Tzitzimitl

Every fifty-two years the fires went out. Houses in Tenochtitlan were swept clean and every hearth was let die, so that not one flame lay in any of them, and after dark the whole population climbed onto the flat roofs and stayed there. Pregnant women were shut inside the grain bins with masks of maguey leaf tied across their faces. Children were kept awake by their parents, who punched and nudged and shouted at them through the night, because a child who slept would wake up a mouse. Everyone faced the summit of a mountain called Huixachtlan, on the borderlands of Iztapalapan and Colhuacan, two leagues from the city, and waited with their necks craned for one spark. If the fire priest of Copolco could not draw it, night would prevail forever, the sun would never come forth again, and the tzitzimime would come down and eat men.

That last line is not a summary of the belief. It is what the Nahuatl text says, word for word, and it says the same thing again in the chapter on eclipses. When the sun turned red and faltered, the women cried out, the men struck their mouths with their hands and yelled, captives were killed, people of pale complexion were killed, and everyone drew straws through their pierced earlobes and offered the blood while the temples filled with shouting. The reason given was always the same. If the sun went out completely, the tzitzimime would come down, and they would eat men.

They were stars. More precisely they were the stars that appear when the sun is covered, which is why the eclipse and the end of the calendar cycle were the two moments they belonged to. The new fire was drilled at midnight, at the passage of the Pleiades, on the chest of a well born captive; when the flame caught, the priest opened him, tore out his heart and fed it to the fire, and the rest of the body burned. Under Motecuhzoma the captive was chosen for his name. They wanted a man whose name carried the word for year, and they found one at Huexotzinco called Xiuhtlamin.

What a Tzitzimitl looked like comes down to two painted manuscripts made within about thirty-five years of the conquest, Codex Magliabechiano and Codex Tudela, both copied by native artists from an older lost original. The figure is skeletal, head and limbs both, with enormous round eyes and wild black hair stuck with a crest of paper banners. Its tongue is a sacrificial flint knife in one version and a spill of blood in the other. Its fingers and toes end in curved talons and there are small biting faces set into its joints. Around its neck hangs a string of human hearts and hands, and one liver. It wears severed human hands as earrings. A snake dangles between its spread legs. And it wears a skirt, bordered along the bottom with a row of shells.

The skirt is the whole argument. Skirts were women’s clothing in Aztec Mexico, and the red shell-tipped back panel that hangs behind the Tudela figure appears almost exclusively on goddesses. The Spanish commentator writing beside the picture described a dead man. The painter had drawn a woman. The two earliest Spanish prose accounts side with the painter: the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, built from native testimony in the 1530s, places in the second heaven “certain women who have no flesh whatever, but are all bones,” set there so that when the world ends their work will be to eat up all the men, and the slightly later Histoyre du Mechique simply calls them goddesses. Sources written after the middle of the century list male gods instead, or avoid the question.

Something happened in between, and it is not hard to name. Missionaries needed a local word for the Devil, and this was the word they took. Sahagún preached a sermon in the 1540s calling Satan the Tzitzimitl, a thing with gaping mouths that bites and gulps people down everywhere, with mouths at all its joints to chew with. Molina’s Nahuatl dictionary files the tzitzimime under Diablo. A gloss on Codex Vaticanus 3738 labels the underworld lord Mictlantecuhtli as “Tzitzimitl, the same as Lucifer.” Medieval European illustrators had been giving Lucifer faces at his joints and clawed hands and feet for centuries, so the two pictures fitted together almost without a seam, and the Tzitzimitl came out of the process male and wholly evil. The monster is half Aztec and half European.

The Aztec half looks different. Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, writing around the turn of the sixteenth century, described the tzitzimime as angels and gods of the air who hold up the sky and who brought the rain and water, the thunder and the lightning. The ruler Ahuitzotl ordered two great statues called Tzitzimime carved and set up on the Main Temple. An earlier statue commissioned under Motecuhzoma I belonged to a class named as sustainers of the sky. In one account four of them stood at the corners of the world and pushed the heavens back up after the collapse, and have been holding them there ever since. Nobody carves a sky-bearer to keep it away.

