Mictlantecuhtli

The Aztec lord of Mictlan, the land of the dead to which most souls went. He is shown as a skeleton or half-fleshed body with a bare skull face, often with claws and a pleated paper rosette on his brow.

Aztec symbols and gods. Also called aztec god of death, mictlan, mictlantecuhtli symbol.

Meaning

Mictlantecuhtli is “Lord of the Place of the Dead”. Sahagún, the sixteenth-century Franciscan, recorded that the souls who went to Mictlan were those who died of illness, whether lords, nobles or common people; there ruled Mictlantecuhtli, whose wife was Mictecacíhuatl. A sculpture found in the excavation of the calmécac in Mexico City shows him with a fleshless face and a rosette of pleated paper on his forehead, fanged masks at his joints and claws in place of hands; Nicholson’s guide to deity insignia lists the paper rosettes as his sign and that of other macabre gods. Among Nahua villagers today, the anthropologist Alan Sandstrom writes, his counterpart is Miquilistli, Death, cut from paper as a human skeleton.

Origin and history

Mictlan lay in the north. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma notes that the Mexica took the north as the direction of the dead, mictlampa, and Lewis Spence wrote in 1913 that they placed Mictlan in the far north, a place of famine, desolation and death. The road there passed nine levels, Enrique Vela writes, and the soul crossed a river with the help of a reddish dog; INAH describes the xoloitzcuintle as that companion. Sahagún lists the dead person’s papers for the passes along the way, the first between two mountains that clash together, and says that after four years the dead went on to the nine hells.

The clay figures of the House of the Eagles

Two clay figures of Mictlantecuhtli stand in the Museo del Templo Mayor. Matos Moctezuma describes them as they were found flanking the north door of the House of the Eagles: half-fleshed, arms raised, with small holes in the skull for real hair, as some codices show him, and a piece painted pink between the ribs that represents the liver, the organ of the dead. Both pairs can be seen in the site museum. The eagle warriors stood at the west door, and Matos suggests that the ruler walked a ritual route from the eagles to Mictlantecuhtli’s north door, toward the land of the dead, following the sun from its rising to its setting.

Death and life, back to back

On plate 56 of the Codex Borgia, Mictlantecuhtli is painted back to back with Ehécatl, the wind god: death and existence, as Patrick Johansson reads them. In the Nahua myth of the creation of people, Quetzalcoatl goes down to Mictlan to fetch the bones of the dead and blows a conch shell into Mictlantecuhtli’s ear; Mexicolore tells how he dropped the bones as he fled, and saved them.

Hell and the devil in Sahagún

Sahagún wrote as a Christian missionary, and his Spanish turns Mictlan into “el Infierno”, hell, and its lord into a devil (“un diablo”).

Mictlan and Día de Muertos

The road to Mictlan still appears in Día de Muertos. INAH writes that the xoloitzcuintle remains a symbolic bridge between the worlds and appears in rituals, art and community life, above all around the Day of the Dead, as in a parade at the Museo Regional de Colima.

Sources

Mictlantecuhtli (Raúl Barrera Rodríguez and Gabino López Arenas, Arqueología Mexicana), Raúl Barrera Rodríguez and Gabino López Arenas, “Hallazgos en el recinto ceremonial de Tenochtitlan”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 93, pp. 18–25, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), photo captions
Recinto de las Águilas o Casa de las Águilas, Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan (Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Arqueología Mexicana), Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, “Recinto de las Águilas o Casa de las Águilas”, Arqueología Mexicana special edition no. 56, pp. 10–32, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), guide text
La muerte: Un vientre materno (Patrick Johansson K., Arqueología Mexicana), Patrick Johansson K., “La muerte en Mesoamérica”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 60, pp. 40–53, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), caption; article text
¿A dónde iban los muertos? (Enrique Vela, Arqueología Mexicana), Enrique Vela, “La muerte”, Arqueología Mexicana special edition no. 75, pp. 59–61, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, vol. 1 (Bernardino de Sahagún, ed. Bustamante, 1829), Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, ed. Carlos María de Bustamante, vol. 1 (Mexico: Alejandro Valdés, 1829), Book 3, Appendix, ch. 1, Internet Archive, Book 3, Appendix, ch. 1
The Myths of Mexico & Peru (Lewis Spence), Lewis Spence, The Myths of Mexico & Peru (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company), Project Gutenberg, Mictlan
Mexica/Aztec deity insignia (Mexicolore, after H. B. Nicholson), Ian Mursell, Mexicolore; abridged from H. B. Nicholson, “The Late Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican (Aztec) Iconographic System” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973), Mexicolore, headdresses; back devices
God of the month: Quetzalcoatl (Mexicolore), Julia Flood, Mexicolore, Mexicolore, article text
Xoloitzcuintle: compañero en el viaje al Mictlán (INAH, foto del día, 2025), Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, foto del día, November 2025, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, photo note
What happened to the Aztec gods after the Conquest? (Alan Sandstrom, Mexicolore), Alan R. Sandstrom, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, answer in Mexicolore’s “Ask the experts”, Mexicolore, answer text

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Last reviewed October 3, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

Added October 3, 2026.

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