Cocijo

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The sacred count of the Zapotec ran to two hundred and sixty days, and it did not run as a single length. It was cut into four, each part sixty-five days long, and each of the four parts was itself called a cocijo. So the rain that the word named did not fall from one place. It was divided among the four directions of the world, each quarter of the count holding its own turn of the year and its own share of the storm, and the offering was made to each cocijo in its season. The lightning-lord whose face repeats across a thousand years of gray funerary urns is therefore also four lords — one storm for every corner of the sky — and the plain arithmetic of the calendar is the first thing his single fanged mask conceals.

That doubling is the key to him. Read Cocijo as one idol and he shrinks to a weather-power with a frightening face. Read him off the four quarters and he opens into the whole architecture of the heavens, the sky divided and named and fed by turns.

The word that is the lightning

His name is the word for lightning. In the Zapotec language cocijo — rendered by scholars as roughly [ko’sixo], and written also Cociyo — means the bolt itself, and it names the god who is the bolt; the two senses do not separate. The colonial vocabularies compiled by Dominican friars in the sixteenth century record the divine name in forms such as gozio, and the deity is known in the language as Guziu. He was the most important power in the sacred world of the pre-conquest Zapotec — the Be’ena’a, the Binniza, the Cloud People, who are a living nation still, speaking a living tongue in the valleys and sierras of Oaxaca — and his pre-eminence follows directly from what the valley depended on: a short, uncertain rainy season on which the maize, and therefore everything, hung.

What makes Cocijo unusual among the reconstructed gods of ancient America is that he is not read off a single late text. He is read off the peoples’ own things. His fanged face is modeled and painted continuously on the gray-ware effigy urns and ceramics of the Oaxaca Valley from the Middle Preclassic through the Terminal Classic — very nearly the full millennium in which Monte Albán, the leveled-mountain capital founded around 500 BCE, governed the valley from its height before losing its pre-eminence through the eighth century. That span of material is the firm ground: the sequence of the urns, the dating of the phases, the association of the mask with rain and the storm, all rest on the archaeology and are not in serious doubt.

The named theology is a different matter, and the difference must be marked. Where the record thins to the later and colonial sources — above all the Arte del idioma zapoteco and the Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca that Fray Juan de Córdova published in 1578, whose word-lists give gozio and cocijo for lightning and whose notes preserve the reckoning of the calendar — the identification of a particular figure on a particular urn with a particular named power becomes an interpretation, not a caption. The great excavators and analysts of the material, Alfonso Caso, Joyce Marcus, and Kent Flannery among them, have said so plainly: an urn is an object, not a legend, and to call its face Cocijo is to read a colonial name backward onto a Classic-period thing. The reading is well founded and widely held. It is still a reading.

Within the tradition itself there is no such distance. There the storm is not a symbol for anything; the storm is a person, and his name is what he does. In the account that the colonial record preserves, Cocijo is more than a weather-power to be petitioned — he is the great lightning who stood at the beginning, who exhaled the world into being, breathing out the sun and the moon and the stars, the land and its mountains and rivers, the plants and the animals, the turn of day into night. That cosmogony reaches the page only through the late sources, and it should be held at their distance; but it fixes the scale of the figure. He is not a minor spirit of the weather promoted to importance because the rains matter. He is the breath that made the world, and the rain is the least of what that breath still does.

Zapotec ceramic urn representing Cocijo, the lightning-and-rain lord, from Monte Albán (c. 2nd–7th centuries CE), now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. Photograph by Yavidaxiu, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The face the arithmetic wears

The mask is an assembly. It is built, part by part, out of the storm’s own components, and once the parts are named the face stops being a grimace and becomes a diagram of the sky.

Two great predators of the Mesoamerican imagination are fused in it — the earth-jaguar and the sky-serpent, both powers of fertility, bound into one head. From the center of the face projects a wide, blunt snout, a form the Kimbell Art Museum describes, of its own splendid urn from Monte Albán phase IIIa (about AD 400–500), as “a development from earlier snouted deity elements that combine jaguar and snake allusions — the roar of the jaguar with the reverberation of thunder.” The snout carries the noise of the storm twice over: the big cat’s roar and the drum of the thunder in one blunt muzzle. From it emerges the tongue. On the Kimbell urn three fangs protrude from the snout and cover a bifurcated tongue “like the almost invisibly flashing tongue of a snake” — and the serpent’s forked tongue is the lightning-stroke itself, the one part of the storm the eye can actually see, made visible in clay.

Above, the reading continues upward through the weather. The brows arching over the eyes stand for the heavens, the band of the sky. The stepped, two-part forms enclosing the eyes below are the clouds, and, in the museum’s own gloss, “by extension the precious water needed to grow crops.” And in the headdress the god often wears a sign the epigraphers label the Zapotec glyph C — the same element that appears in the Mixtec painted books as the day-sign Water, the proper mark of a rain-and-storm lord. The scholarship that reads the urns systematically, gathered in studies such as Supernatural Lightning: Depictions of Cocijo on Zapotec Urns, treats the whole face as a legible compound in exactly this way: eyebrows, eyelids, snout, tongue, and headdress each a named term, the mask a sentence about the sky rather than a portrait of a monster.

The compound is not fixed to clay alone. At Lambityeco, one of the valley towns that rose as Monte Albán fell, Late Classic stucco busts show the god with a jar spilling water held in one hand and bolts of lightning gripped in the other — the two halves of the storm set out as objects, the gift on the one side and the fire on the other. Water and bolt, the thing hoped for and the thing feared, are the whole of what he is, and the modeler at Lambityeco simply handed him one in each fist.

