Teyolia
Heart-soul / divine fire
Teyolia — from yollotl, 'heart': the heart-soul, the most stable of the three animating forces. Teyolia is the divine fire, the carrier of memory, of moral character, and of the calling that orients a life — the painter, the physician, the warrior all owe their distinctive faculty to the formation of their teyolia. Unlike tonalli, teyolia does not wander; unlike ihiyotl, it does not leak. At death the teyolia departs together with the heart: this is why human-sacrifice rituals at the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan extracted the heart specifically — to release the teyolia upward to the sun. Teyolia is the only one of the three forces that has a reliable post-mortem destination: it travels to one of the four afterlife realms (Mictlan, Tlalocan, Cihuatlampa, or Tonatiuh-ichan) according to the manner of dying. We render this point at the mid-sternum landmark, the canonical heart-locus.
Point 2 of 3 in Aztec Three Animating Forces — Tonalli / Teyolia / Ihiyotl
Cross-tradition overlaps
- Teyolia ↔ Teyolia (distance 0.015)
Sources
Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book X ch. 27 (primary_canonical)
“The good painter is a Toltec; he draws his work from his heart [yollo]; his heart is the source of his art.”
López Austin, The Human Body and Ideology, vol. 1 ch. 6 (secondary)
“Teyolia, in contrast to tonalli, does not abandon the living; it is the most permanent and most fixed of the animistic entities.”