Robert Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P] .
For the ancient inhabitants of the great Tenochtitlán, dualities, as we know them today, did not exist as such; for example, there was a difference to be made between life and existence. Existence ?nemiliztlin the Nahuatl language, would correspond to the nocturnal part that begins at birth: tlacatiliztliand ends with death ?miquiztli? i.e., 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 for a new existence, but this can only be understood by briefly reviewing the way in which the Mexica viewed time:
After four epochs 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 there, sacrificed himself. Since no one responded, a small, ugly, bubbous god named Nanahuatzin stood up to offer himself, and in response, the arrogant god TecuciztécatlThe gods, lord 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, and the Moon, personified by him, would be born. 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 was kept as 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 those two movements of night and day, feminine and masculine, shadow and light. The ancients, rather than having cardinal points, had regions that clearly reveal the opposition of the Nahua to think in opposite poles and rather reveals their tendency to not establish definitive and eternal states but transits from one state to another.
According to the myth, man was born from the penetration of Quetzacoatl into Mictlan, from where he took the dust from the bones of Mictlatecuhtli's scepter and created man. That is to say, it was the time incarnated by Quetzalcoatl that penetrates to the center of the earth where the darkness lies to make the bones the matter of the human being, where it also falls into a trap (the hole called tlaxapochtli) laid by the mictecaHis bones will be scattered, his limbs separated and he will become that which was to change, that spoil, that decay of a divine being in order to create life through restoration.
An example of this myth is that children who died early were buried near the so-called granaries, cuezcomatenot only because these infants who died early, according to their beliefs, were going to give -because of 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 Nahua developed with all that was disposable from the body was not one of sorrow or obfuscation. Within the Borgia Code, in plate 13 there is an image where the ingestion of a mortuary lump by the earth is compared, 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 in the earth is the bone, 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 who, in addition, was seen as an antithesis of the human process, who while defecating what was bad, what was discarded and left over, the Goddess ate it and made it good again, that was the main of her divine gifts: regeneration.
The Nahua believed that for four days and four nights the souls of the deceased remained among us visiting the cardinal points, then, on the fifth day, they were taken to their final destination. For women, widows, sisters and mourners, the mourning lasted 80 days, where they did not wash their bodies, hair or change their clothes.
During four years, every year after the death of the person, offerings, food, pulque, tobacco, flowers, etc., were made in the name of the deceased and according to the manner of death. If the death had been a natural death - due to old age - the festivities were celebrated during 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 from drowning, hydropesia, had been struck by lightning, or had succumbed to skin problems, were going to the 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 a regeneration, not only a reincarnation and would go through a transformation. It was the same waiting in which the gods awaited the departure of the stars that were to be set 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 to resurface again.
