The Marigold: Mexico’s Flower of Remembrance
In this article historians Andrea Reed-Leal & Léon Pradeau explore the Cempoalxochitl, also known as the Marigold, a flower deeply rooted in Mexican culture. Learn more about its significance and how it servesas a bridge between the living and the deceased.
The Cempoalxochitl*
1.1. Cempoalxochitl, Book 10, Florentine Codex, fol. 186v.
She has yellow, orange, and green colors, many petals, hundreds, thousands. Her texture is soft as cloth. She paints the lands surrounding the Cholula Pyramid in my hometown, one that still is a place of worship to the rain deities: with her light, she leads the dead back to Earth every November. Nowadays, agricultores [farmers] sow their seeds to sell them for the very popular Día de Muertos [Day of the Dead]. If you visit Central and Southern Mexico on these days, you will see the cempoalxochitl everywhere: on pick-up trucks traveling to the main cities, in every household as ofrenda [offering], and sold by street vendors. For centuries, she has been the link between the living and those who dwell in the land of the dead—and for that long, we’ve been living and growing in floral worlds.
Nahua Flowery Worlds
Cempoalxochitl means “twenty flowers” or “many flowers.” She is rooted in many religious and political rituals in Mexico, and referred to by different names around the globe: the flower of the dead (flor de muertos), Indian Rose (rose d’inde), and African marigold. If we only look at the colonial legacies and extractive uses of the flower, we fail to see the worlds of creativity, life force, and shimmer this flower carries in Nahua imagery.
Thus, we will only pick a minimum of flowers here – to avoid reproducing the exploitation, the commodification of this flower as a “cultural” image of the Day of the Dead. And to get closer, with centuries of differences, to the strangeness, to the fluctuation of this flower in the Nahua world – which was so poorly read, so distorted by the colonial documents which wanted to explain its customs. Failing to be ideal readers, we wrote about this flower in dialogue between cultures, between eras; and, above all, trying not to force our ideas on a flower, not writing a story about it that is not its own.
Nahuas of Central Mexico cultivated all sorts of flowers (image 1). When Spaniards (violently) arrived in Tenochtitlan, one of the main cities of the Aztec Empire, they were amazed by their beautiful and well-cared-for gardens. Indigenous painter-scribes portrayed scenes of sowing, picking, stringing, and arranging flowers in a painting in the Historia general de la Nueva España, also called the Florentine Codex, a twelve-book Encyclopedia produced in the sixteenth century by Indigenous scribes and painters and Spanish friars. The hair and clothes of these masculine figures look like they did before the conquest. For the creators of these images, decades after the war, no longer resembled these silhouettes: they had been trained from a young age under the harsh rule of the Spanish brothers, at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco.
The smell of each flower has meaning: the Nahuas keep a record of it. A mestizo chronicler, Diego Muñoz Camargo (1529-1599), described how Nahuas would spend days smelling roses during the festivities of the goddess Xochiquetzal. Odors played key ritual and symbolic roles in ceremonies. The smell of copalli (incense) was —and still is—thought of as food for the deities (Dupey, 2013, 3). In the second image, one man is smelling a petal and pointing with the other hand to the flowery design he has in front. He is most probably preparing adornments for a ceremony, food for the deities.
In the third image, a man is arranging flowers in beautiful garlands and chaplets. During the festivities in honor of Xochiquetzal and the deity of corn, Xilonen, women would wear them proudly while dancing and chanting. Many kinds of flowers and plants accompanied rituals. Recently, at the site of the Templo Mayor in what was the main square of the city of Tenochtitlan, archeologists analyzed pollen residues inside burials and found traces of xalxocotl (Guava flower), chimalacatl (Sunflower), ehuauhtli (Amaranth flower), huitzquílitl (Thisles), among other types of flowers, showing the distinct associations with flowers. Each flower associated with a precise meaning: by finding these flowers, we can give another meaning to the graves, and to the lives lost in silence.
