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Introduction
With his characteristic critical view, Carlos Navarrete has examined closely the roots of the Mexican view of death so widely celebrated abroad. Far from what we might assume, the common myth of death as festive, beloved and always mocking does not go back farther than the 20Õs. As Navarrete explains (1982: 9-12), in those times of the founding of the Nation and in the midst of a revolutionary mystique that was searching for the reason and the meaning of being Mexicans, folk art, especially the graphic work of José Guadalupe Posada was reevaluated. Skulls of sugar, skeletons of paper cutouts, and festive prints were thus converted into ancestral models and sources of inspiration for a multifaceted iconography that every November floods public buildings, schools, markets, bakeries and cemeteries. In the decades following the revolution, intellectuals like Diego Rivera, Gabriel Fern‡ndez Ledesma and Paul Westheim took up this banner, spreading the new aesthetics far and wide, and solidifying the myth that death inspires little or no fear in the Mexican.
Beginning with this picturesque, and above all nationalistic, vision there has been no lack of those who have wanted to find in the threads of historic continuity a long indigenous tradition of friendly, smiling skulls. Obviously, extrapolating the post-revolutionary urban sentiment of Mexico to the prehispanic world is extreme. While it is definitely certain that the Mexica or Maya cosmovision did not have an equivalent to the terrible hell of our Christian heritage, neither can one say simply that before the arrival of the Spanish there was no fear of death, nor that beings such as Mictlantecuhtli or God A did not inspire an enormous respect in the believer.
The complex prehispanic conceptions of death and the afterlife defy any simplistic explanation. Numerous studies of indigenous beliefs reveal elaborate eschatologies, such as deities of death with contradictory features. In addition, some of the divine functions may seem paradoxical from our western point of view. By way of illustration, suffice it to mention for the time being that the gods of the underworld not only had a destructive character in the Mixtec codices where they appear in scenes of death, sacrifice and destruction, yet suprisingly, in other pages of the same documents, these skeletal beings also depict generative functions, not only in the vegetal cycle, but also in the conception and birth of human beings.
The main focus of this work is centered on the double aspect of the God of Death, a being greedy for human flesh and blood. Our reflections deal with the recent discovery of two exceptional Mexica images of Mictlantecuhtli in the House of the Eagles, very near the intersection of the streets of Justo Sierra and República Argentina in the Historic Center of Mexico City (figure 1). Given the enormous importance of the discovery, in the first section we will discuss in some detail the archaeological context and the process of exploration and restoration of these amazing sculptures. Following that, we will present a formal and technological analysis of them. On this foundation, we will then discuss the indigenous vision of Mictlan a malodorous place of decomposition, related to sexuality, femininity, passions and growth.
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Last Modified: November 30, 2000
Museo del Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e História, México.
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