Introduction

We will be focusing on Central Mexican mythology, though the ancient Maya also shared belief in a perilous four-year journey and in the existence of nine levels of the underworld (the first of which, incidentally, is the earth’s surface, where we live). Whilst the story of the Maya Hero Twins confirms that every Maya individual had to take a harrowing journey after death through a decayed underworld to get to Xibalbá (‘Place of Fright’) in order finally to rise to the heavens, the Mexica (Aztecs) believed that at every stage of the journey downwards the soul had to pass a severe trial. Some scholars have linked the nine underworld levels to the nine deities called ‘Lords of the Night’. Gordon Brotherston explains (Painted Books from Mexico pp. 130-31): ‘The nine Night Lords or Yoallitecutin count out the 260 nights of the tonalamatl [sacred calendar], from conception to birth, as nine moons of 29 nights... the Night Lords are celebrated in every one of the ritual books... As the powers invoked by midwives, they correspond numerically to the orifices of the human body’.

Pic 1: The nine levels of many Mesoamerican temple-pyramids represent the nine levels of the underworld; this is the Feathered Serpent pyramid at Chichen Itzá

Just how was the Underworld imagined by the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica? Sadly we have virtually no imagery from Central Mexico showing any sort of vision of how Mictlan was conceived. Iconography abounds depicting the Lord and Lady of the Land of the Dead, and the ancient Maya portrayed Xibalbá imaginatively on ceramic vases (pic 4), but otherwise there is little to go on besides textual descriptions, of which there are plenty. We might start by considering some of the terms in Nahuatl for the land of the dead. Irene Nicholson gives us a good introduction (Firefly in the Night, p. 49):-
’Tocenchan tocenpopolihuiyan signifies a common house, a region in which we all lose our identities. Tlatalpatlahuac means simply a wide expanse, and Atlecaloian a cul-de-sac. Opochquiyahuayocan means “where the doors are on the left...” The idea that the land of the dead is the place where we all lose our outer skin or covering is contained in the phrase Ximoan, Ximoayan, which describes the process of removing the bark from trees and is thus closely related to the idea of the god who flays the dead man of his skin.’

Pic 3: Reconstruction of Tomb 1, Zaachila, Oaxaca, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City

Where was Mictlan to be found? Some have suggested that Mictlan lay to the north (Mictlampa - place of death), traditionally a region associated with coldness, the dark, an area ruled by black Tezcatlipoca and symbolised by the tecpatl or flint knife (pic 5). Other scholars, rooting their research in the wisdom and knowledge of contemporary (Nahua) religious practitioners, stress that to talk of specific directions, levels or sides of the underworld is ‘peripheral’, and that the land of the dead lies not only under the earth but that it is ‘far more than the world beneath our feet. It is a world that is within the earth that is one with the earth, but it is also a world that is within the mind. In that sense, it is also the world of the timeless mythic past, archetypical events that constitute the genesis of the peoples of Mesoamerica. The underworld is the world from which the people of Mesoamerica emerged’ (Timothy Knab, Oxford Encylopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures vol. 3 p. 290).

Pic 5: The North - second page of the five directional trees; Codex Borgia pl. 50

It’s easy to envisage nine underworld levels actually UNDER the earth, but in fact only eight were conceived, the first of the nine being Tlalticpac, the earth’s surface, the land of the living. Kay Read (Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos p. 139) points out that the actual entrance to Mictlan ‘may have been situated at the horizon’s edge where the sky meets the sea and mountains’, that is in López Austin’s words ‘at the extreme outer limit of the underworld’ (op cit, p. 333). This suggests that, as Read puts it, ‘the dead may be disappearing outward as well as downward’. The ‘levels’ are spelt out in the article ‘Mictlan and its Inhabitants’ (link top right). Here it remains simply to draw attention to the fact that the two key texts mentioned by Nicholson do differ in some details. López Austin explains:-
’Sahagún refers to the second place [after Tlalticpac], Chiconahuapan, ‘”river of the nine”, as the current of water a dead person must cross with the help of a reddish-coloured dog. However, he locates it at the end of the path, as the last barrier before the descent to the ninth level. He also mentions the hills that clash and the place of the obsidian wind, and possibly the eighth floor of the Codex Vaticanus can be identified with the place Sahagún states was thought to be inhabited by a serpent that lies in wait on the road to attack the dead. Another site, one which does not correspond to the description in the Codex Vaticanus, is the one Fray Bernardino calls “the place of the green lizard Xochitonal.”’

Pic 7: First (and last?) stage on the journey to Mictlan, ‘the passage of water’ - illustration by Steve Radzi

Second, in López Austin’s words ‘the hardships of the journey cleansed the individual’s history. Even today, the Nahua consider death a process that cleanses the soul’. In this sense, Kay Read has carefully chosen to describe the journey to Mictlan as ‘a pilgrimage for the dead’. The picture is complicated somewhat by recalling that for the Nahua we have THREE spirit centres or animistic forces, and the fate of each is different after death. López Austin here refers to the teyolía, the closest to the Western concept of ‘soul’ and the only one to make the journey to one of the four afterworlds, including Mictlan. It is this ‘main soul, the yolio of the Nahuas, which is a sort of vital principle located in the heart but which survives after death to enter a new, immaterial existence’ (Stresser-Péan, The Sun God and the Saviour p. 464) which is still very much believed in today by contemporary Nahua, together with a belief in Mictlan for the majority and ‘special’ heavens, reserved for victims of particular types of death, those ‘who were marked by a life of virtue of exceptional religious merit’ (this can include healers, soothsayers, women sages, musicians and so on), ‘women who died in their first childbirth and infants who died at a tender age’.

Pic 9: Three ‘souls’ leaving a dead body, Codex Laud pl. 44 (detail)

Even today, many Nahua families bury with their dead ones miniature versions of their earthly work tools - such as a digging stick or plough for a man or a grinding stone or weaving device for a woman. Such symbolic offerings as work tools would allow the deceased to go on working in the afterlife.
Furthermore, Nahua people living today in the Sierra de Puebla believe that ‘to enter Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, it is necessary to come to a large river that marks the edge. At the bank of this river, each dead person knows he or she will meet his or her dog, which, if all goes well, will aid the individual in crossing to the other side.’ Interestingly too, Stresser-Péan records that some contemporary Nahua still recall the second hazard of passing between two mountains that crash together.

Pic 11: Artist’s impression of a jade bead being placed under the tongue of a deceased Aztec man, before burial

Perhaps we should view destruction as ‘entailing the changing of form’ (Read, op cit. p. 110-113): ‘to disappear meant to cease existing in death in the same way one had existed in life. This was not a total evaporation into nothingness, into a black void. It meant, instead, never to return to the same previous visible form... In the Mexica-Tenochca world, all forms, including humans, were continually transformed...’
Being buried in a foetal position surely indicated belief in the hope of a new beginning in life.

Pic 13: Aztec burial: detail from a mural by Antonio González Orozco, Hospital de Jesús Nazareno, Mexico City