1.2. Men planting, picking, stringing, and arranging flowers. Book 11, fol. 192. Historia general de la Nueva España
Chronicles described the use of garlands and chaplets. The Franciscan Toribio de Benavente (1482-1569), also called Motolinía, wrote in 1568 about Nahua festivities that they “decorate their churches very neatly [...] where processions pass they make many arches, made of roses, with much hard work and ribbons made from the same flowers, and make many cones of flowers, something very impressive, and for this reason in this land everyone rejoices if they have gardens with roses [...].”A few years later, in 1575, another Spanish chronicler, Bernal Díaz del Castillo was also amazed by the Nahua gardens in Iztapalapa: “We went to the orchard and garden, which was very admirable to see and walk around, I couldn't get enough of looking at the diversity of trees and the smells that each one had and the platforms full of roses and flowers and many fruit trees and rose bushes.”
Nahuas considered flowers as sacred and precious beings that connoted poetry or high speech and formed vital cores of cosmologies, rituals, and the everyday lives of Indigenous peoples. Their aromas and colors had different meanings. For example, the purposeful use of organic pigments for painting codices derived from flowers suggests that “flowery matter” endowed codices with tonalli, one of the vital forces inhabiting living bodies and which allowed someone to communicate with the sacred (Domenici 2021, 272; Maffie, 2014, 60-61). In a section of Book 11, in the Florentine Codex, scribes describe the significance of flowers:
“I offer flowers. I sow flower [seeds]. I plant flowers. I assemble flowers. I pick flowers. I pick different flowers. [...] I make a flower necklace, a flower garland, a paper of flowers, a bouquet, a flower shield, hand flowers. I thread them, I string them. I provide them with grass. I provide them with leaves. I make a pendant of them. I smell something. I smell them [...] I provide him/her with flowers. I cover one with flowers. I cloth him/her with flowers [...] I injure one with flowers. I destroy him/her with flowers.”
In the description, we again see the multiple and often contradictory nature in flower symbolism, analogies of love and war, life and death. The Mexica used to offer cempoalxochitl to their deities in different festivities, as she has been associated with bravery, death, and sacrifice in war. Flowers such as cempoalxochitl and hummingbirds represent the outpouring of soldiers who died in battle. But flowers were also signs of excess and love and could represent body parts and sexual acts (Sigal, 2011, 6).
The women of Chalca sang around 1470 to King Axayacatl’s penis as a “quetzal popocorn flower” (Plagiobothrys) to seduce him. The choice of words alludes to the relationship between flowers and sexual pleasure, the reverential rhetoric (“quetzal” alludes to preciousness), and the transmeaning of the flower as both male and female genitalia for the Chalca concubines. A sex to be shared between the king and them, sharing its world-making power too. War and sex, lust and bravery.
Flower worlds open two distinct cosmologies expressed in Central Mexico: pleasure and militarism. They invoke the human spirit, preciousness, and vital forces (such as warrior-like spirituality and sexual strength). Nahuas believed in a place of “eternal bliss,” called the Tamoanchan, presided by the deities of flowers, Xochipilli and Xochiquetzal, full of trees, aromatic flowers, springs, and rivers (Pohl, 2021, 232). In this view, flowers have agency and are animate beings in the spiritual paradise—a place of origin and return. As Art historian Berenice Alcántara Rojas noticed, flowers appear as insignia in almost all religious festivities depicted in the Florentine Codex (2008, 114). Nahuas offered flowers to the dead as acts of respect, commonality, and reciprocity because flowers were vehicles into other realms of reality or the divine.
1.3. Xochiquetzal weaving beneath the tree in the Tamoanchan. Primeros memoriales, fol. 256 ©Real Biblioteca del Palacio Real de Madrid
Xochiquetzal
It is said that all the sweet-smelling flowers came from Xochiquetzal’s vagina when they were brought to the underworld.
There was once—she is still—the goddess Xochiquetzal (“precious flower”), patroness of creative art crafts, of weavers, silversmiths, and painters. She was believed to be the first woman to weave, according to Nahua tales of the creation of the world (Weitlaner Johnson, 2005, 8), and to represent the excess of feminine sexuality and beauty. Xochiquetzal was linked to sexual desire and fertility but also with war; this duality of life and death is a recurrent theme in Mesoamerican religions (McCafferty & McCafferty, 2003, 105). There still is a link between creativity and sexual energy, doesn’t it?