The urns repay a second look for the sheer discipline of the convention. Across the long ceramic sequence the mask holds its terms while the workmanship shifts — the early pieces spare and blocky, the Classic examples swelling into the deep, high-relief masses of the phase IIIa vessels, the whole seated figure sometimes buried under an elaborate headdress and a bib of ornament until the god nearly vanishes into his own regalia. Yet the core signs stay put: the brows, the stepped clouded lids, the muzzle, the forked tongue between its fangs. A modeler working eight or nine centuries after the first version could still spell the same word in clay, which is what tells the archaeologists they are looking at one continuous cult and not a series of unrelated faces. The face is a script, and the potters were literate in it.

Effigy urn of Cocijo, Zapotec, Monte Albán Period III, in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photograph by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication).

The four quarters and what was owed

The doubling that opens the count runs all the way through him. In the Postclassic the four sixty-five-day divisions of the two-hundred-and-sixty-day sacred count were themselves the four cocijos, and the division implies a Cocijo for each cardinal direction — a lightning-lord of the east and one of the west, one of the north and one of the south, each holding a quarter of the year and a quarter of the sky. Religious rites, the record indicates, were made to each of the four in turn, and among them the drawing of one’s own blood: autosacrifice, the offering of the body’s own water back to the power that sent the rain.

To feed Cocijo was never to feed him alone. The urns bearing his mask were set with the honored dead in the stone tombs beneath the houses of the great, so that the source of the year’s water stood at the threshold of the ancestors; and the rain he brought was the rain the maize needed, the crop that in the Zapotec world was itself a god — Pitao Cozobi, the maize made divine. To offer to the lightning was to feed the ancestors and the maize together, the dead in their chambers and the seed in the ground, and the lord of those chambers, Coqui Bezelao at the place of the dead the Zapotec called Lyobaa — the underworld sanctuary beneath what is now Mitla — stood at the far end of the same exchange. Rain, maize, ancestor, and death were one circuit, and the storm’s face was set where that circuit could be watched.

The offerings reached, in the sober record, beyond blood. As payment for the rain the sources attest sacrifice — mostly of children, less often of adults — made to secure the season’s water. The matter is held here in its context and without spectacle. In a world where the storm was quite literally life, where a failed rains meant a failed harvest and a failed harvest meant hunger, life was understood to be owed to the power that gave it; the logic is terrible and it is not obscure. The account belongs in the record as the record has it, told plainly and with neither apology nor relish.

Across Mesoamerica the same office was held by other names, and the parallels are worth naming as parallels and not as identities. The central-Mexican peoples fed a rain-and-storm lord they called Tlaloc; the Maya of the east knew the thunder-and-lightning power as Chaac; and among the Mixtec neighbors of the Zapotec, the People of the Rain, the storm was Dzahui, for whom the nation itself was named. These are cousins in an office, four regional faces of the one Mesoamerican preoccupation with the sky that decides whether the maize will stand. Cocijo is the Oaxaca Valley’s face of it, and he is not the others; the resemblance runs deep and the gods stay distinct.

After the mountain

Cocijo outlived the state that carved him. Monte Albán lost its political pre-eminence through the eighth century, and by the time the Mexica pressed south and then, after 1521, the Spanish reached Oaxaca, the great urn-workshops had long fallen silent. But the rain-lord did not fall silent with them. He persisted in the calendar the day-keepers went on turning, in the vocabularies the friars themselves compiled, and in the tombs the conquerors opened.

The colonial campaign against native religion pressed hard on the region. The Dominican Fray Francisco de Burgoa, writing in 1674, described the old sanctuaries; and in the early eighteenth century the idolatry proceedings centered on Villa Alta, in the Zapotec sierra northeast of the valley, gathered up ritual calendars and the objects the friars called idols and prosecuted the men who kept them — an amnesty offered in exchange for confession that drew in scores of the alphabetic ritual booklets in which the sacred count survived, written now in adapted script by people who knew exactly what they guarded. The vocabulary that campaign carried — idolatry, superstition, devil-worship — is a historiographic frame to be named and set aside, not adopted. What it called idolatry was a literate people’s thousand-year knowledge of their own sky; and the narrower irony here is a material one — the fanged rain-lord is best known today from the very urns and colonial vocabularies the campaign set out to erase. The fuller account of that conquest and extirpation belongs with the history of the Zapotec people themselves; here it is enough to mark that Cocijo reaches the modern record through hostile and late hands, and through the urns, and that both routes must be read with care.

The urns, meanwhile, have traveled a long way from the tombs. Once grave-goods set beside the honored dead, the great gray effigy vessels are now among the most recognizable objects of Mesoamerican art, held in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City — where an Early Classic Cocijo from Monte Albán stands among the masterworks — and in museums across Europe and the United States, cataloged, photographed, exhibited, and reproduced in replica for the tourist trade below the ruined capital. The dispersal is its own kind of afterlife, and not an innocent one; the face that was made to keep watch in a sealed chamber now keeps a different watch behind glass.

Beneath all of it the tradition it came from is not a closed file. The Be’ena’a are a present people with a present language, and in the Oaxacan highlands rain, lightning, and the ancestors remain near. The gray urns stand in their vitrines in Mexico City and far beyond it, cataloged and sold in replica, but the face they carry was never a portrait of a beast. It was the sky’s own parts gathered into a person — the cloud in the stepped lids, the thunder in the blunt snout, the bolt in the split tongue — and above the leveled mountain the rain still comes to the maize in its season, quartered as the count once quartered it.

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