Tonacacíhuatl
Lady of our sustenance
What it rules
Sustenance and the high place it comes from — the trecena 1-Cipactli, beside Tonacatecuhtli.
Why «energy» and not «god»
Because «god» translates badly. The Mexica did not separate the deity from the force it stands for in the way the European word does, and calling them gods imports an idea that is not theirs. «Energy» is not perfect either, but it does not carry that freight. It is a decision of this site, and it is declared as one.
The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why
What you have read above is this project's own summary of Tonacacíhuatl. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.
In Spanish the entry carries:
- El nombre
- La morada de arriba
- La pareja
- De dónde viene su imagen
Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.
The name
Lady of our sustenance. Her name is the same as Tonacatecuhtli's with the ending changed: they are a pair, and the pair is the point — not two similar energies but one duality with two names.
Where its image comes from
The images in this app are drawn for it, not traced. Below is what the sources say about her appearance, feature by feature. What they do not say is left blank: a declared gap is better than an invented feature.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «Tonacacíhuatl», The energies. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/energy/tonacacihuatl/