Aztec Mythology (Mictlān)

The Aztec afterlife was determined not by how you lived but by how you died. This is the most striking feature of Mexica cosmology, and the one hardest for the modern visitor to hold: there is no moral accounting at death. Mode of death allocates destiny, and each destiny is its own world. Warriors who fell in battle and women who died in childbirth — treated as equivalent sacrifices, one's death a combatant of the outer war, the other a combatant of the inner — went to the Sun. For four years they accompanied Tonatiuh across the sky, the men from dawn to zenith, the women from zenith to dusk. After four years they returned to the earth as hummingbirds and butterflies. Those drowned or killed by lightning or lost to water-related diseases went to Tlalocan, Tlaloc's paradise of eternal springtime, where maize grew without cultivation and a kind of easy abundance reigned. Infants who died before tasting solid food went to Chichihuacuauhco, a garden with a tree whose branches dripped milk, to wait until the next world-age when they would return to earth to be born again. Everyone else — the overwhelming majority — went to Mictlan, the land of the dead, ruled by Mictlantecuhtli and his wife Mictecacihuatl. The journey took four years. Nine levels had to be traversed: a river crossed on the back of a small red dog (hence the dog buried with the deceased); a place between two mountains that smashed together; an obsidian-knife-winded desert; eight deserts; eight hills; a place of obsidian winds. At each level the soul lost something — its personal belongings, its name, its individual form. At the ninth level, Mictlan proper, what remained dissolved. There was no reward and no torment. There was extinction, clean and peaceful, into the undifferentiated place from which Quetzalcoatl had once fetched the bones of humanity back to the light of the Fifth Sun. Understanding Aztec eschatology requires understanding Aztec cosmogony. Four previous Suns had ended in cataclysm — jaguars, wind, fire, water. The gods had re-made humanity each time. The Fifth Sun required blood to keep moving; this is why warriors and sacrificial victims fed it, why every dawn was the negotiated outcome of a cosmic transaction, why the priesthood's calendar precision mattered. To die well was to contribute to the balance, not to purchase your own salvation. The Mexica did not believe in an immortal soul in the Greek sense. They believed in multiple animating principles (tonalli, teyolia, ihiyotl) seated in different parts of the body, each with its own fate after death. A single person dispersed into the cosmos. The dispersal was not tragic; it was the shape the world took when a life ended.