The Bone Lord of Mictlan

Marguerite Salt
Field Correspondent, The Far Country

Fieldnotes — notes toward Día de Muertos, late October

Halloween turns my notebook south this year, away from the turnip lanterns and bonfires of my usual ground, toward a people who never needed a single night invented for the dead because they had already given them several.

Mictlantecuhtli rules Mictlan, the lowest of the nine descending levels the Mexica believed a soul must cross before it could rest. He is shown in the surviving codices, the Borgia, the Vaticanus B, the Borbonicus, as a figure stripped to bone, ribs open, sometimes his liver hanging visible at the chest, for the Mexica held the liver, not the heart, as the seat housing one aspect of the soul. He wears a collar strung with eyes or with disembodied hands, and he carries paper banners, the mark of one who owns souls the way a landholder owns ground. Owls attend him. So do spiders and bats, and his consort, Mictecacihuatl, rules beside him, no lesser partner but joint keeper of the house of the dead.

The journey to reach him took four years by Mexica reckoning, through obsidian winds, through mountains that ground together, past a river called Chiconahuapan that only a small red-gold dog, the ancestor of today's Xoloitzcuintli, could help a soul cross. Mourners buried their dead with one of these dogs, or an image of one, for exactly that purpose. None of this was punishment. Mictlan was not a hell in the Christian sense; it was simply where most of the dead went, regardless of how they had lived, their manner of death determining the route rather than their conduct. Warriors, women who died in childbirth, and the drowned went elsewhere, to the sun's house or to Tlalocan. Everyone else walked toward the bone lord.

When Spanish missionaries arrived, they found a people who already kept an autumn reckoning with their dead, layered now against the Catholic calendar of All Saints and All Souls, the first and second of November. What emerged from that collision, over generations, is Día de Muertos: marigolds, cempasúchil, laid in paths to guide the spirits home by scent and colour; copal smoke; candles; photographs of the departed set beside their favourite foods and drink, a place laid at table in the oldest sense, the door of the house left, in spirit if not in fact, on the latch. Scholars argue, reasonably, over how much of this descends in an unbroken line from Mictlan's old court and how much is colonial-era invention wearing indigenous dress; the versions disagree, and I will not pretend the thread is cleaner than it is. What survives plainly, whatever its route here, is the conviction the Mexica held before anyone asked them to hold it differently: that the dead are owed a welcome, and that somewhere in the dark a bone-faced lord is still keeping the register of who has arrived.

I have stood at ofrendas in late October and felt something of what a Samhain bonfire or a Dziady supper is reaching for by other means, a hand held out across the same gap. Mictlantecuhtli does not forgive and he does not punish. He receives. For one night in the Society's calendar, that seems reason enough to write his name down properly.

Marguerite Salt is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Far Country. The American south and east: bottle trees, haints, front-porch instruction in how to keep a house safe. She attends to who is doing the telling and what it costs them, and has no patience for the word "quaint".

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.