Tlaelquani The Eater Of Filth
Tlazolteotl did not originate with the Aztecs. She came from the Huastec people of the Gulf Coast and was absorbed into the Aztec pantheon when the Triple Alliance subjugated the Huasteca around 1450. The Aztecs reshaped her but preserved her essential contradiction: she was simultaneously the goddess who incited sexual transgression and the goddess who consumed it. The same deity who led people into sin was the only one who could take it back. Her most important epithet was Tlaelquani, meaning eater of filth, a title that described her ritual function precisely. In Aztec theology, tlazolli referred not just to physical waste but to moral and sexual pollution. These were understood as the same category of substance, a contamination of the body and spirit that accumulated through misconduct and could make a person sick, unlucky, or spiritually dangerous to those around them. The solution was confession through her priests, who acted as intermedia...