Tlazolteotl

Also Known As: Tlazolteotl / Tlahzolteotl, roughly “filth deity”, from tlazolli, refuse or sweepings; also Tlahelcuani, “she who eats filth”; Tlazolmiquiztli, “the death caused by lust”; Ixcuina or Ixcuinan, from Huastec, “deity of cotton”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She both provokes illicit desire and consumes the moral refuse it leaves behind, taking sin into herself so that the sinner comes out clean.
Role in Mythos: She presides over lust, cotton and spinning, steam baths, midwifery and the once-in-a-lifetime rite of confession that absolved a Mexica of crimes the law would otherwise have punished with death.
Relation to Humans: Mortals approached her through a priest to confess and be purged, most often near the end of life, since the mercy could be claimed only once. She also afflicted them, sending sickness and sexual disease to those who indulged in forbidden love and concealed it.

The black ring around her mouth in the Codex Borgia is not paint in any ordinary sense. It is rubber, laid on thick and glossy, and the scribes who put it there meant it to read as residue. She had just eaten. What she ate was other people’s filth.

Tlazolteotl was the Mexica deity of everything that gets swept up and thrown out. Her name comes from tlazolli, a word covering refuse, old rags, sweepings, the worn and the used and the spoiled, and by extension the moral wreckage that behaves the same way. It accumulates, it stinks, it has to go somewhere. She was called Tlahelcuani, she who eats filth. She was also called Tlazolmiquiztli, the death that comes from lust. The two names describe one transaction from opposite ends.

She did not begin in the high basin. The Huastec country on the Gulf lowlands kept a mother goddess whose cult travelled inland and was absorbed into Mexica religion, and she arrived with her wardrobe intact. In the codices she wears a band of unspun cotton across her forehead, the raw fibre still fluffed and unworked, with two spindles pushed through it, and a half moon of shell or worked metal through her septum. Cotton grew in the lowlands and not in the cold uplands around Tenochtitlan, so the fibre in her headdress works as a passport as much as an ornament. Her other name, Ixcuina, is not Nahuatl at all. It is Huastec, and it means something close to deity of cotton. Thelma Sullivan’s study of her called her the great spinner and weaver, and the tools in her hair are the reason.

Under that name she was not one goddess but four sisters, ranked by birth order: Tiyacapan the first born, Teicuih the younger, Tlahco the middle one, Xocotzin the youngest. Sahagun’s Nahua informants gave them as a set, the ixcuinameh, and described them as deities of indulgence. A single goddess of appetite is a moral abstraction. Four sisters of different ages is a family, and families are harder to argue with.

She is almost never shown as lovely. In the Codex Borbonicus, presiding over the thirteenth trecena of the ritual calendar, the one that opens on the day One Movement, she squats inside the flayed skin of a sacrificed woman, the dead hands hanging slack past her own wrists, while Centeotl the young maize god is born from between her legs. Her lips and teeth are black. Ochre marks ring her nose and mouth. The expression on her face is neither agony nor ecstasy. It is the look of someone at work.

The rite that mattered most was called neyolmelahualiztli, the straightening of the heart. A man who had done something that would kill him if it came out, and adultery in Tenochtitlan would kill him, went to a priest called a tlapouhqui, a reader and counter of days. The priest opened the two hundred and sixty day calendar and found a fitting date. On that day the penitent stripped, sat, and said all of it aloud. The priest listened, judged, and set the penance according to the weight of what he had heard: fasting, offerings, ritual song and dance, and blood, drawn by pulling maguey spines through the tongue or the ear. The spine goes in cold. Afterwards the matter was closed, the sin eaten, and the law had no further claim on him.

The catch was arithmetic. A person could do this once. Not once a year, not once a season, but once in an entire life and never again, which is why the people who came to her priests were overwhelmingly old. Men hoarded the mercy the way you hoard a single unrepeatable favour, and carried whatever they meant to spend it on for decades. Tezcatlipoca also presided over purification, being invisible and everywhere and therefore able to see everything, but he only heard. Tlazolteotl was the one who swallowed.

She owned the temazcal as well, the low domed sweat house, and the midwives who worked inside it. Water hits the heated stones and the room goes white, the air turns thick enough to lean against, and the labouring woman braces her back on the wall while the midwife calls the goddess in by her filth-eating name. Nahua thought did not sort uncleanness into physical and moral bins, so a steam bath and an absolution belonged to the same category of event, and both belonged to her. The language keeps the logic visible: the Nahuatl word for gold is teocuitlatl, divine excrement.

