Mesoamerican creatures

What this is

Four figures from Mexico and Guatemala, taken from the written record rather than from the internet's version of it.

That distinction matters more here than in any other section of this site. Mesoamerican material is popular, visually striking and widely repeated, and a great deal of what circulates — particularly about La Llorona — is a twentieth-century synthesis presented as ancient. The sources are good enough that we do not need to guess, so we do not.

What we have to work with

Three bodies of evidence, of three different kinds.

The Florentine Codex (1577). Bernardino de Sahagún's encyclopedia of Nahua life, compiled in Nahuatl with Nahua collaborators at Tlatelolco. Book 11, "Earthly Things", is a natural history, and the ahuitzotl sits in it among the real animals, described with the same matter-of-fact attention as an otter. Book 12 gives the omens said to precede the Conquest, including the sixth: a woman's voice heard weeping at night.

The Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya narrative written down in the Latin alphabet in the mid-sixteenth century and copied by Francisco Ximénez around 1701. The bat house belongs to it, and so does the only Mesoamerican creature here whose context is a complete, surviving story rather than a description.

Twentieth-century ethnography. Nutini and Roberts spent years on a single belief in a single region and produced, in Bloodsucking Witchcraft (1993), one of the most thorough studies ever made of a folk creature anywhere — including what happened to the families accused. The tlahuelpuchi is here because of that book.

The La Llorona problem

The best-known figure in this material is also the one where the popular account is least reliable, and the page on her is largely about the difference.

The claim in circulation is that La Llorona is Cihuacoatl, an Aztec goddess, and that she is documented in the Florentine Codex before the Conquest. What the Codex actually contains is an omen: a voice in the night, weeping for her children, among seven other portents. It is a recognisable ancestor of the legend's imagery, and it is not the legend — there is no drowning, no river, no faithless man, no named woman.

How that omen became the modern story is a real question with a real answer, and it runs through colonial preaching, nineteenth-century print and twentieth-century film. We tell it that way.

Start here

• La Llorona — the weeping woman, and what the sixteenth-century sources do and do not say about her
• Ahuitzotl — a water creature described as an animal, in a book of animals
• Tlahuelpuchi — the blood-taking neighbour of Tlaxcala, and the best-documented folk belief on this site

The rest

• Camazotz — the bats of the dark house in the Popol Vuh

What this hub leaves out

The living religious traditions of Maya and Nahua communities today, and the deities of the Mexica state cult. This site covers folklore — the material that circulates among people as story, warning and village belief — and it does not produce illustrated versions of other people's religion. The line is not always sharp, and where a figure sits on both sides of it we say so on the page.

Reading the sources

• Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (1577), Books 11 and 12 — in the Anderson and Dibble English translation, and now also in the Getty's digital facsimile.
• Popol Vuh, in Dennis Tedlock's translation (1985; revised edition 1996) — the standard English version, with commentary that is explicit about what is uncertain.
• Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts, Bloodsucking Witchcraft (University of Arizona Press, 1993) — the Tlaxcala study.
• Frances Toor, A Treasury of Mexican Folkways (1947) — an early popular collection; useful for what was in circulation when, and not an analytic source.
• Bess Lomax Hawes, "La Llorona in Juvenile Hall", Western Folklore 27 (1968) — a fieldwork article on how the story was actually told and used, which is a rarer kind of evidence than another retelling.