Coqui Bezelao

← Encyclopedia

In 1590 the Dominican friars raised the church of San Pablo Apóstol over the leveled platform at Mitla, and when they had finished they recorded that they had walled up the mouth of the underworld. Local memory has never let the claim go. The entrance is said to lie directly beneath the main altar, so that for four centuries the Mass has been sung a few feet above the door of the dead, the two liturgies stacked one atop the other in the same stone. Go around the church into the archaeological zone, cross the patio of the fret-worked palaces, and descend the narrow stair cut into the floor of a cruciform crypt: this is the threshold the Cloud People kept. The lord who held it has a name in the oldest Zapotec dictionary that survives. He is Coqui Bezelao, the great lord of Lyobaa.

The colonial church of San Pablo Apóstol, built from 1590 atop the leveled platform at Mitla; local tradition places the sealed entrance to the underworld of Lyobaa beneath its altar. Leslibautista, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The name and how it reaches the record

Almost everything known by name about the Zapotec lord of the dead passes through a single, late channel: the Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca that the Dominican philologist Fray Juan de Córdova printed at Oaxaca in 1578. Córdova had spent decades in the valley learning the language the Zapotec call Diidxazá, and his dictionary — one of the most extensive compiled anywhere in the early colonial Americas — glosses thousands of Zapotec words against Spanish. Among them stands the name of the underworld’s ruler, which he and later scribes wrote in a scatter of spellings: Pitao Bezelao, Pezeelao, Bezelao, Becaloo, Pijzij. Modern writers usually settle on Coqui Bezelao, and the choice is not arbitrary. Coqui is the Zapotec word for a lord or a king. It was the living title of the rulers of the valley kingdoms — the coqui of Zaachila, Cosijoeza, bore it in the flesh — and to attach it to Bezelao is to say plainly what the colonial glosses only imply: that death has a sovereign, and that his rank among the powers is royal.

Beside him the same sources name a queen. She is Xonaxi Quecuya, and here too the first word is a title of state: Xonaxi is the feminine of coqui, the word for a great lady, the wife or peer of a king. The colonial testimony calls her Mother Death; she appears also as Ponapi Quecuya and Xonati Huilia. Together the pair are styled the Lord and Lady of the Hereafter who receive the dead in the House of the Underworld, and Córdova’s material ties them to particular places — they are named as the patrons of Mitla itself and of Teococuilco, the towns where the road of the living most plainly bent toward their house.

The reconstruction is genuinely thin, and it is late. Everything in the paragraph above rests on a Christian friar’s dictionary written more than half a century after the conquest, in a script and a language not the god’s own, by a man whose purpose was to catechize rather than to preserve. Read at that distance, even the category is unstable. Córdova rendered the Zapotec word pitào — the term he attached to the great powers — with the Spanish dios, “god.” The archaeologist Joyce Marcus has argued that the gloss flattens the original. In her reading pitào divides into pi- or pèe, meaning breath, spirit, or wind, and tào, meaning great, so that the word says something closer to “great breath” or “great spirit” than to the bounded Greco-Roman idea of a deity. (Other linguists, such as Thomas Smith Stark, read the first element instead as “animated being.”) The disagreement is not a footnote. It means that the very word “god,” applied to Coqui Bezelao, is already a translation — a colonial hand laid over a Zapotec concept of animate, breathing power that European theology had no exact box for.

His face, though, was known to the eye and not only to the ear, and here the record is older and firmer than any dictionary. From the tombs of Monte Albán and the valley towns come the ceramic effigy urns for which the Zapotec are famous — seated clay figures set as companions to the dead — and among their recurring masks is the head of a bat, the creature of night, of the cave, of sacrifice and the dark below the ground. The Zapotec bat power, called Piquete Ziña, is one of the oldest continuous figures in the art of the valley, and it is with the bat that the lord of the dead is most often identified. The colonial iconographic reports add features no urn quite matches: a skull with hands shaped like pincers, ear ornaments, and a knife for a nose; or a bent-kneed skeleton, its mouth agape, gripping a human femur in the right hand and a sacrificial blade in the left, in the company of spiders and lizards. Where an urn or a carving is given the name Bezelao, that identification is a modern interpretation laid on an ancient object — the mask is real and datable; the name attached to it is inference, and scholars from Alfonso Caso onward have said so.

The lord who keeps the door

In the ordering of the world the Cloud People built, Coqui Bezelao is not a marginal terror but a great officer of the cosmos, reckoned among its weightiest powers. Above him in the valley’s regard stands chiefly Cocijo, the lightning-lord of the four quarters on whom the rain and the harvest depend; but after the giver of water comes the keeper of the dead, and for a plain reason. Every road the living travel runs at last down to his house. The maize that Pitao Cozobi makes grow feeds bodies that will one day be carried to Lyobaa; the lightning that Cocijo throws waters a valley whose lineages all descend, in the end, the same stone stair. Bezelao is the necessary terminus of the whole system, and to hold that office is to hold the door through which everyone passes.

He does not, in the colonial testimony, hold it as a devourer. This is the point most easily lost when the Christian record calls him a demon. The Lord and Lady of the Hereafter are sovereigns, not monsters, and what the living do toward them is what subjects do toward a court: they petition. According to the record preserved of Zapotec practice, Bezelao and Xonaxi Quecuya were entreated to lift sickness and to turn back epidemic, and their favor was sought by the city-states — the queche — when they went to war, so that the lord of death was also, in the same breath, a lord of deliverance and of victory. The one who commands the end of every life is exactly the one with the standing to postpone it. That is not a paradox inside the frame; it is the ordinary logic of a monarchy of the dead.

The teaching cannot be separated from the cult of the ancestors that is the deep floor of Zapotec religion. The dead of the noble lineages, laid in the cruciform crypts beneath the palaces, do not simply depart. They become the binni gula’sa’, the ancient ones — the Cloud People, the Be’ena’ Za’a from whom the valley’s lineages hold themselves descended and to whom, in death, they return. From below the ancestors intercede for their living descendants; the underworld is therefore not a pit of punishment but an underground homeland, the place the people came out of and the place they go back into. Some of the effigy urns are read as portraits of exactly such an ancestor, seated to intercede. Over that whole traffic between the buried and the breathing, Coqui Bezelao presides as king.

Nowhere was the door wider than at Mitla. Its Zapotec name is Lyobaa, “the place of rest,” which is to say the place of tombs; the Nahuatl speakers of the highlands translated it Mictlán, “the place of the dead,” and the Spanish carried that name south as Mitla. For centuries it was the cemetery of the Zapotec kings and high priests and the seat of the supreme priest himself, the Uija-tào, whom the Spanish, groping for a comparison, likened to a pope — a figure of such authority that lords and war-captains were said to consult him before any grave decision, and who was still resident at Mitla when the Spanish reached the valley in the 1520s. Beneath the priests’ residence, the colonial chronicler Fray Francisco de Burgoa reported in his Geográfica descripción of 1674, lay a set of subterranean chambers — sanctuaries and burial vaults — held to be the very mouth of the underworld, into which the honored dead and, it was said, the living weary of the world might be received.

The service of that house moved by the count of days. The Zapotec, like the peoples around them, kept a ritual calendar of 260 days — the piye, twenty day-signs turning against thirteen numbers — meshed with a solar year of 365 days, the two counts coming back into alignment only once in a round of fifty-two years. A person took a name from the day of the piye on which they were born, and the same count set the days when the ancestors and the lord of their house were served with the smoke of copal and with offering. What those observances were, at the closed heart of them, the public record does not give and this account does not reconstruct; the calendar is described here as the frame of a religion, not handed over as a working rite.

The valley of Mexico to the north kept a lord of the dead of its own — Mictlantecuhtli, the skeletal ruler of the Aztec Mictlán, whose very name is the Nahuatl for the place the Zapotec called Lyobaa. He is a genuine parallel, a neighbor at the same station in a neighboring cosmos, and no more than that. Bezelao is not his double dressed in Zapotec clothes; he is the Cloud People’s own king of the dead, reached through the Cloud People’s own record.