Her great month was Ochpaniztli, the sweeping, falling in what is now early September at the turn of the harvest. For twenty days the city cleaned itself. Houses were swept out, roads and canals repaired, maize seed flung into the crowds, and there were dances and reviews of the warriors. The month belonged jointly to Tlazolteotl and to Toci, the grandmother earth goddess whose territory overlapped hers so heavily that the sources sometimes slide between them. It ended with a young woman taken from a subject people, kept four days in flowers and scent while her attendants teased her about what was coming, dressed as Toci with her face whitened and her mouth painted black, and then killed and flayed so that a priest could wear her.

The most famous statue of her is almost certainly a fake. A scapolite figure about twenty centimetres high at Dumbarton Oaks shows a woman squatting in labour with the child’s head emerging, her face contorted, the whole surface polished to a hard shine, and for most of the twentieth century it was the image of Tlazolteotl in every popular book and the model for the golden idol Indiana Jones lifts off its pedestal in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jane MacLaren Walsh observed that it resembles no other Mesoamerican object: the choice of stone is odd, the carving in the round is odd, the birthing posture and the grotesque realism and the near total absence of iconographic detail are all odd, and the piece flatters modern taste in a way Aztec sculpture does not. A scanning electron microscope examination in 2002 found the marks of rotary tools. It was carved, or at least recarved, in the nineteenth century. The goddess who spent her career swallowing other people’s counterfeits acquired one of her own.

What she could do followed from what she was. She planted the desire and she removed the consequence, and she also sent the punishment when the desire was indulged and hidden, particularly sickness that arrives by way of sex. The cure ran back through her: steam, ritual purification, appeal to the tlazolteteoh, the cluster of desire deities who travelled with her. She was the drain and the source at once, which is less a contradiction than a description of how refuse works.

Her limits were built into the mercy rather than imposed on her from outside. One use per life, and no refunds. A date chosen by a specialist rather than by the sinner. A priest as the necessary channel, so that nobody absolved themselves in private. And the amnesty ran backwards only, over the life already lived, so whatever came afterwards was carried without recourse. The Spanish friars who recorded all this kept reaching for the word confession, and the word does not quite fit. She forgave nothing. She ate it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tlazolteotl?

Tlazolteotl is the Aztec goddess of filth, lust, purification and childbirth, whose name derives from tlazolli, the Nahuatl word for refuse and sweepings. She both inspired illicit desire and absorbed the moral pollution it created, and she was also the patron of cotton, spinning, steam baths and midwives. Her cult appears to have come to the Mexica from the Huastec peoples of the Gulf Coast.

What did Tlazolteotl do with people’s sins?

She ate them. In a rite called neyolmelahualiztli, the straightening of the heart, a penitent confessed to a priest known as a tlapouhqui on a date chosen from the ritual calendar, then performed a penance of fasting, offerings and bloodletting with maguey spines. Tlazolteotl consumed the resulting filth, and the confession also carried legal amnesty, which mattered because crimes such as adultery were punished by death.

Why was Tlazolteotl called the goddess of filth?

Because the Aztecs made no sharp division between physical dirt and moral corruption, and Tlazolteotl governed both. Her epithet Tlahelcuani means “she who eats filth”, and images of her show her mouth and lower face blackened with rubber to indicate what she had swallowed. The same logic runs through the language, where the word for gold, teocuitlatl, literally means divine excrement.

Is the famous Tlazolteotl birthing statue genuine?

Probably not. The scapolite birthing figure at Dumbarton Oaks, long treated as the definitive image of Tlazolteotl and used as the model for the golden idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark, resembles no other Mesoamerican sculpture, and Jane MacLaren Walsh argued that its stone, carving and realism are all anomalous. A scanning electron microscope study in 2002 found modern rotary tool marks, indicating that it was carved or recarved in the nineteenth century.

What festival was dedicated to Tlazolteotl?

Ochpaniztli, meaning “the sweeping”, a twenty day harvest month falling in early September. The city cleaned, swept and repaired itself, maize seed was cast into the crowds, and there were dances and military reviews. The festival honoured Tlazolteotl together with the earth goddess Toci, and ended with the sacrifice and flaying of a woman who impersonated Toci.