Mictlantecuhtli is the Aztec lord of Mictlan, the lowest and northernmost level of the underworld, and the god of the dead. He is a fearsome figure: a skeleton or a skeletal, blood-spattered man, his liver (associated by the Aztecs with the underworld) sometimes shown hanging exposed, crowned with owl feathers and adorned with bones, his mouth open to swallow the stars by day.
With his consort Mictecacihuatl he rules over Mictlan, the destination of the great majority of the dead, those who died ordinary deaths, rather than the warriors and sacrificial victims who went to the sun, the drowned and rain-struck who went to the paradise of Tlaloc, or the women who died in childbirth. To reach Mictlan the soul had to journey for four years through a series of trials and dangers before coming to rest in the presence of its lord. Mictlantecuhtli figures memorably in the Aztec myth of the creation of the present humanity: after the destruction of the earlier worlds, the god Quetzalcoatl descends into Mictlan to retrieve the bones of the people of the previous ages, from which the new human race is to be made. Mictlantecuhtli, jealous of his bones, sets him tests and tries to trap him, and though Quetzalcoatl escapes with the bones, he stumbles in his flight and breaks them, which is why, the myth explains, human beings today come in different sizes. Ground and sprinkled with the penitential blood of the gods, the bones become the humanity of the present sun. Mictlantecuhtli embodies the Aztec vision of death as a realm with its own stern lord, through whose domain the bones of the dead must pass for life to begin again.