Mictlan, the Aztec Land of the Dead

The Mexica, the people who built Tenochtitlan and ruled the empire we call Aztec, inherited a picture of the world shared by many peoples of Mesoamerica. The earth, Tlalticpac, was a flat surface floating on water, often imagined as the body of a great earth monster. Above it rose layers of sky, and below it lay levels of the underworld. The four directions each had their own colour, gods and trees, and Mictlan, the land of the dead, was linked with the north, the region of cold and darkness, called Mictlampa.

The best-known version of this cosmos appears in the Codex Vaticanus A, a manuscript painted and annotated by friars and Indigenous artists in the 1560s. It shows thirteen heavens, from the sky of the moon and the stars up to Omeyocan, the ‘place of duality’, and nine levels below the earth ending in Mictlan. Other sources give different numbers, and some scholars think that the tidy stacking of thirteen and nine was partly shaped by the colonial setting in which it was recorded. The diagram on this page follows the Vaticanus A scheme but places the destinations of the dead in a schematic order, with the paradises above and Mictlan below.

Almost everything written about Mictlan dates from after the conquest of 1521. The richest account is Book 3 of the Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars who had grown up in the old world, and written in Nahuatl with a Spanish summary. Its authors were Christians recording the beliefs of their parents, and historians read them with that in mind. Archaeology, from burials to the temple precinct of Tenochtitlan, adds evidence of its own.

In Nahua belief, the fate of the dead depended above all on the manner of death. People who died of ordinary causes, from old age to most illnesses, went to Mictlan. Those whom the rain god Tlaloc had chosen, by drowning, lightning, or diseases thought to come from water such as dropsy, went to Tlalocan, a land of endless spring, fruit and flowers. They were buried rather than cremated, with images of the mountains associated with Tlaloc.

Warriors who died in battle, captives sacrificed on the altars and merchants who died on their long journeys went to the House of the Sun in the eastern sky. Each morning they escorted the sun from its rising to the height of noon with songs and mock battles, and after four years, the sources say, they returned to earth as hummingbirds and butterflies feeding on flowers. Women who died in childbirth were honoured as warriors who had fallen while taking a captive, the baby. As the cihuateteo, ‘divine women’, they carried the sun from noon down to its setting in the west, though they were also feared as spirits who haunted crossroads on certain days.

Infants who died before eating maize, according to the Codex Vaticanus A, went to Chichihuacuauhco, where a tree with breast-shaped fruit dripped milk to nourish them until they could be born again. This idea of a waiting place shows that the dead were not always fixed in a single fate.

For the many who went to Mictlan, the Florentine Codex describes a hard road. The body was dressed and wrapped, and a bead, of greenstone for nobles and of plainer stone for commoners, was placed in the mouth to stand for the heart. Relatives gave the dead paper banners, water and gifts, and the body was usually cremated with them. A dog was killed to accompany its master, and its remains were cremated too.

The journey led between two mountains that clashed together, along a road guarded by a serpent, past the place of a green lizard, across eight deserts and over eight hills. The dead then faced a wind of obsidian blades that cut like knives, which is why they were burned with their clothes and possessions to protect them. At a wide river the dog carried its master across on its back. Sahagún’s informants specified a yellow or reddish dog, explaining that a white dog would refuse, saying it had just washed, and a black dog would refuse, saying it had just stained itself.

After four years the dead reached Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of the dead, and offered him the paper, incense and clothing that their families had sent. Then they passed on to Chiconamictlan, the ninth place, which the sources describe as the end, a realm with no exit. Mictlan was cold, dark and windowless, but it was not a place of punishment for wickedness. Families continued to make offerings for four years, the time of the journey, and the Mexica calendar held two feasts of the dead in late summer.

Nahua poetry, recorded after the conquest in collections of songs, adds a more personal voice. Poets lamented that life on earth was brief, that people came only to dream, and asked whether anyone truly lived in the place of the dead or whether it was a place of no return. Some songs describe the dead as going to the ‘place of the fleshless’, others to a realm where one is no longer known. Historians caution that these songs were written down in a Christian setting, but they suggest that the Nahua held a range of feelings about death, from acceptance to doubt.

Spanish missionaries saw Mictlan through Christian eyes and translated it as ‘hell’, a choice that helped to turn a neutral land of the dead into a place of torment in catechisms written in Nahuatl. Over the following centuries, Indigenous ways of remembering the dead blended with the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls on 1 and 2 November. The result, the Día de Muertos, with its altars, marigolds, food offerings and visits to graves, is now one of the best-known traditions of Mexico and was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008.

How much of the modern festival continues pre-conquest practice is debated. Historians point to deep continuities in the care of the dead and the giving of food, and also to strong Spanish and later national influences. Images such as La Catrina, the elegant skeleton lady created by José Guadalupe Posada in the early twentieth century, are modern, though they are often linked today with Mictecacihuatl. Mictlan itself has returned in novels, murals, video games and films, usually as a colourful realm of ancestors rather than the cold northern land of the old sources.