⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-17 - Repairs are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Some of our more complex, multi-field searches (such as the search field on our homepage and Search All Fields) are currently under repair and may not work as expected.

Thank you to all our users who emailed to alert us to the problem! We hope to have it repaired soon.

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

cenchantli.

Headword: 
cenchantli.
Principal English Translation: 

a collective home; seen in the Florentine Codex to refer to a place where people go after death, a place without outlets, without openings

Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 27.

Attestations from sources in English: 

cuxj ontlamatiz in tocenchan in apuchqujaoaiocan, in atlecallocan, cujx conmatiz in tonan, in tota in mjctlan tecutli = Perchance he will know our collective home, the place without outlets, without openings. Perchance he will know our mother, our father Mictlan tecutli (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 27.

auh noce mjtzonmotlatiliz, mjtzõmocxipachilviz, mjtzonmjvaliz in tocenchan in mjctlan = And perhaps he will hide thee, put thee underfoot, send thee to our common home, the land of the dead (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 33.

themes: