Difuntos, apariciones y los lugares de los muertos entre los antiguos nahuas

Abstract

For the ancient nahuas of central México at the moment of the contact with the Spaniards, death was just another part of life, needed to dynamize the universe and let the existence to continue. The death ones, depending in the way they past away, went to one of the many places where the gods lived so they can continue working by passing through a transformation to get a new form. Under these new forms, the death ones or beings of those places could appear in the world of the living, scaring people but also spreading fertility or announcing the future. These beliefs and stories shaped the ghost’s stories that are still told by the Mexican oral traditions and of those adjacent traditions. For this work, I will focus on those scary appearances and narratives that has the characteristic of provoke fear.