Tlaltecuhtli

Turn over an Aztec stone box and there is often a face on the underside, carved with as much care as anything on the visible sides, pressed flat against the dirt where nobody was ever going to look at it. The mouth gapes. The fingers and toes end in claws. The head is thrown so far back that the whole body reads as a fall, or as a birth, depending on which scholar is holding the light. The placement was the point. The carving faced downward because it was addressed to the ground, and the ground was a person, and she had a name.

Tlaltecuhtli is the earth in the way a body is a body: not scenery, not a stage, but something with a temperature and an appetite. The soil that fed the Mexica had been someone before it was soil, and it had not consented to the change.

How that happened survives in a manuscript written in French. The Histoyre du méchique, a sixteenth-century compilation of Nahua accounts, describes Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca looking down at a world that was still nothing but water, and at the enormous creature striding across the surface of it, hungry, mouths gnashing at every joint. The two gods decided that no ordered world could be built while she was in it. They turned themselves into serpents. One seized her left hand and her right foot, the other took her right hand and her left foot, and they pulled in opposite directions until she came apart. The lower portion of her stayed to become the earth. The rest was flung upward and made the sky.

A rougher version circulated too, in which Tezcatlipoca offered his own foot as bait. She took it. He lost the foot and she lost her lower jaw, which meant she could no longer sink below the water to escape, and the killing became a matter of time.

The other gods were appalled. What had been done could not be undone, so they legislated a kind of compensation: everything necessary for human life would be made from what was left of her. Her hair became the trees and the flowering herbs. Her skin became the grasses and the small flowers underfoot. Her eyes became springs and wells, her nose the hills, her shoulders the mountains, and her mouth the caves and the rivers that run out of them. It is a generous arrangement described in the flat voice of a settlement, and it did not make her whole.

She stayed alive inside the landscape, and she stayed hungry. Sounds coming out of the ground at night, the groan of settling rock, the rumble before a tremor, were understood as her screaming or as her calling to be fed. The Mexica answered with blood, and above all with hearts, which were carried in stone eagle vessels called cuauhxicalli. Those vessels frequently carry her image on the bottom, the surface in contact with the earth, so that the offering was delivered to her through the floor of its own container.

At dusk the sun goes into her mouth. The jaws close on it, and the night is what happens while the sun makes its way through the underworld; at dawn she gives it back. The Mexica watched that transaction with real anxiety, and a solar eclipse, which looked like the schedule breaking down in daylight, drove them to increase the offerings. Her name went into the prayers spoken to Tezcatlipoca before armies marched.

What she looks like is unusually well documented, because hundreds of carvings survive. The standard image shows her from above, squatting with her knees pulled up and her arms flung wide in the posture Mexica women took to give birth. The head is tipped back and up, the eyes bulge, the mouth is stripped of lips down to the teeth, and a flint sacrificial knife is often clenched between them, or a river of blood pours in. Skulls sit where her elbows and knees should be, a convention shared with the tzitzimime, the dangerous star women who also had dealings with midwives. Crocodile-textured skin stands for the crust of the earth. On many pieces a jade symbol rests on her torso, the Mexica sign for preciousness and for water.

The largest example was found by accident. In October 2006, INAH archaeologists working under a colonial house at the corner of Argentina and Guatemala streets in Mexico City, at the edge of the Templo Mayor, uncovered a slab of pink andesite roughly four metres by three and a half, weighing close to twelve tonnes, broken into four pieces. It is bigger than the famous Calendar Stone. Enough paint survived to show her in red, white, black and blue, and enough of the body to show breasts and the loose folds of a woman who has borne children, a skirt of skulls and crossed bones with a band of stars across it, tassels of braided rattlesnakes, and huge ear spools of the kind only the elite wore. Gripped in the claw of her lower right foot is the year glyph 10 Rabbit, which is 1502, the year the emperor Ahuitzotl was laid to rest. Underneath it lay Offering 126, a dedicatory deposit of some twelve thousand objects. Nearly every other sculpture of her had been placed face down. This one was face up.

