You can find this work and others as prints and original works of art in my Etsy store by following this link
The Twentieth of the Major Tarot cards is Tlayectiliztli. It takes the place of “The Last Judgement,” which is usually the twentieth card in the tarot. However, “The Last Judgement” reflects a European concept, the idea that time can one day end. For our ancestors, time is not linear, but cyclical, and therefore can have no ending. Rather, things only transform, one thing becoming another, eternally. Here, in the place of “The Last Judgement” is “Purification,” “Tlayectiliztli.” It is the purifying of the soul who has reached its end, it is the death of the individual, who is cleansed for a new existence and a new birth.
Here, Tlazolteotl, “Divine Filth,” the Filth Eater, descends in darkness from a place of chaos and mist. She is a divinity of the earth and of the moon, and wears the moon as a nose ring, and embroidered on her quechquemitl, or short triangular cape. She is the patroness of weavers, for she weaves the fate of men. As such, she wears inserted into her headdress of unspun cotton a spindle wrapped in cotton thread, and she carries in her hand another spindle, likewise wrapped in thread, from which still unspun cotton dangles. She is the mother of vice, depravity, passion, and sexuality. She lives within all of us, in our entrails and livers, and inspires us to feel dark, unbidden, chaotic emotion. Desire wells up within us, and is her creation. Tlazolli, from which she derives her name Tlazolteotl, is filth, dung, and refuse. She is the mother of shit. However, dung is necessary to life, and therefore sacred. Sowed into the field, it becomes fertiliser, and makes the corn grow. Spiritually, Tlazolli is greed and envy. However, it is also passion and sexuality, which, uncontrolled, can lead us to cheat on our partners or engage in unlawful and dangerous, or harmful to others sex, but which, in its place, is necessary to romantic love and to the growth of families. She inspires all Tlazolli, in the world and in the body, and all desire, and it is up to us to channel it, understand it, and act upon it only when it is proper and good to do so. Around her waist is a coral snake, the symbol of sexuality, and her skirt is embroidered with bones, for life and death, fertility and rot, are intimately linked. However, her breasts are large and pendulous. They are breasts which have nourished many children with milk. And her stomach is wrinkled and sagging, for her open, fecund sexuality leads to pregnancy, birth and creation. Her stomach sags because she is the mother of all the children on the earth, of all creatures ever born.
Because it is she who inspires Tlazolli and desire within us, only she has the power to cleanse us of this burden. Therefore, she is also called Ixcuina, “Filth Eater.” Once in a persons life, they have the ability to confess their misdeeds, their weight of Tlazolli, to Tlazolteotl Ixcuina. A priest or priestess dressed in her regalia summons her, and through ritual becomes her, incarnate in flesh, and asks the penitent to confess their “sins.” They tell her what they have done, how they have harmed others, how the desire she had inspired in them and the fate she had woven for them had revealed itself in their lives, and she consumes it, their sin, their weight, their misdeeds, their Tlazolli, and leaves them clean and unburdened. For this reason her mouth is painted black, with the sins of humankind she has taken upon herself.
In the painting, the person who confesses his sins is already wrapped in shrouds, and set upon his alter. His shrouds are white, the color of bone, of death. He is adorned with paper rosettes and flags, with are symbols of death. He wears a red cinta, or headband, to indicate that he is of the faithful, and a follower of the Middle Path. His jaw is skeletal in death, and he speaks, looking up to Tlazolteotl. His words, his cargo of sin and Tlazolli, leave his body as a swirl of dark mist, of chaotic smoke, adorned with night-eyes and stars. She swallows them, and leaves him clean. However, in her left hand she holds three instruments of sacrifice; a knife, a bone awl, and a maguey thorn. These are symbols of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. With the bone awl and the maguey thorn, people of faith pierce their earlobes, tongue, or other fleshy parts, and offer the blood thus spilled to the Tlazolli, as a “debt-payment,” an acknowledgment that the Teteo have sacrificed themselves for us, and that for us to live other beings must die, such as the meat we eat, the corn we transform into tortillas, and the trees whose lumber becomes our homes. We all owe a debt-payment, a cargo of sacrifice, in gratitude and acknowledgment of the sacrifices all other creatures and beings make for our sake.
Death comes for the person in the painting, and they prepare by unburdening themselves, by giving up their weight of Tlazolli to Tlazolteotl. They have lived a life on the Middle Path, and are reminded of their sacrifice by Tlazolteotl. This card speaks of transformation, of the necessity of giving up ones cargo of Tlazolli, of the moral necessity of unburdening. Tlazolteotl listens, and forgives, but she stands in for our lovers, friends, and family, whom we have wronged, and whose forgiveness we most desire. The knives and thorns she carries remind us that this unburdening is difficult, that confession carries risk. Yet, she forgives, she purifies. She leads us from one state of consciousness to another, one free of guilt, one in which we are prepared for a new reality and transformation.
jacobvanloon
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
