Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander

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      PLATE XI.

      Green stone image of Mictlantecutli, the skeleton god of death and of the underworld. The original is in the Stuttgart Museum.

      Yet not all who died pursued this journey. To the terrestrial paradise, Tlalocan, the abode of Tlaloc, rich with every kind of fruit and abundant with joys, departed those slain by lightning, the drowned, victims of skin-diseases, and persons who died of dropsical affections—a heterogeneous lot whose company is to be ascribed to the various attributes of the rain-gods. With them should be included victims sacrificed to these deities, who perhaps themselves became rain-makers and servants of the Lords of the Rain. More fortunate still were they who ascended to the mansions of the Sun—those who fell in war, those who perished on the sacrificial altar or were sacrificed by burning, and women who died in child-birth. Those warriors, it was said, whose shields had been pierced could behold the Sun through the holes; to the others Tonatiuh was invisible; but all entered into the sky gardens, whose trees were other than those of this world; and there, after four years, they were transformed into birds of bright plumage, drawing the honey from the celestial blossoms.

      It was in the eastern heavens that the souls of warriors found their paradise. Here they met the Sun as he rose in the morning, striking their bucklers with joyous cries and accompanying him on his journey to the meridian, where they were encountered by the War Women of the western heavens, the Ciuateteo, or Ciuapipiltin, souls of women who had gone to war or had died in childbed. These escorted the Sun down the western sky, bearing him on a gorgeous palanquin, into Tamoanchan ("the House of the Descent").⁴⁵ At the portals of the underworld they were met by the Lords of Hell, who conducted the Sun into their abode; for when it ceases to be day here, the day begins in the realm below. Possibly it was from this association with the underworld powers that the Ciuateteo acquired their sinister traits, for they were sometimes identified with the descending stars, the Tzitzimime, which follow the Sun's descent and become embodied as Demons of the Dark.

      But the Sun has yet another comrade on his journey. As the soul of the dead Aztec is accompanied and guided into the nether world by his faithful dog, so the Sun has for companion the dog Xolotl. Xolotl is a god who presides over the game of tlachtli, the Mexican ball-game, analogous to tennis, in which a rubber ball was bounced back and forth in a court, not hurled or struck by hand, but by shoulder or thigh. As with other Indian ball-games, this was regarded as symbolic of the sun's course, and Xolotl was said to play the game on a magic court, which could be nothing else than the heavens. He was, moreover, deity of twins and other monstrous forms (for twins were regarded as monstrous), and it was humpbacks and dwarfs that were sacrificed to the Sun on the occasion of an eclipse, when it was deemed that the solar divinity had need of them. A myth narrated by Sahagun possibly explains or reflects this belief. In the beginning of things there was no sun and no moon; but two of the gods immolated themselves, and from their ashes rose the orbs of night and day, although neither sun nor moon as yet had motion. Then all the gods resolved to sacrifice themselves in order to give life and motion to the heavenly bodies. Xolotl alone refused: "Gods, I will not die," he said; and when the priest of the sacrifice came, he fled, transforming himself into a twin-stalked maize plant, such as is called xolotl; discovered, he escaped again and assumed the form of a maguey called mexolotl; and evading capture a third time, he entered the water and became a larva, axolotl—only to be found and offered up. A second version of the legend, recorded by Mendieta, makes Xolotl the sacrificial celebrant who gave death to the other gods and then to himself that the sun might have life. In still another tale, recorded also by Mendieta, it is the dog Xolotl who is sent to the Underworld for bones of the forefathers, that the first human pair might be created; but being pursued by Mictlantecutli, Xolotl stumbled, and the bone that he carried was dropped and broken into fragments, from which the various kinds of people sprang. Tales such as these are strongly reminiscent of the coyote stories of the northern continent, and it is possible that Xolotl himself is only a special form of Coyote, the trickster and transformer, especially as Ueuecoyotl ("Old Coyote"), borrowed from the more primitive Otomi, was a recognized member of the Aztec pantheon, as a god of feasts and dances, and perhaps of trickery as well.

      Of all the recorded beliefs connected with the dead the most affecting is the brief account of the limbo of child-souls reported by the clerical expositor of Codex Vaticanus A. There was, he says,⁴⁶ "a third place for souls which passed from this life, to which went only the souls of children who died before attaining the use of reason. They feigned the existence of a tree from which milk distilled, where all children who died at such an age were carried; since the Devil, who is so inimical to the honour of God, even in this instance wished to show his rivalry: for in the same way as our holy doctors teach the existence of limbo for children who die without baptism, or without the circumcision of the old law, or without the sacrifice of the natural man, so he has caused these poor people to believe that there was such a place for their children; and he has superadded another error—the persuading them that these children have to return thence to repeople the world after the third destruction which they suppose that it must undergo, for they believe that the world has already been twice destroyed." The belief in an infant paradise, with its Tree of Life whence the souls of babes draw nourishment, biding the day of their rebirth, is a pleasant relief from the nightmarelike quality of most Aztec notions—not less familiarly human than are the pious reflections of the good friar who records it.