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The Aztec Confessional of Tlazolteotl. [1]
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Date: 2022-08-23
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour.
When the Spaniards invaded the New World, eventually arriving in what are now known as Central America and Mexico, they were immediately plunged into a land full of people whose cultures, beliefs, and practices were strange beyond their imagining. But they also were confronted with things so similar to their own- a landscape dotted with large crosses (which were eventually revealed to be markers of sources of fresh water), priests who, like their own, dressed in black, sex workers who dyed their hair and wore a lot of cosmetics, numerous inventive ways of brewing alcohol, and much more- they had to have been simply gobsmacked.
One of those oddly, perhaps unnervingly similar things was the deathbed confessions made to the priests of the goddess Tlazolteotl.
The goddess Tlazolteotl as depicted in the Codex Laud.
Side note: I used the term Aztec in the headline because it's the best known name in our culture for the Nahuatl speaking peoples of Mesoamerica. From this point I will refer to them by the name they called themselves, Culhua-Mexica, or Mexica.
You might not have heard of Tlazolteotl, but there's a very good chance that you've seen her.
Remember this?
Yep, Indiana Jones' "golden idol" was directly patterned on this ancient stone figurine depicting Tlazolteotl giving birth to her son Centeotl, the god of maize.
Pottery replicas of that stone figurine are sold in import stores, and in gift shops in Mexico. My parents had one out on the patio that was purchased in Tijuana. (I'm guessing they had no clue about who or what it actually represented.) Tlazolteotl is a lunar goddess, a patron goddess of midwives and women healers, and a protector of women in childbirth.
As depicted in the Codex Borgia, together with her sacred animal, the jaguar.
Tlazolteotl was known as the "Filth Eater", an unlovely name for a fairly kindly goddess. The filth was of course a person's sins. For the Mexica people, the afterlife you could expect depended a lot on who you were (nobility, warrior, commoner, slave) and how you died. A warrior's death on a battlefield, or a commoner or even slave dying as a sacrifice to some god (the "flowery death") pretty much ensured a happier outcome than, say, drowning in the lake or dying of old age. But anyone could go to whatever awaited them cleansed of a lifetime's worth of sins, if they first made their confession to a priest of Tlazolteotl.
A surprisingly modern looking, graceful stone statue of the goddess known as Filth Eater. Circa 900 to 1521 CE.
And because never in all of human history has any deity anywhere been simple and easy to understand, this goddess also had a reputation for actually encouraging sin. Particularly sin of a sexual nature. The Mexica took a very dim view of all sorts of sexual impropriety, with certain things being considered so egregious as to warrant capital punishment. But, again, even the worst condemned sinner could embark on their journey to the afterlife with a pure conscience, thanks to the same goddess who purportedly incited them to sin in the first place.
I can only imagine how Bishop Zumarraga and his priests reacted to all of this. Monumental crosses that were merely signs for watering holes, and deathbed confessions heard by the black-clad priests of a pagan goddess must have seemed like blasphemous parodies of Christian rituals concocted by the Devil himself in cooperation with the native people. It couldn't have endeared the Culhua-Mexica any to the White colonizers. And may have resulted in intensified persecution.
Thank you for reading. This is an open thread, all topics are welcome.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/23/2116788/-The-Aztec-Confessional-of-Tlazolteotl
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