MICTLANTECUTLI = “LORD OF MICTLAMPA” (REGION OF THE DEAD)

ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

Codex Borgia.—Sheet 14: This is one of the most striking representations of the Death-god which has come down to us. Here he is depicted as a skeleton with a skeleton’s thorax and a skull for head, the arms and legs painted white with yellow spots picked with red, to symbolize the bones of a newly flayed person. He has a large rosette at the occiput and a flag, both painted in alternate white and red cross-bands, and this motif is carried out in the ends of the loin-cloth, and in the extremities of other bands and stripes. He presents a burnt-offering. The symbolic crossways and the owl are figured before him, the death-bird being surrounded with paper flags, the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation. Sheet 15: On this sheet he wears the death-symbols. At the nape of the neck he has a paper rosette, decorated with red and white cross-bands, the paper flag painted in the same way, broken in the middle and bent, and an ear-plug consisting of a human hand. His symbol in this place [[328]]is a bunch of malinalli grass. Sheet 79: In this representation of the Death-god we find the invariable skeleton head, but the body is painted, like that of the priests, in black. The nape-ornament is of paper, and the ear-plug is a human hand. The screech owl’s wing also appears. Opposite him is a corpse wrapped up in a cloth and corded with strings, a paper flag, used in the decoration of corpses prepared for cremation, and a cross, apparently made of knotted sheets of cloth or paper. His hair or wig is black and curly, some of the curls ending in eye-like circles with red centres. In this picture he sits opposite Tonatiuh, the Sun-god, and thus, perhaps, represents night in its black aspect, the eyes in his wig, as elsewhere, symbolizing the stars. Sheet 57: Here he is placed opposite the Death-goddess and wears the usual insignia. The ground on which their seats are placed is not simply yellow, as in the other sections, but consists of alternate fields of malinalli grass and fragments of skulls in the style of the hieroglyph of arable land. Both present each other with a naked human figure, symbolic of human sacrifice. Between them stands a receptacle painted black and studded with eyes, with red bands in the middle and yellow border. On the left of this stands a dish filled with blood and smoking hearts, on which the goddess is pouring fire from a vessel. On the right projects the body and tail of a dragon, which is seized by the god. In the centre is seen a skull swallowing a man who is falling headforemost into its throat, and above all is pictured the moon, without, however, the usual rabbit appearing in its circumference.

MICTLANTECUTLI.

(From Codex Borgia, sheet 13.)

Tepeyollotl.

(From Codex Nuttall, sheet 70.) (See page 332.)

FORMS OF THE UNDERWORLD DEITIES.

(See also under Quetzalcoatl, facing p. 119.)

Codex Fejérváry-Mayer.—Sheet 37: Here Mictlantecutli is placed opposite the Death-goddess. He has the usual insignia, but wears black garments, decorated with eyes and crossbones. His seat is made of ribs and a piece of skull, and he holds a dragon in both hands. Between him and his mate a man sinks into the yawning jaws of the earth, and above it is a dish with a stone sacrificial knife.

Codex Vaticanus B.—Sheet 21: He has the usual skeleton head, but in the arms and legs the bony structure is merely [[329]]indicated by a yellow colour and a black design. He is clothed with a jacket of green malinalli blades and wears in his ear a strip of unspun cotton. He has as back-device a pot, in which three flags are stuck. Sheet 34: In this sheet he is represented much as in Codex Borgia, sheet 15. Sheet 58: Here he is pictured as a black god, with a skull for head and seated on a chair made of blood, bones, and malinalli grass. He has the nape-shield and the flag inclining forward, and a nose like a sacrificial stone knife.

STATUE OF AN OCTLI (DRINK) GOD.

Found near Vera Cruz.

