Cihuateteo

Women who died as warriors

Sahagún's Nahua informants, recorded in the Florentine Codex, compared a woman who died in her first childbirth to a warrior who died in battle: she had fought and been taken. Such women became cihuateteo, 'goddess women' (also cihuapipiltin, 'noblewomen'), and went to the western paradise, Cihuatlampa, 'the place of women'. Just as dead warriors escorted the sun from dawn to noon, the cihuateteo carried it from noon down to its setting. Book 6 describes the midwife's address to the dead mother, and Book 1 the cihuapipiltin.

Feared at the crossroads

Their honour made them dangerous. On particular days in the ritual calendar they were believed to descend to earth and gather at crossroads, where they could strike children with paralysis or seizures, and parents kept children indoors on those days. Small shrines at crossroads received offerings to them. Young warriors, Sahagún adds, sought the hair or fingers of a woman who had died this way as talismans for battle, so her husband and kin guarded her burial.

In stone

Several carved stone figures of cihuateteo, with clawed hands and skull faces, survive in museum collections from the Tenochtitlan area.