The question of afterlife in Aztec civilization has not received the attention it deserves from Mesoamericanists. Most of the time the data of the Spanish or Indian sixteenth-century chroniclers have been almost uncritically accepted, after elimination of certain elements arbitrarily considered to be the product of Christian influences. It is generally admitted that there were two possibilities of surviving after death. The fallen warriors, the persons killed on the sacrificial stone, and the women who have died in childbirth and are therefore assimilated to the heroic warriors, survive gloriously in the company of the sun in the >>House of the Sun<<. Those who have been chosen by Tlaloc, the god of the earth and the rains, go to Tlalocan, a kind of >>earthly paradise<< more or less assimilated with the mythical land of Tamoanchan and corresponding to the ideal of sedentaries and agriculturalists. The ordinary dead become the prey of Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of the Place of the Dead, in the underworld. They disappear forever after a short while. Because of the lasting influence of past century evolutionists theories, it is also generally considered that behavior during life did not influence fate after death.

In this paper I shall attempt to demonstrate first, that after death everybody had to descend to Mictlan and that only those who had showed merit in one way or another managed to escape and to survive gloriously or happily. It will also be shown that the places of the dead I the Other World coincided with certain divisions of time, space and time being to closely related, and that for the chosen ones afterlife was cyclical. And third, we shall see that destiny of men was influenced by moral considerations.

Our main information concerning the afterlife stems from Friar Bernardino de SAHAGÚN, who describes three sojourns of the dead: the paradise of Tlaloc, the house of the Sun and the underworld, the Mictlan.