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Healing among Nahua communities

31st May 2022

Mexicolore contributor Edward Polanco

We’re sincerely grateful to Edward A. Polanco for this enlightening introduction to the little understood subject of the Indigenous Nahua healing tradition. Dr. Polanco was born in Los Angeles, CA and his family and ancestors are from Kuskatan (Western El Salvador). Dr. Polanco is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech and he is currently completing his first book titled People Healers: Decolonizing the Nahua Tiçitl in Central Mexico, 1535-1660.

Nahua peoples in various parts of the Nahua World (Mexico and El Salvador) have complex ways of healing the body. In the postclassic period and early colonial period Nahuas in Central Mexico referred to their healing knowledge as tiçiyotl, and its practitioners were titiçih (sing. tiçitl). The tiçitl could be a man or a woman with diverse specializations on how to keep individuals and communities whole. Nahuas sometimes also referred to men and women that cured as tepahtianimeh (sing. tepahtiani) and amanteca.

The most translatable out of all of these is tepahtiani. It is composed of te- (a non-specific human prefix) pahtia (to heal) and the agentive suffix -ni, creating ‘he or she is a healer of people’. This is how many variants of Nahuatl and Nawat (the language of Nahuas in El Salvador) conceptualize healing specialists today.

In the sixteenth century Nahuas in the Valley of Mexico disclosed where their healing knowledge came from. According to the Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España (also known as the Florentine Codex) a primordial couple named Oxomoco and Cipactonal mastered tiçiyotl, Nahua healing knowledge often compared to Western medicine. Oxomoco and Cipactonal are typically depicted in codices or other material culture casting corn and beans and holding needles and other tools of the healing trade. The primordial couple then went on to pass this knowledge on to humans, who have kept the tradition and knowledge alive and well.

Nahua communities in Mexico largely use the term pahtli when referring to salubrious materials created by healing specialists. These materials are typically created from animal parts, plants, minerals, and rocks. Though today some communities refer to pharmaceuticals as pahtli as well. Similarly, Nawat speaking Nahuas in El Salvador use the term pahti for the salubrious materials created from nature, and those that are synthetic as well. The astute reader might see the connection between the verb pahtia, the noun pahtli, and the agentive noun tepahtiani. Like their ancestors, Nahua healing specialists continue to be masters of materials with curative properties.

When Spaniards arrived in Central Mexico in 1519 the Nahua tiçitl was a prominent figure with complex knowledge of how to cure the human body. Female and male titiçih used tools such as gourds, needles, and entheogenic plants and seeds (those that release the God within) to help the sick. Entheogenic plants included peyote (peyotl in Nahuatl) and ololiuhqui (the seeds of the morning glory Turbina corymbosa). These items were typically ingested by specialists who could then communicate with a non-human lifeforce that emerged from within the plant or seed. This lifeforce would provide information to the tiçitl regarding the nature and direction of the illness. Other titiçih specialized in the usage of tlapohualiztli, the interpretation of things. These titiçih, functioning as tlapouhqueh (sing. tlapouhqui) would cast corn and beans, gaze into water, or measure the length of forearms, to understand diagnose and prognosticate an illness or condition.

Spanish clerics noticed the importance and influence Nahua healing specialists enjoyed and starting in the late sixteenth century the Catholic Church launched an attack on titiçih. Pedro Ponce de León, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, and Jacinto de la Serna spearheaded the Catholic Church’s persecution of titiçih. These individuals, and others, viewed titiçih – namely women - as an obstacle to Nahua Christianization. Priests claimed that Nahua healers prevented their communities from obtaining Spanish medicine, both spiritual and physical. Treatises and correspondence penned by Ruiz de Alarcón (treatise completed 1629) and Serna (treatise completed 1655) contain evidence of how priests harassed and attacked Nahua specialists, titiçih and otherwise. Catholic priests were suspicious of titiçih, it is likely for this reason that the term tiçitl fell out of use among many Nahua communities. Nevertheless, healing specialists persist among Nahua communities throughout the Nahua world today.

Records tell us that Nahuas in diverse parts of Central Mexico believed that hills, rivers, streams, caves, and crossroads attracted or served as a home to non-human lifeforces that could cause illness. In seventeenth-century Guerrero, when a Nahua became ill titiçih assessed if the illness had been contracted near one of the above-mentioned sites and if so, they would make offerings in the area to appease the lifeforces in the area. Similarly, in modern day Tecospa (southern Mexico City) Nahuas believe that cave-dwelling little men and women known as los aires (Spanish for “the airs”) emerge from caves to inflict people with illness. This is typically the result of humans invading the caves in which los aires live, or people walking by their caves with food without offering some to them. Once more, healing specialists come to the aid of the ill by accessing the situation and making offerings when and where necessary.

