The Wet Nurse Tree

Chichihuacuauhco, the wet nurse tree, is described in colonial-era Aztec cosmological sources as the afterlife destination for infants who died before reaching the age of reason or before weaning, imagined as a realm containing a great tree whose branches drip milk, nourishing the infant souls gathered there until, in some accounts, they are eventually reborn into the world of the living.

The realm reflects a broader, comparatively gentle strand within Aztec afterlife belief specifically reserved for those who died too young to have accumulated the deeds, whether warrior valor or ordinary conduct, that determined most adults' destination among realms such as Tonatiuh Ichan or Mictlan, treating infant death as a distinct category requiring its own particular, nurturing afterlife rather than folding it into the general adult system. As with the other named Aztec destinations recorded in this atlas, Chichihuacuauhco comes down through colonial-era compilation, chiefly material connected to Sahagun's ethnographic project, and should be read as a genuinely attested piece of Mexica religious belief whose exact original detail was mediated through the specific circumstances of its Spanish-supervised recording.