As the goddess of fertility, abundance, and pleasures, she was associated with prostitutes, concubines, and priestesses who accompanied young warriors into battle. In Nahuatl, her name means "flower" and "feather" or “preciousness.” Xochiquetzal signified the excess of feminine sexuality, military and creative powers not only for women but for men artisans and warriors as well as all generative life forces (McCafferty & McCafferty, 2003, 103). The chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo described her:
“These nations had a goddess they called the Goddess of lovers, as formerly the gentiles had the goddess Venus. They called her Xochiquetzal, they said she lived above the Nine Skies and that she lived in delectable places and among great recreations, accompanied and protected by many people, being served by other women, like a goddess, in great delights and gifts of fountains, rivers, forests, without lacking anything. [...] They celebrated this goddess Xochiquetzal every year with great solemnity, and many people attended her where her temple was dedicated.”
She was celebrated with dances, sacrifices, food, and flower offerings. Myth and rituals converge. For the Nahua, flowers diffused the binaries of sexual identity, connoted contradictions, and related to humans and deities alike. The flowery world is a space of ritual transformation where one’s identity, that of humans and animals, dissolves with the botanical sacred ecosystem.
On the day of her celebration during the month of Ochpaniztli, in precontact times, a priest would wear the skin of the goddess from a flayed sacrificed victim and become one with her, disorienting both of their gender identities. The priest would then pretend to be the goddess and begin to weave in the steps of the temple. All around him/her, people dressed as monkeys, dogs, and felines, and children as butterflies and flowers danced before him/her (Flood 2008).
There is a relationship between good-smelling flowers and corn tlaeli [harvest] and probably comes from the myth that Cinteotl, the corn god, was born from Xochiquetzal (Dupey, 2013, 26). The Mexica would fill temples and altars in honor of Cinteotl with flowers.
Nowadays, in la Huasteca, ripe corn is still xochiyotia [decorated with flowers] (Image 1.4). The contemporary Xochitlalquetl, “flower man,” a guide of rituals in the Huasteca, in Veracruz, represents an odd displacement of the goddess into the masculine – into the cartesian framework of the rational god. Truth is Xochiquetzal is too grounded in earthly affects; she resists this forced masculinization, for she was also the patron of silversmiths, warriors, and painters. My Nahuatl teacher, Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, explained to me that during the celebration of Chicomexochitzin (Seven-Flower), people dress the corn with paperwork and Cempoalxochitl. This sense of commonality with flowers may force us to think that other nonhumans —animals, plants, earth, and even artifacts— can be in intimate relationships and act as agents in human relations. If we pay careful attention, as Jane Bennett invites us to in Vibrant Matter (2010), we can notice the vital materiality that traverses all beings, “in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between humans and nonhumans” (112).
Are these realities different from other flowery encounters you’ve had? In my garden, I sow flower seeds. They inhabit my spaces at home: my kitchen, the living room, and my studio. Flowers come back during Spring in my garden; some stay, and some go. Some invite bees and butterflies. I saw last Spring a hummingbird. Are warriors coming from other worlds to feed in the garden?
Abuela
1.4. Corn is decorated with flowers in the offering during Chicomexochitzin rituals. Courtesy of ©Sabina Cruz de la Cruz
I bring flowers and burning candles for my abuela [grandmother]. In the photograph, she is around 60 years old, she smiles with her big mouth that I remember always painted in sheds of red. I wasn’t here for the velorio, the ritual of accompanying the deceased two nights before the burial. I also bring copal incense (if my abuelo [grandfather] knew, he would be alarmed because of its association with non-catholic religious ideas). People from my town, Tlaxcalancingo, have the custom of burying their dead with food: they place tortillas, blessed palm leaves, black beans, pumpkin seeds, sweet potato, bread of the Dead, and salt. I offer my abuela una cubita she loved dearly (Ron with CocaCola), red rice, and envueltos de mole (corn tortillas with chicken and spiced chocolate sauce on top). She might be here, and I want to say goodbye.
