Every culture that has lasted long enough has had to find a way to hold death.
Not to explain it, not to make it comfortable, not to wrap it in promises about what comes after – but to hold it. To give it a face and a name and a place in the world that allows the living to go on living while staying in honest relationship with the fact that they won’t always be able to. The deities who preside over death in the world’s traditions are, for this reason, among the oldest and most consistently present figures in the human spiritual imagination. They predate most theology. They outlast most of the civilisations that named them.
The Aztec civilization named theirs with particular precision.
Her name in Nahuatl is Mictecacihuatl – pronounced Meek-te-kah-see-wah-tl – and it means, simply, Lady of the Dead. She has been watching over the bones of the deceased for at least eight centuries of documented history. She survived the Spanish conquest that destroyed most of what Aztec civilisation had built. She survived the forced conversion that replaced her temples with churches and her priests with Catholic missionaries. She survived – transformed, syncretised, renamed, driven underground and then surfacing again under different faces – and today she presides over Día de los Muertos, the most widely celebrated death festival in the Western Hemisphere.
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