Codex Magliabecchiano.—Mictlantecutli is represented more than once in this codex, importantly on pages 73 and 79. In the first instance he is depicted with blue-grey body and enormous claws on hands and feet, the head plastered with the yellow patches and bloodstains he frequently shows. The head is that of a skull, with protruding yellow nasal-bone, but the ground-colour is blue, not bone-colour. He wears the “night-hair” occasionally associated with him, and his coiffure is decorated with small, black, festal bannerets, interspersed with what appear to be stellar eye-motifs. His maxtli appears to consist of a rope or twisted piece of cotton, and he wears wristlets and anklets of bright red cotton. The necklace is reminiscent of that worn by several of the Maya deities. He sits in the portal of a temple, and before him squat a number of men and women, regaling themselves on human flesh from several earthen vessels containing a head, a leg, and an arm. The second picture exhibits the penance done before him. In this place he is painted brown, with the same enormous talons, the death’s-head face, “night-hair” and bannerets (yellow), without, however, the accompaniment of the stellar eye-ornaments. These, however, appear to be reproduced upon the wrists, knees, and one ankle, and, perhaps, make this phase of the god a parallel to the Greek Argus, the “eye-spotted” night. On the breast depends an ornament which is not sufficiently clear to justify its description. On page 82 the god is depicted as wearing a garment covered with crosses, and on page 88 as standing on the skull-altar (see Tezcatlipocâ). His wavy hair is surrounded by a red and yellow cotton fillet, [[330]]and he is being anointed by a priest from a vessel of blood, whilst other priests stand before him with pots full of blood and human hearts. He wears a curious blue necklace almost of the “masonry” type seen in Egyptian, Greek, and Asiatic deific ornaments, and a cotton garment with red bows. A cotton web depends from his blue ear-plug.

MYTHS

The interpreter of Codex Vaticanus A says of Mictlantecutli: “He descends for souls as a spider lowers itself with its head downwards from the web.” Later on he states that “he is the great lord of the dead below in hell, who alone after Tonacatecutli was painted with a crown.… They painted this demon near the sun, for in the same way as they believed that the one conducted souls to heaven, so they supposed that the other carried them to hell. He is here represented [that is in the codex] with his hands open and stretched towards the sun to seize on any soul that might escape from him.” Later he states that Ixcuina, “the goddess of salt, dirt, and immodesty,” was the wife of Mictlantecutli. The commentator of Codex Telleriano-Remensis seems to regard Mictlantecutli as rescuing souls from the realm of the dead. He says: “They place him opposite to the sun to see if he can rescue any of those seized upon by the lord of the dead.” The two interpretative codices were almost certainly edited, if not copied one from the other, by the same hand, and it is such passages as this which show the great dubiety existing in the minds of the priestly commentators regarding the precise nature of the Mexican deities.

Sahagun in the Appendix to his third book, the first chapter of which treats of burial, gives a prayer or address to the dead which mentions Mictlantecutli, and which states that he and his wife Mictecaciuatl await the deceased, who goes to dwell among the shadows, “where there is no light or window.” It is further explained that when he arrived in the realm of the god of the dead (which has already been described in the chapter on Cosmogony), he makes him an offering of the papers which he carries, of faggots or torches [[331]]of pinewood, and of perfumed reeds, cotton, mantles, and costly apparel.

Boturini and Brasseur give a great deal of matter regarding this god which is absolutely worthless, as does Leon y Gama, and the deity has been in some manner confounded with a god Teoyaomiqui, who seems to be quite supposititious in character and never to have had no other existence in the minds of Gama and his copyists.

NATURE AND STATUS

Mictlantecutli, it would seem, is neither more nor less than a god of the dead, that is, his original conception was probably that of a prince of Hades, a ruler of the realm of the departed, who in time came to possess the terrific aspect and the punitive attributes of a deity whose office it was to torment the souls of the erring. The fact that he presides over the eleventh hour—the hour of sunset—shows that he was in a measure identified with the night, as certain aspects of his insignia would appear to show. In a manner he must be regarded as the earth, which in its form of the grave, yawns or gapes insatiably for the bodies of the dead. (See Mictecaciuatl.) He appears to have analogies with the Lords of Xibalba, or the Place of the Dead, alluded to in the Popol Vuh, of the Quiches of Guatemala.[1]

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