Their origin runs back to Citlalinicue, Star-Her-Skirt, who was the Milky Way and who with her consort Citlalatonac made the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. In one telling she gave birth to a stone knife, and her other children, jealous and frightened, threw it down to earth, where it shattered into sixteen hundred gods who were sent into the underworld to gather the bones of the races that came before. She was the first of the tzitzimime, and the rest are her daughters and her granddaughters. The stars in the sky and the beings that might eat the world are the same beings, seen at different hours.

One story catches them in the act. The wind god Ehecatl went looking for Mayahuel, the maguey, and carried her off, and her grandmother came after them with a crowd of furious goddesses. The two lovers hid by turning into a tree with a pair of branches. The tzitzimime broke off the branch that was the young woman and ate it. When they had gone, Ehecatl took his own shape again, gathered up her bones and buried them, and from the bones the first maguey plant grew. The grandmother’s name in that source is simply Tzitzimitl.

They kept a nearer, more domestic form as well. Women who died in childbirth became the Cihuateteo, who lived at the western horizon and carried the sun down from noon to sunset. Some of Sahagún’s informants said these women were content with their post. Others said they were bitter about it, and that they came down at crossroads on certain fixed nights to take pregnant women and small children. People who met them shook, and their limbs withered and twisted, and foam came to their mouths, which reads as an account of palsy and epilepsy. Households left offerings for them at home and at crossroad shrines, and the offerings were meant both to keep the sickness off and to lift it once it came.

That double edge is the thing the demonizers cut away. Their powers follow from what they are: creatures of the dark before the sun existed, present at the making of the world, holding the sky and able to drop it, carrying illness and therefore its cure. Their limits follow from the same place. They need the darkness, so fire checks them and daylight ends them, and their descent is not free but tied to the calendar and to the failure of the sun. Ehecatl beat them by hiding in a shape they did not read, and lost only a branch. And in a painting in Codex Tudela an old woman kneels on a mat in front of a black platform painted with white skulls and crossed bones, with two priests beside her drawing their own blood with sharpened animal bones, the whole scene arranged to make a sick person well. The platform is a skirt turned to stone. It is the same skirt the devourer wears.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Tzitzimitl?

A Tzitzimitl is an Aztec star deity, usually pictured as a skeletal figure with clawed hands, biting faces at the joints, and a shell-hemmed skirt. The plural is tzitzimime. They were understood as the stars that become visible when the sun is covered, and they were feared as the beings who would descend to devour humanity if the sun ever failed to return.

Were the Tzitzimime male or female?

The earliest evidence makes them female. The native painters of Codex Magliabechiano and Codex Tudela dressed them in skirts and the shell-tipped back panel worn by goddesses, and the two earliest Spanish prose accounts, from the 1530s and around 1543, call them women and goddesses. Sources written after the middle of the sixteenth century list mostly male gods instead, a shift that tracks the missionaries’ use of the word for the Christian Devil.

Why did the Aztecs fear the Tzitzimime at the end of a 52-year cycle?

Because the sun’s return was in doubt. Every fifty-two years the household fires were put out and a new fire was drilled at midnight on a mountain called Huixachtlan, and if the priests failed to light it the belief was that night would last forever and the tzitzimime would come down to eat people. Pregnant women were shut in grain bins behind maguey masks and children were kept awake until the flame was seen.

Were the Tzitzimime evil?

Not in the pre-conquest record. Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc called them angels and gods of the air who held up the sky and brought the rain and lightning, Aztec rulers had statues of them raised at the Main Temple, and offerings were made to them on skull-carved platforms to cure the sick. The purely demonic version comes from Spanish colonial writing, where the Nahuatl word was adopted as a translation for the Devil.

Which Aztec deities were called Tzitzimime?

The colonial sources name Itzpapalotl, Mictlantecuhtli, Tezcatlipoca, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Mixcoatl and Quetzalcoatl among others, and Huitzilopochtli appears on one list before being struck out. The first and archetypal Tzitzimitl was Citlalinicue, Star-Her-Skirt, the Milky Way, who with her consort made the sun, moon and stars and from whom the rest descend.

Related Entries

Coatlicue, Itzpapalotl, Cihuateteo, Ilamatecuhtli, Mictlantecuhtli, Tlaltecuhtli, Mayahuel, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Mixcoatl, Coyolxauhqui, Tonatiuh, Xiuhtecuhtli, Mictlan, Quetzalcoatl