Tlazolteotl

Tlazolteotl, the Filth Eater or Filth Goddess, is an Aztec earth and mother goddess whose worship the Aztecs traced to the Huastec region of the Gulf coast, and she gathers together a striking range of domains: sexual desire and transgression, childbirth, and above all purification. Her name comes from tlazolli, meaning refuse, filth, or by extension moral filth and misconduct, especially of a sexual kind, and her paradoxical nature is that she both provokes vice and consumes it, she is the goddess who kindles illicit desire and the goddess who cleanses its stain. This double role is expressed in a remarkable ritual institution reported in the colonial sources.

A person burdened by sexual transgressions could, characteristically once in a lifetime and often in old age, make a confession of them before a priest of Tlazolteotl; the goddess was believed to eat the filth confessed, taking the moral defilement into herself and so cleansing the penitent, who was thereby freed of the fault and its consequences. She is associated with spinning and weaving and with raw cotton, which appears in her headdress, and she is often shown with a band of unspun cotton and spindles, and sometimes with black around the mouth, the filth she has consumed. As a mother goddess she also presided over childbirth and was invoked by midwives. Tlazolteotl embodies an idea found in a number of Mesoamerican deities: that the same divine power which governs the dangerous, disorderly and polluting forces of life is also the power that can purify and set right, so that the eater of filth is at once the source of transgression and the means of absolution from it.

Colonial sources describing Tlazolteotl frequently complicate the single name with a set of four related figures, the Ixcuinan or Ixcuiname, sister goddesses whose individual names, Tiacapan, Teicu, Tlaco and Xocotzin, are themselves simply the ordinary Nahuatl terms for the first, second, third and fourth born daughters in a family, so the goddess of transgression and purification is presented, in this tradition, not as one figure but as an ordered set of siblings named for nothing more than their birth order. Different colonial informants and modern scholars disagree about how to read this: some treat the four Ixcuinan as genuinely distinct cult figures each carrying a piece of Tlazolteotl's wider domain, while others read the foursome as a way of representing different life stages or aspects of a single goddess of sexuality and purification, split across the culturally loaded roles daughters of different birth order held within a Nahua household.

The clearest surviving image connected to this cluster is a well known illustration in the Codex Borbonicus, likely produced very close to the conquest, showing a goddess in the pose of active childbirth, squatting with a small figure emerging from between her legs, an image art historians generally identify with Tlazolteotl in her aspect as patroness of birth, shown at the culminating moment of labor rather than in a static, seated pose typical of most other codex deities. Read together with the confession ritual described elsewhere, the image and the sister goddesses show a deity whose single name in modern accounts compresses a considerably more layered set of birth, sibling and life stage associations in the surviving sources themselves.