Tzitzimime
Tzitzimimeh · Tzitzimitl · Star demons · Skirt-of-stars figures
Beings of the star-filled sky who were read as devils by the men who wrote them down — and whose association with eclipses, midwives and childbirth survives underneath.
Basis: The eclipse associations in the sources · AI-generated
| Tradition | Mesoamerican |
|---|---|
| Type | sky being · omen |
| Habitat | sky |
| First attested | 1577 |
| Principal source | Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (1577) |
Illustrations
Read through two filters
The tzitzimime survive only through two layers of interpretation, and both have to be named before anything else can be said.
The first filter is the recording itself. The Florentine Codex is an extraordinary document — compiled in Nahuatl, with Nahua collaborators, by a friar with real linguistic ability — and it was made in order to equip the conversion effort. Its categories are Christian: things are sorted into gods, devils and superstitions.
The second filter is four centuries of popular writing that took the colonial reading at face value and amplified it. The tzitzimime arrive in modern books as skeletal star demons who will devour humanity at the end of the world — a description with the shape and the vocabulary of European apocalyptic writing.
Modern scholarship, particularly in art history, has gone back to the images and the Nahuatl and argued that the demonic reading is largely a colonial construction, and that the original associations were more ambiguous — including protective roles, particularly around childbirth. That line of reading rests on the Nahuatl and the images rather than on what the friars concluded about them.
What the sources do not describe
There is no settled appearance to report, and that absence is the most useful fact about the figure.
What the Nahuatl material gives is position and movement rather than body. The beings belong to the star-filled sky; they are plural, a class rather than an individual; and during an eclipse they come down. The passages that name them in the Florentine Codex are embedded in accounts of the sky, of omens and of childbirth, where the point being made is what happens and what must be done about it. Size, face, limbs, clothing, voice, whether they leave any trace on the ground — none of that is specified. The one recurring physical element is the stars themselves, and even there it is unclear in the earliest readable material whether the stars are a garment, a location, or the beings.
The familiar description — skeletal, clawed, a skirt of stars, teeth at the joints — is later. It comes from colonial-era illustration and from the reconstructions built on it, and it is exactly the part Cecelia Klein's "The Devil and the Skirt" (2000) identifies as belonging to the conversion period rather than to pre-Conquest belief. A reader looking for a face is looking for something the sources never supplied.
What the sources attach them to
Three things, repeatedly.
The stars, and the sky when it is wrong. They are associated with the star-filled sky and with its appearance at the wrong time — which is to say, with eclipses.
Descent. The fear is directional: they come down. An eclipse is the moment when the boundary that keeps them up there is weakened.
Childbirth. The sources connect them to the cihuateteo, the women who died in childbirth, who in Nahua belief were honoured as a dangerous and powerful category of dead. Birth and eclipse sit together in this material as moments when a threshold thins.
That last association is the one the demonic reading loses entirely, and it is the one that makes the category coherent.
What people actually did
The recorded response to a solar eclipse is loud and public. Book 7 of the Codex describes tumult and weeping, a great din of shouting, war cries in the temples, bloodletting through pierced earlobes, and the killing of captives. It also records the saying that fastens these beings to the event: if the eclipse became total it would be dark forever, the tzitzimime would come down, and they would eat people.
The bakunawa tradition of the Visayas answers an eclipse the same way. There the eclipse is a serpent swallowing the moon, and the response is the whole village outside banging pots until it lets go — collective, immediate, and effective by its own standard.
Same event, same sky, the same instinct: go out and make noise at it. Neither response is more rational than the other, and both are unfalsifiable in the same way: the sun comes back.
What the colonial frame contributed
The familiar figure of the tzitzimime — skeletal, clawed, wearing a skirt of stars — comes from colonial-era illustration and from modern reconstruction built on it. It is the friars' conclusion given a body, and it is the part of the record that art-historical scholarship identifies as a product of the conversion period rather than a description of pre-Conquest belief.
The Nahuatl material itself is far less specific about what these beings look like. It places them in the star-filled sky, has them descend, and sets them beside the cihuateteo and the dangers of childbirth. A face, a posture, a costume: those are things the directly readable sources do not give, and the skeletal demon cannot be traced back to them.
What the record does not settle
The honest position on the tzitzimime is that the sources are filtered, the scholarship is active, and confident statements in popular writing are usually repeating a sixteenth-century judgement rather than reporting a sixteenth-century belief.
The Codex can be read directly on the eclipse, the descent and the childbirth associations. Where the material turns into a demonology, the evidence is colonial and stops being evidence about Nahua belief.
Sources
Sahagún's Florentine Codex (1577), in the Anderson and Dibble translation, is the principal source. The argument that the demonic characterisation is largely colonial is made in modern art-historical scholarship, Cecelia Klein's "The Devil and the Skirt" (Ancient Mesoamerica 11, 2000) in particular.
Regional names
| Central Mexico | Tzitzimimeh — The Nahuatl plural; tzitzimitl is the singular |
|---|
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Frequently asked
What are the tzitzimime?
Nahua beings associated with the stars and with the darkened sky, described in sixteenth-century sources as descending during eclipses. The sources also connect them with childbirth and with women who died giving birth.
Are they demons?
That is how colonial writing presented them, and modern scholarship treats that reading as substantially a product of the conversion effort. The pre-Conquest associations are more ambiguous and include protective functions.
What was the fear during an eclipse?
That the sun might not return, and that these beings would descend and eat people. The response recorded in the Florentine Codex is public and loud: shouting and weeping, war cries in the temples, bloodletting, and the killing of captives.
Why are they connected with childbirth?
The sources link them to the cihuateteo — women who died in childbirth and were honoured as a category of dangerous dead. Birth and the darkened sky are both moments of threshold in this material, and the same beings appear at both.
Are they gods?
The category does not map cleanly onto that word, which is part of the problem. They are a class of being with power and with a season, and the friars who first described them had only "god" and "demon" available.
Sources
- Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (1577). Anderson and Dibble translationThe principal source. Compiled in Nahuatl with Nahua collaborators; the passages on these beings sit among accounts of the sky, of omens and of childbirth.
- Cecelia F. Klein, The Devil and the Skirt: An Iconographic Inquiry into the Pre-Hispanic Nature of the Tzitzimime (2000). Ancient Mesoamerica 11(1): 1-26The study that reread the tzitzimime against the colonial sources and argued that the demonic reading is largely a product of the conversion period.