The grecas of Mitla — thousands of finely cut stones set without mortar into stepped-fret mosaics — sheathe the palaces above the crypts of Lyobaa. Lsalgador82, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Two conquests and a persecution

The lord of Lyobaa outlived the fall of two empires and a century-long effort to erase him, and the record of how is itself a lesson in how such a figure survives.

The first empire to break over the valley was the Aztec one. Late in the fifteenth century the armies of the Triple Alliance drove south into Oaxaca; under the ruler Ahuizotl they took the Zapotec capital of Zaachila in 1495, having already planted a garrison a decade earlier on the hill of Huaxyacac, the site of the present Oaxaca City, to squeeze tribute from the region. Mitla stood among the semi-autonomous towns caught in that reach, but the shrine and its priesthood were not extinguished; the Uija-tào was still keeping the door, and the death-cult still running, when a second and stranger conquest arrived. After 1521 the Spanish came into the valley, and with them came the campaign the Church called the extirpation of idolatry.

It is a campaign that has to be named for what it was: religious persecution, the attempt of one faith to break another and to seize its record. The friars’ own documents describe the Zapotec powers as devils and the priests’ knowledge as superstition, and that vocabulary — idol, idolatry, devil-worship — is not a neutral description to be repeated but a historiographic problem to be set aside. What the sources record, read against their own grain, is the dismantling of a functioning religion. The order to demolish Mitla came in 1553. The Dominicans raised San Pablo Apóstol over the leveled platform from 1590, sited so that the church would stand upon the mouth of the underworld and, in the friars’ own account, seal it — the entrance to Lyobaa now thought to lie beneath the main altar, the geography of the dead overbuilt by the geography of the saved.

The lord of death did not vanish. He went underground with his people, which was, after all, his proper country. In the hill towns south of the valley the old count of days went on being kept in secret, and the effort to stamp it out kept generating, against its own intent, the fullest record of the thing it meant to destroy. Around Sola in the 1630s the secular priest Gonzalo de Balsalobre prosecuted clandestine Zapotec calendar-keepers; in his case of 1635 against the ritual specialist Diego Luis he seized the man’s calendar, burned it before the door of the church, and paraded its keeper through the town as a penitent — and Diego Luis’s testimony, that the 260-day count he had copied into small booklets was divided into thirteen periods each governed by a deity, is one reason the shape of the calendar is known at all. The pattern reached its climax in the great campaign of Villa Alta in 1704 and 1705. Under an offer of amnesty from Bishop Ángel Maldonado, the elected officers of more than a hundred Zapotec, Mixe, and Chinantec towns came in to confess, and surrendered scores of hand-written ritual books — one hundred and three booklets, of which ninety-nine carried the complete roll of the 260 day-names. A persecution meant to obliterate the calendar of the dead instead deposited it, wholesale, into an archive where it could be read three centuries later. The living religion was preserved by the machinery built to abolish it.

Reopening the door

The door itself has now been reopened, not by priests but by geophysicists. In 2022 and 2023 the Arx Project’s Project Lyobaa mapped the ground beneath the Church Group at Mitla with combined geophysical survey — the instruments and the fuller technical account belong to Mitla — confirming a network of subterranean chambers under the platform, in exactly the place where Burgoa’s 1674 chronicle and unbroken local tradition had put the entrance to the underworld temple. The account nearly three and a half centuries old turned out to describe something really there. The mouth of Lyobaa is, for the moment, sealed and mapped rather than opened, its chambers known by their echo.

And the tradition it belongs to has not ended. The Zapotec are a living people of some hundreds of thousands, speaking a living language, and they still call their ancestors the binni gula’sa’ and themselves, in their own tongue, the Cloud People. Each year the returning dead are met and fed; Mitla is still a town where the dead are near, now also one of the most-visited archaeological sites in Oaxaca, its fret-worked walls sold in miniature to the visitors who climb down into the crypts. The lord who kept the door was walled beneath an altar, tried in absentia through his priests, and mapped at last by radar. Through all of it the Cloud People kept coming home to him, which is the one thing about the house of Lyobaa that the four centuries above it never changed.

→ Related: Cocijo · Pitao Cozobi · Dzahui · Nine Wind · Monte Alban · Mitla · Apoala · Tilantongo · The Zapotec · The Mixtec · The Mixe