The Material of the System

Warning, again: the clean threefold scheme that follows is López Austin’s synthesis from scattered material. The sources do not present it this way, and they do not always agree with one another. Chapter 8 says exactly what we do not know.

5. Tonalli — the heat that leaves

tonalli — from the verb tona, “to warm, to emit heat”. The same root as Tonatiuh, the sun.

The word means, simultaneously — and this is not a coincidence:

• heat, solar warmth
• the day of birth and the point of the calendar
• fate, portion, destiny
• the vital force inside the body

Where it is located

In the head, especially the crown — in the region of the fontanel, where the infant’s skull has not yet closed.

That is why the hair of the crown was important: it protected the tonalli. One did not cut the crown hair of young children. And in war, to seize a captive by the crown hair was not merely practical — it was seizing his force.

Its characteristics

1. It is hot. It warms the body and makes it alive.

2. It can leave — and this is the critical thing. The tonalli is not fixed in place. It departs:
   - in sleep (which is why one does not wake someone abruptly, and why dreams are real journeys)
   - in drunkenness
   - in the sexual act
   - in terror — and here the illness of chapter 17 is rooted
   - in violent emotion

3. It is not of fixed quantity. It grows with age, with achievements, with office. A ruler has more; an infant very little, and that fragile.

4. It is not only human. Animals have tonalli, so do mountains, days, cities, cult objects.

5. It is set by the day of birth. See Part D.

Why this is the most important concept of the document

Because it changes what “ill” means.

In the previous systems, illness is a disorder within a system. Here, a whole part of you can no longer be there — can be left somewhere on the road, can be held by someone, can have fallen in water.

And so treatment is not regulation. It is recovery.

6. Teyolia — the heart that stays

teyolia — from the root yol-, “to live”. Related to yollotl, heart, and to ollin, motion.

(The heart, in Nahuatl, is by name “that which moves”. The same pattern as chapter 4.)

Where it is located

In the heart. And in contrast to tonalli, it does not leave while you live.

What it does

• Memory and thought. In Nahuatl, cognition is located in the heart, not in the head.
• Emotion and character.
• What makes someone what they are — the particularity, the talent, the inclination.

The language shows it: a crowd of expressions for mental states are built on yollotl. Confession is called neyolmelahualiztli — literally “the straightening of the heart” (chapter 11).

What happens after death

The teyolia is what travels. It leaves and goes to the destination determined by the manner of death (chapter 19).

And for certain people — rulers, great artists, priests — the teyolia could be deified, become teotl itself.

The contrast that holds the system together

The first is what keeps you alive. The second is what makes you you. And the first is far more fragile than the second.

7. Ihiyotl — the breath that harms others

ihiyotl — “breath, exhalation, emanation”. The third, the most unusual, and the one on which the sources are least consistent.

Where it is located

In the liver.

What it is

Described as a luminous gas that resides in the liver and can be emitted. Related to:

• passion, drive, vitality
• appetite, desire
• courage or cowardice
• influence over others

And here the unique idea

Your ihiyotl can harm those around you — without your willing it.

The ihiyotl was considered dangerous in:

• an angry person
• a person in a state of pollution (tlazolli, chapter 11)
• the dead
• certain physiological states, such as menstruation and the puerperium — and here it has to be said plainly that this is the kind of belief that produces social stigmatisation of women, as in many traditions

The vulnerable are infants and small children, who have little and unstable tonalli.

From this cycle of ideas comes the modern folk term mal aire, “bad air”.

Why this is not superstition in the easy sense

Whatever one believes about the mechanism, the structure of the idea is serious and unusual:

Your internal state is not a private matter. It has a physical effect on the people around you, especially the weakest.

There is no “what I feel inside is my own business”. Your anger is in the room.

And it connects directly with chapter 11: pollution in this system does not primarily harm the one who caused it — it harms his dependants.

8. What binds the three — and what we do not know

The structure

Balance of all three is health. And each can be disturbed independently — so the system distinguishes at least three different types of illness:

• Loss of tonalli → weakness, sadness, lethargy, wasting (chapter 17)
• Disturbance of teyolia → confusion, loss of self, “not the same person”
• Attack of another’s ihiyotl → sudden illness, especially in children

And now what we do not know

This has to be said explicitly, because the table above looks more certain than it is:

1. No source presents them together. López Austin assembled them from hundreds of scattered references in medical, religious and linguistic contexts.

2. The sources do not agree. Other texts give other locations, others are silent, others use the terms in overlapping ways.

3. The very question may be foreign. “How many souls does a person have and where are they?” is a question of European theology. Nahua informants were answering questions put to them by Franciscans — and the form of the question shapes the answer.

4. The dividing line was probably more blurred. The most plausible reading is that there was a spectrum of vital forces with overlapping functions, and that the threefold tidying is our own reading tool.

Use it as a map. Do not take it for a photograph.