Today’s Day of the Dead is of Catholic origin and was introduced into Mexico by Spaniards, although there is for sure a precontact influence with similar rituals for the dead. The Catholic ritual was indigenized, or the Mexica beliefs were Christianized. We know that Mexicas honored their dead on special occasions, which might have coincided more or less with the month of November and the catholic holiday of Todos Santos (All Saint’s Day). In the past decades, the Day of the Dead has become a national celebration that attracts huge waves of tourists who come to see the offerings, processions, and spectacles produced for the tourist market. For decades it has also had a presence in the US as the Mexican diaspora celebrates the Day of the Dead all around the country and is now mass-marketed and merchandised in big stores, such as Target, Nike, and Amazon. The Day of the Dead has always boosted commercial activity; during these days, people buy and sell foods, flowers, and goods, although for some communities, such as in Huaquechula, Puebla, the traditional barter or mass exchange of goods still takes place in the central market.
It is a time of joy and celebration because the dead come back to us on this day. The petals of the cempoalxochitl outside the houses lead the souls to the altar inside. We encounter the spirits in the streets; flowers are believed to link our Earthly world to theirs as they have a tonalli, an internal force of life. They symbolize the hearts of the dead; all around, the deceased’s hearts paint the landscape. The smell of cempoalxochitl is quite unique, delicious, sweet, and so strong in the room. My abuela will love it; she will reminiscence with all the food we have put for her. Their orange and yellow colors, like the sun, will lead her way back to us.
Men smelling flowers. Book2, folio 73r, Florentine Codex Digital
Works Cited
Álcantara Rojas, Berenice. “In Nepapan Xochitl: The Power of Flowers in the Works of Sahagún.” Colors Between Two Worlds, edited by Louis A. Waldman, Villa I Tatti, 2008, pp. 107-134.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. de Benavente, Toribio. Historia de los indios de la Nueva España. Linkgua, 2017.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia Verdadera de la conquista de La Nueva España. Impr. del Reyno, 1632.
Dupey García, Élodie. “De pieles hediondas y perfumes florales.” Estudios de cultura Náhuatl, vol. 45, no. enero-julio, 2013, pp. 7-36.
Flood, Julia. “Goddess of the Month: Xochiquetzal ('Quetzal Flower').” Mexicolore, 2008, https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/gods/goddess-of-the-month-xochiquetzal. Accessed 11 October 2023.
Lok, Rossana. Gifts to the Dead and the Living: Forms of Exchange in San Miguel Tzinacapan, Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. Centre of Non-Western Studies, Leiden University, 1991.
Maffie, James. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. University Press of Colorado, 2014.
Muñoz Camargo, Diego. Historia de Tlaxcala. Red ediciones, 2023.
Pohl, John M. D. “The Flower World of Cholula.” Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, edited by Michael Mathiowetz and Andrew Turner, University of Arizona Press, 2021, pp. 222-242.
Rodríguez Figueroa, Andrea Berenice. Los jardines nahuas prehispánicos: una introducción desde la perspectiva de la arquitectura del paisaje. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Arquitectura, 2021.
Sigal, Pete. The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture. Duke University Press, 2011.
Weitlaner Johnson, Irmgard. “El vestido prehispánico del México antiguo." Textiles del México de ayer y hoy.” Arqueología Mexicana, no. 19, 2005, pp. 8-9.
*We would like to acknowledge that the histories and sources in this text belong to the Nahua people and their ancestors. Colonial violence persists in our day, and the indigenous communities in Mexico and all Latin America suffer from systemic discrimination and ongoing political and social inequalities. I wouldn’t be able to access these stories without Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and John Sullivan, my Nahuatl teachers, who have generously shared their knowledge with me. We approach the archive with care and respect, with an attitude of openness. We are here to learn.
Andrea Reed-Leal @anreedl & Léon Pradeau @lpradeau