Tlazolteotl

Tlazolteotl is the goddess of purification through confession, her name built from tlazolli, filth or refuse, a word Nahua thought extended from literal waste to sexual transgression and other moral impurity that could be named, confessed and thereby cleared. Sahagun's informants describe a rite of confession, neyolmelahualiztli, the straightening of the heart, performed typically once in a lifetime and generally reserved for later years, in which a penitent confessed serious transgressions before a priest acting in Tlazolteotl's name, who then imposed penance and declared the matter closed, an institution colonial writers found strikingly close in form to Christian confession though rooted in an entirely separate theology. She is depicted in the codices with a blackened mouth or lower face, read as the mark of having consumed the confessed filth, and she carries strong associations with midwifery and sexuality, a patron of the acts that could produce transgression as well as of the rite that cleared it, a double character consistent with how Nahua religion generally treated dangerous forces as needing address and channelling rather than simple avoidance. Her cult has roots that colonial sources trace to the Huastec region along the Gulf coast, and she is sometimes grouped with a set of related earth and fertility goddesses including Toci and Teteoinnan under the broader Tlazolteotl Ixcuina complex, the sources not fully agreeing on how sharply these figures should be distinguished from one another.

Seventh among the Lords of the Night, Tlazolteotl governs every ninth date beginning from day seven of the tonalpohualli, her turn moving through the full range of day signs and trecenas across the 2340 days required before the nine day and 260 day counts realign. A date under her night carried, in the tonalpouhque's layered reading, an association with the confession rite's own logic, a day read as suited to clearing old transgression or beginning a course that required discipline and eventual reckoning, an interpretation drawn from her known ritual role rather than from any surviving day by day manual specific to the night lords, since Sahagun records the nine as a fixed sequence without a separate divinatory text attached to each.

The confession rite itself was not tied to any particular date in the 260 day count, being available to a penitent essentially once and near the end of a serious transgression's weight on the conscience, so Tlazolteotl's place in the calendar priests' reading of a given day is best understood as one register among several a diviner weighed for a birth or an undertaking rather than as scheduling the confession rite itself. Her position immediately before Tepeyollotl, the jaguar aspect of Tezcatlipoca who follows her as eighth, places two of the sequence's more severe figures adjacent to one another near its close, though the compilers of the codices record no explanation for the ordering beyond the list itself.

Sources Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of FateElizabeth Hill Boone with Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble