Mictecacihuatl

Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead, rules the Mexica underworld Mictlan together with her consort Mictlantecuhtli. Mictlan was the lowest and most common destination of the dead, of those who died ordinary deaths, as distinct from warriors or the drowned, who went elsewhere, reached only after an arduous four-year journey through nine levels, and the two skeletal deities presided over the bones that came to rest there. Depicted with a fleshless face and a skirt of serpents, she is, in the colonial sources, keeper of the bones of the dead and presider over the offerings made to them.

Modern Mexican observance of the Day of the Dead is a syncretic tradition blending indigenous and Catholic elements; popular and commercial culture has sometimes linked Mictecacihuatl to that festival and to the folk figure La Catrina, but such connections are recent interpretations rather than documented pre-conquest continuities.

Mictecacihuatl's underworld, Mictlan, was not imagined by the Mexica as a single chamber but as a landscape the ordinary dead had to travel through, a journey the colonial sources describe as lasting four years and passing through nine distinct levels or trials, among them a place of clashing mountains, a mountain of obsidian knives, a freezing wind that cut like blades, and finally a wide river the soul could not cross unaided. Aztec and earlier Mesoamerican burial practice addressed this last obstacle directly: archaeologists have recovered the remains of dogs, generally identified as the native hairless breed known today as the xoloitzcuintli, buried alongside human remains at various Mesoamerican sites, a practice widely interpreted, on the strength of colonial written sources describing exactly this belief, as providing the deceased with a guide able to carry the soul safely across Mictlan's river, since dogs of a particular reddish coloring were specifically said to be capable swimmers for this purpose while others were not trusted to make the crossing.

This picture of an elaborate, obstacle filled underworld journey, ending at the throne of Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli where the bones of the dead were finally gathered, sits at some distance from the modern popular image of Mictecacihuatl as a colorful precursor to the Day of the Dead and the figure of La Catrina, an association already noted as a later, largely commercial linkage rather than a documented pre-conquest continuity. The nine level journey and the archaeologically attested dog burials, by contrast, rest on a considerably firmer combination of colonial textual description and independent physical evidence recovered from the ground.