Mictlan

Mictlampa was the north, and the north was where the dead went. Not down a tidy numbered staircase, whatever the diagrams show, but out across the cold quarter of the world, over open country where the wind carried obsidian and nothing grew that anyone would want to eat. The Nahua made the word out of the verb for dying and a suffix that means nothing more than *there*. Mictlan, the place of the dead. No decoration on it at all.

Almost everybody went. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the thing most likely to be got wrong, because the destination had nothing to do with conduct. It turned on the manner of death. Warriors killed in battle, captives who died on the stone, and women who died in first labour went to the house of the sun and carried it across the sky, and the Florentine Codex has the women delivering it at dusk on a litter of quetzal feathers into the hands of the Micteca, the people of the dead. Those taken by water, by lightning, by the swellings and fevers the rain god counted as his own went to Tlalocan, where it stayed spring. Infants went to a nursing tree. Everyone else, the old and the sick and the merely unlucky, went north. Good behaviour bought nothing.

The road took four years and was built to take a person apart. It ran between two mountains that ground together and slammed shut, past a hill and a desert the sources number eight, along a stretch a serpent watched, into a wind that carried blades of volcanic glass. The family fed the journey from the other end. They burned the dead person’s clothes and the goods bound in with the body, which were understood as tolls, things to be handed over on arrival, and they kept burning them across the four years of mourning.

At the far edge lay Chiconahuapan, the nine waters, a broad river with no bridge. There the dog came in. The dead one arriving at the bank looked over the dogs on the other side until one of them recognised its master, and then it went straight into the current and swam him over on its back. A white dog would not do it and said, reasonably enough, that it had only just washed. A black one said it had only just been stained black. The yellow dog carried you. Families bred them for it, and sent one along at the funeral with a loose cotton cord tied round its neck, and burned it beside its owner. The breed in the pictures is the hairless xoloitzcuintli, the largest of the old Mexican hairless dogs, which does not bark and runs unusually hot, and whose warmth is part of why it was trusted with the job. Warriors who died away from home got a dog-shaped pectoral laid on the death bundle instead. Households too poor to own one were buried with a small clay model. The point was never the animal. The point was that without it you stood on the bank.

On the far side was Mictlantecuhtli, and there the goods ran out and so did the traveller. What happened was not punishment. One of the oldest Nahuatl names for the place says it plainly: Ximohuayan, where the flesh is shaved off, from the same verb used for planing bark from a tree. The self came apart, the body finished going, and what stayed behind was bone. Rest meant ending. That sounds bleak until you follow the bone, because bone was the one part of a person the underworld kept rather than destroyed, and bone was seed.

The nine levels everyone can name are a shakier thing than they look. Alfredo López Austin, who spent a career on this material, put it flatly: the sources contain very little about the road to the ninth place of death, and where they say anything they disagree. The one complete list, with a name for each stage, comes from a single colonial manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus A, drawn up in the sixteenth century by Nahua scholars trained in Franciscan schools. Ana Díaz has argued that its stacked cosmos owes as much to the medieval European universe the friars carried over, the Ptolemaic spheres tidied up for Christian use, as to anything the Mexica held. Jesper Nielsen and Toke Sellner have made the case that the pre-contact cosmos had three levels rather than a dozen, and that the dead did not descend at all but travelled outward across a plane. Katarzyna Mikulska has pointed out how closely Mictlan resembles the night sky, which is above. The Florentine Codex itself, in a moment nobody quite knows what to do with, puts the land of the dead *over* us, alongside the heavens. Sahagún meanwhile translated the word into Spanish as *infierno*, hell, and the obstacles are ancient but the staircase is largely ours.

Recent scholarship has begun separating two things the single word had been doing. There is the four-year crossing, the wind and the mountains and the plain, which is transit. And there is Mictlan proper, the domain past the water, which is where transformation happens. The numbers in the Nahuatl track the difference: the features of the road carry eight, the same features beyond the river carry nine, and nine is the number attached everywhere to destruction that turns into new life. Mictlantecuhtli reduces people to bone-seeds. Somebody then comes to collect.

Which is exactly what the creation story has him doing. When the fifth sun was lit over an empty world, Quetzalcoatl went down for the bones of the people of the previous age, with his dog-shaped double Xolotl for company in some tellings. He asked for them straight out. Mictlantecuhtli set a condition designed to be impossible: sound my conch and go four times round my realm. The shell had no holes bored in it. Quetzalcoatl called worms to drill it and bees to fill it with noise, and the horn sounded, and the lord of the dead let him load up and then thought better of it. His servants dug a pit in the road. A quail broke cover, Quetzalcoatl startled, fell in and went out cold, and while he lay there the bones scattered and cracked and the quail pecked at them. He got up, gathered what he could, and ran with an armful of rubble. That is why people are not all the same size. At Tamoanchan the old goddess Cihuacoatl ground the pieces on a metate into a jade bowl, and the gods opened their own bodies over the meal until it moved.

Nothing about the place offered a living person a door. Its force was patience. It did not need to chase anyone, because everyone was already walking, and four years in the road simply ran out and so did the traveller. Only a god ever made the trip both ways, and he came back concussed and carrying broken goods. What did keep leaking out was the name. Healers were still travelling to Nine-Mictlan in their incantations a century after the conquest, sent there by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s informants to set a fractured bone or fetch back a soul that had wandered off. And in the Tlaxcalan courts a witness taking the oath was warned that if he lied the devil would punish him in mictlan, which by then meant hell, and which had once meant only the cold place in the north where the bones were kept.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mictlan?

Mictlan is the land of the dead in Aztec (Nahua) belief, associated with the north and ruled by Mictlantecuhtli. Most people who died ordinary deaths travelled four years to reach it, crossing a wind full of obsidian, two clashing mountains, and finally a broad river. Its name is built from the Nahuatl verb meaning to die plus a suffix meaning simply “place.”

Who went to Mictlan?

Almost everyone, because the destination depended on how a person died rather than on how they had behaved. The old, the sick, and anyone whose death was unremarkable went to Mictlan, while warriors, sacrificial victims, and women who died in childbirth accompanied the sun, those taken by water or lightning went to Tlalocan, and infants went to a nursing tree.

Why was a dog buried with the dead in Aztec belief?

Because a dog was needed to carry the soul across the last river, Chiconahuapan, and without one the dead person could not cross. A small yellow or reddish dog was given a loose cotton cord around its neck and burned or buried beside its owner, and the breed shown in the codices is the hairless xoloitzcuintli. Families too poor to keep a dog were buried with a clay model instead.

Does Mictlan really have nine levels?

The famous list of nine named levels comes from one colonial manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus A, and the other sources do not match it or each other. Alfredo López Austin noted that the surviving texts say very little about the road and disagree about what is on it, and Ana Díaz has argued that the tiered scheme reflects the medieval European cosmos the friars brought with them. The obstacles themselves are old; the neat numbered staircase is mostly a later construction.

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

Quetzalcoatl went down to Mictlan at the start of the present age to recover the bones of the people of the previous world. He passed Mictlantecuhtli’s trick of a conch shell with no holes by having worms bore it and bees make it sound, but the lord of the dead changed his mind, and a quail startled Quetzalcoatl into a pit so that the bones broke and scattered. He carried the pieces to Tamoanchan, where Cihuacoatl ground them and the gods bled over the meal to make the people of the fifth sun.

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Mictlantecuhtli, Quetzalcoatl, Xolotl, Cihuateteo, Tzitzimitl, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaltecuhtli, Xibalba, Ah Puch, Duat, Hades, Charon, Cerberus