Becoming a tiçitl, or Nahua healing specialist, seems to have remained the same throughout the centuries. There is ample evidence that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Nahua healers learned much of their knowledge from parents and grandparents. However, it is very important to note that most titiçih typically had a lifechanging event that took them inches from death, or they actually died for a period. During this lifechanging event a non-human lifeforce or a deceased loved one would visit the future healer to teach them how to heal and give them the tools and items necessary to cure. This included things like needles to prick, gourds to interpret water, and plants to apply to the sick.

Nahua healing specialists still operate in their communities restoring and preserving health. For instance, in the region of Chicontepec in the Huasteca Veracruzana, the tepahtihquetl (pic 9) continues to heal. The Nahuatl variant in this area uses an agentive -quetl instead of -ni, though the rest of the term is basically identical to the tepahtiani found in other parts of the Nahua world. Nahua scholar Sabina Cruz de la Cruz has described two different healing ceremonies that a tepahtihquetl performed in the 2010’s. These ceremonies are “the cutting of the bad,” and the “cleansing.” Both of these ceremonies are geared towards healing individuals that have become sick due to the ill wishes of others.

In what is today the metropolitan area of Mexico City Nahuas continue to use the terms tepahtiani and tiçitl. In Tetzcoco for instance, a tepahtiani is a male or female that cures the human body while a tiçitl is specifically a woman that assists other women in childbirth. In the Milpa Alta (southern Mexico City) the tiçitl practiced under that name well into the 1980s, though healers also use tepahtiani. It is crucial to reiterate that evidence suggests that in the late postclassic and early colonial period titicih were men and women that healed men, women, and children from diverse types of illness. Colonialism and persecution seems to have curtailed usage of the term tiçitl and largely relegated it towards women that assist in birth attendance.

The tapajtiani in Kuskatan, in the settler nation of El Salvador, continues to practice though in smaller numbers. Like the Nahuatl tepahtiani, the Nawat term tapajtiani is composed of ta-, pahtia, and -ni, someone who heals. Tajtapajtiani (plural of tapajtiani) provide recetas (Spanish for recipe or prescription, i.e., remedies) so that sick people can overcome illness cast on them by wrongdoers. The Nawat term for “medicine” or a salubrious item is pajti, and this is one of the tools tajtapajtiani use to cure the sick. Much like Nahuas in Mexico, healing specialists among Nahuas in El Salvador are knowledgeable about the human body and how to keep community members safe. However, evangelical movements in Central America are jeopardizing the position of healers in Kuskatan.

Healers, tepahtiani, tepahtihquetl, or tapajtiani, continue to fight illness and assuage non-human lifeforces among Nahua communities. Though in many communities less and less people visit Mesoamerican healers and they opt for Western Medicine. Largely due to the stigma that non-Western healers receive. After 500 years, the struggle continues.

Suggested Reading List:-
• Cruz de la Cruz, Catalina. “Sentidos Y Significados Del Embarazo En Diversas Generaciones De La Cultura Nahua: Tlamachilistli Uan Xitlaualistli Tlen Koneuaj Pan Ejeliuis Xiuitl Tlen Nahuamaseuallajlamijkayotl.” Masters, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015
• Cruz de la Cruz, Sabina, and Rebecca Dufendach. “Tepahtihquetl Pan Ce Pilaltepetzin / a Village Healer.” Ethnohistory 66, no. 4 (2019): 647-66
• Sandstrom, Alan R. “Mesoamerican Healers and Medical Anthropology: Summary and Concluding Remarks.” In Mesoamerican Healers, edited by Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom. TX, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010
• Polanco, Edward. “Tiçiyotl and Titiçih: Late Postclassic and Early Colonial Nahua Healing, Diagnosis, and Prognosis.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press. Article published October 2019
• Polanco, Edward Anthony. “’I Am Just a Tiçitl’: Decolonizing Central Mexican Nahua Female Healers, 1535–1635.” Ethnohistory 65, no. 3 (2018): 441-63.

Picture sources:-
• All images supplied by Edward Polanco, with the exception of -
• Pic 1: illustration by and courtesy of Felipe Dávalos
• Pix 2 & 10: images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 8: image from the Codex Tudela (original in the Museo de América, Madrid), scanned from our copy of the Testimonio Compañía Editorial facsimile edition, Madrid, 2002
• Pic 9: photo courtesy of Catalina Cruz de la Cruz
• Pic 12: image courtesy of and thanks to Joseph Johnston/Arte Maya Tz’utuhil (artemaya.com).