Robert Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
For the ancient inhabitants of the great Tenochtitlan, dualities, as we know them today, did not exist as such; for example, a difference would have to be made between life and existence. Existence -nemiliztlIn the Nahuatl language, it would correspond to the night-time part that begins at birth: tlacatiliztliand it ends with death -miquiztli-that is, that death only represented a dark phase in which the life cycle began to renew itself.
Death was, for them, only a moment of organic and functional relaxation that prepared a new existence, but this can only be understood by giving a brief review of the way the Mexicas saw time:
After four times full of chaos in which life did not progress, the fifth sun arrived, nahui ollinwhose original legend says that the gods met in Tehotihuacán to create the sun and the moon. It was necessary for this purpose that one of those present, sacrificed himself. Since no one answered a bubbly, little, ugly god called Nanahuatzin stood up to offer himself and in response, the arrogant god TecuciztécatlLord of the Snails, also offered his life for him to create the stars. The gods gave him preference, but despite trying four times, he was afraid. Instead, Nanahuatzin on the first attempt he courageously threw himself into the bonfire of the creative fire from which the Sun, personified by him, would be born and the Moon by Tecuciztécatl.
This myth teaches us that the sacrifice of the gods created the movement of the stars, that it was thanks to having the courage to die that the universe could be set in motion. Blood was necessary to give way to life and this cult remained a symbol of birth, because if the gods had already done it, it was necessary for men to repeat that feat.
The name of the Sun, Tonatiuhmeans "there will be light". Not in an immediate time but in that time of waiting in which the gods were afraid and uncertain. The Mexica creation is defined on these two movements of night and day, the feminine and masculine, the shadow and the light. The ancient ones, more than having cardinal points, had regions that clearly reveal the opposition of the Nahuas to think in opposite poles and rather let us see their tendency not to establish definitive and eternal states but transits from one state to another.
Man was born according to the myth, from the penetration of Quetzacoatl into Mictlan from where he took the dust from the bones of the scepter of Mictlatecuhtli and created man. That is, it was time incarnated by Quetzalcoátl that penetrates to the center of the earth where darkness lies to make bones the matter of human beings, where it also falls into a trap (the hole called tlaxapochtli) laid by the mictecaThe bones will be scattered, the limbs will be separated and it will become that which was going to change, that stripping, that rotting of a divine being to through restoration, create life.
An example of this myth is that children who died early were buried near the so-called barns, cuezcomatenot only because these early dead infants, according to their beliefs, were to give - by their premature death - to the cincalco or house of corn, but because they would deposit their soul energy in the corn stored in that place.
The relationship that the pre-Columbian Nahuas developed with everything that was disposable from the body was not one of sorrow or obfuscation. Within the Borgia Code, there is an image in Figure 13 comparing the ingestion of a mortuary lump by the earth, TlalatecutliWith cropofagia, the "essence of the consumed being" is found in the excrement. As far as the corpse is concerned, what remains after its cremation on earth is the bone, the raw material for the divine elaboration of man and the ultimate state of his organic cycle.
One of the goddesses related to this vision of death and deposition is the goddess Tlazoltéotl, who had four names that represented carnality and was also seen as an antithesis of the human process, that while she defecated the bad, what she discarded and left over, the Goddess ate it and turned it into good, that was the main of her divine gifts: regeneration.
The Nahuas believed that for four days and nights the souls of the dead remained among us visiting the cardinal points, then, on the fifth, they were taken to their final destination. For the women, widows, sisters and mourners, the mourning lasted 80 days, where they did not wash their bodies, hair or change their clothes.
For four years, every year after the person's death, food, pulque, tobacco, flowers, etc. were offered to him in the name of the deceased and in accordance with the manner of his death. If the death was natural - due to old age - the festivities were held in the month of Títitl. The deceased children were celebrated during the month of MiccailhuitontliThe first of these was the celebration of the death of a man, while the adults who died in the war and the sacrifice were celebrated in the month of Huey Miccailhuitl; those who had died by drowning, dropsy, were struck by lightning or had succumbed to skin problems, were on their way to Tlalocán were celebrated in the month of Tepeilhuitl.
Death was not only part of life but also part of a waiting, in which it would go through an expectant silence and regeneration, not just a reincarnation and would go through a transformation. It was the same waiting in which the gods waited for the stars to come out and set them in motion -Ollin- to make sense of the universe. The wait and its uncertainty were that moment where the decomposition was total but not fatal, but only a lapse in which life healed itself to re-emerge.