Her name has been an argument for a century. Tlālli is earth and tēuctli is the word conventionally translated “lord,” which is why English has spent so long calling the deity male. Nahuatl does not work that way. Tēuctli carries no gender, and the Bancroft Dialogues, recorded in the early seventeenth century, show elderly women being addressed with the same root; “esteemed personage” is closer than “lord.” Meanwhile the carvings are overwhelmingly female, breasts and skirt and birthing squat. Alfonso Caso read the same pose as a male figure crouched beneath the ground with his jaws open for the dead. H. B. Nicholson concluded that the female conception was the fundamental one and the male aspect real but subordinate. Lucia Henderson catalogued two distinct iconographic variants, one female and one male, and noted that some of the tidy gendering in the literature is an artefact of writing about Nahuatl in Spanish. Leonardo López Luján, who excavated the monolith, treats the multiplicity as a measure of how important the deity was rather than as a puzzle to be solved. Sahagún’s informants sidestepped the whole question. In the ceremonial speech of Book 6 of the Florentine Codex, Tlaltecuhtli is addressed as in tonan in tota, our mother, our father.

Her power is total and monotonous in the way that only fundamental things are. She produces every edible plant, holds up the world, receives every corpse, and runs the sun on time. Nothing that lives is outside her jurisdiction, because the ground is where all of it stands. Her limits come from the same place. She cannot leave. She cannot refuse the sun or hold on to it. She was taken apart by two gods once and could not stop them, and the mouth she uses to demand payment is the same mouth that lost its jaw in that fight. Most of all she depends on being fed by the very creatures she feeds, and the Mexica knew exactly how that ends if the arrangement lapses. The same Book 6 that calls her mother and father says it plainly: our mother, our father, Tlaltecuhtli, is already dried up, and can no longer nourish, and can no longer provide food.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tlaltecuhtli male or female?

Both, depending on the source, and the question is partly an accident of translation. The Nahuatl title tēuctli in the name carries no grammatical gender, so rendering it “lord” imposes a masculine reading that the original does not have. Most surviving carvings show a female figure with breasts, a skirt and a birthing posture, though a smaller male variant exists, and the Florentine Codex addresses the deity as “our mother, our father.”

What is the myth of Tlaltecuhtli’s dismemberment?

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca found Tlaltecuhtli walking on the primordial sea, turned themselves into serpents, seized her limbs from opposite sides and tore her in half. One half became the earth and the other became the sky. The remaining gods, angry at the violence, decreed that her body would supply everything humans needed, so her hair became trees, her eyes became springs, her shoulders became mountains and her mouth became caves and rivers.

Is Tlaltecuhtli the same as Cipactli?

They are closely related and the sources do not fully agree. Some accounts name the primordial monster torn apart at the creation as Cipactli, the crocodilian creature of the first waters, and others name Tlaltecuhtli. The most common way of reconciling them is that Cipactli is the sea monster before the killing and Tlaltecuhtli is the earth made from the body afterwards, still hungry and still owed.

Why was Tlaltecuhtli carved on the bottom of sculptures?

Because the images were addressed to the earth rather than to people. Mexica sculptors regularly placed Tlaltecuhtli on the undersides of stone boxes, thrones, altars and temple cornerstones, on the face that touched the ground, where no worshipper would ever see it. The eagle vessels that held sacrificed hearts often carry the deity on their base, delivering the offering downward.

What is the Tlaltecuhtli monolith at the Templo Mayor?

It is a painted relief of the deity in pink andesite, about four metres by three and a half and weighing close to twelve tonnes, found broken into four pieces near the Templo Mayor in Mexico City in October 2006. It is the largest Aztec monolith yet discovered, larger than the Calendar Stone. A glyph in its lower right claw reads 10 Rabbit, or 1502, the year the emperor Ahuitzotl died, and a deposit of roughly twelve thousand objects was buried beneath it.

Related Entries

Cipactli, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Cōātlīcue, Tlazolteotl, Cihuateteo, Tzitzimitl, Tlaloc, Huitzilopochtli, Ilamatecuhtli, Mictlan, Tiamat, Ymir, Pangu, Gaia