictlan. For this reason a dog was cremated or buried with the deceased to accompany them on the journey, because without its help the soul could not cross the water.

What is the myth of Quetzalcoatl and the bones of Mictlan?

At the start of the present age, the fifth sun, Quetzalcoatl descended into Mictlan to recover the bones of earlier humanity from Mictlantecuhtli. He tricked his way past the lord of the dead, fell into a trap that broke the bones, and carried the pieces up to Tamoanchan, where they were ground and sprinkled with the gods’ own blood to create the people of today.