Dzahui

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In the language of the people who speak it, one word does three kinds of work at once. Dzavui — written dzahui in the old colonial orthography, and sounding as savi, sau, davi, or dau as the valley and the mountain change the vowel — is the word for rain. It is also the name of the god who sends the rain. And it is the root of the name the people give themselves. To say rain in this tongue is already to have named a deity and a nation in a single breath, and the three senses do not come apart under the hand. There is no clean place to cut between the weather, the power behind it, and the identity of the people who live or fail by it.

Move from the word to the ground it falls on and the collapse stops being a curiosity. The homeland is the Mixteca Alta, the fractured highland core of the Sierra Madre del Sur in western Oaxaca, a country of pine-ridged slopes and narrow valleys at one to two thousand meters where the maize grows on terraces cut into the mountainside and drinks only what the sky consents to give. There is no great river to lean on here. The harvest hangs on a short, uncertain rainy season, and the storm that gathers over the peaks each year is not experienced as weather. It is a lord arriving. His name is the word for what he brings, and the people who wait for him are named after him in turn.

The name that is a nation

The people the outside world calls Mixtec do not call themselves that. Their own name is built directly out of the rain-god’s. In their language they are the Ñuu Savi — also Ñuu Dzaui, Ñuu Davi, ñuudzahui — where ñuu is the comprehensive word that means at once a place and the people who inhabit it, so that the name says People of the Rain and Nation of the Rain and Land of the Rain without choosing among them. The historian Kevin Terraciano, working through an extraordinary corpus of documents written by the Mixtec themselves in the roman alphabet from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, reconstructs the self-designation as Tay Ñudzahui, “people of the rain place” — the etymology confirmed from the peoples’ own colonial-era words, whatever remains uncertain about the deity standing behind them. Their language carries the same root: it is Tu’un Savi, also Dzaha Dzaui and Sahan Savi, literally the word or language of the rain.

The familiar name is a stranger’s. “Mixtec” is Nahuatl — mixtecatl, the Aztec word for the “cloud people,” the dwellers in the land of clouds — a label pinned on from outside, by neighbors who saw the highland fog and named the people for it. It is a serviceable exonym and a well-worn one, and it is not what the Ñuu Savi say when they say who they are. What they say is rain.

Behind the self-name stands the god, and he reaches the record by two roads that must be kept apart. The first is firm ground: the peoples’ own painted books and the long sequence of their ceramics, material that can be dated and read. The second is the reconstruction of his exact identity and function as a deity, which rests on thin and late testimony — the colonial vocabularies and the missionary reports, and the modern reading-back of a name onto a figure in a manuscript. On the first road the rain-cult is beyond serious doubt; its veneration in the Mixteca reaches back to the Late Preclassic, appearing on effigy vessels of the Highland Mixteca between roughly the fifth century BC and the second century AD. On the second road the god himself thins into interpretation, and that limit is worth stating plainly before the portrait is drawn.

In the painted books

The deepest indigenous documentary record in all the Americas is Mixtec. The screenfold codices — long strips of deerskin folded like a screen and painted on both faces, among them the manuscript the Austrian National Library holds as the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (the Vienna Codex, known to the Ñuu Savi as the Codex Yuta Tnoho for the origin-valley of Apoala) and the Codex Zouche-Nuttall (the Tonindeye) — are the Mixtec’s own history and cosmology, set down before the conquest by the hands of a literate people. They are the peoples’ record, not a colonial one, and Dzahui is in them from the earliest folios.

In the Vindobonensis he appears near the beginning of the world, showering rain upon a land only just brought into order — a landscape of ñuhu, the primordial earth-and-nature powers, receiving the water that will make it live. He is shown there beside a figure of the first importance: Nine Wind, the culture-hero who came down from the sky on a rope, the Mixtec form of the Feathered Serpent, giver of agriculture and of the arts of civilized life. The same great page of the Vienna Codex that shows Nine Wind descending to the earth belongs to the founding sequence in which rain and order arrive together; the rain-god and the sky-descended hero stand in it as the two powers that make an inhabited world possible — the one bringing the water, the other bringing the knowledge to use it. In prose the outside record names Nine Wind’s central-Mexican counterpart Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, and the rain-god’s counterpart the Nahua Tlaloc; these are parallels across the shared Mesoamerican world, not identities, and the Mixtec figures are their own.

Detail from page 48 of the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (the Vienna Codex / Codex Yuta Tnoho), a pre-Hispanic Mixtec screenfold: the culture-hero Nine Wind — the Mixtec Feathered Serpent — descending from the sky, in whose founding sequence Dzahui showers rain upon the newly ordered land. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A painted scene, though, is not a caption, and reading a codex is an act of interpretation. That a certain figure showering water is Dzahui, that a certain compound of signs names the rain rather than merely depicts it, is a scholarly reading — a well-founded and widely held one, built by generations of codex study, but a reading and not a legend printed beneath the picture. The books are the peoples’ own record; what any single scene means is recovered, and the recovery is where the honest uncertainty lives.

The face of the storm

What is not uncertain is the face. Across the codices and on the ceramic vessels of the Highland Mixteca, Dzahui wears a signature so consistent that a modeler could spell it centuries after the first version and be understood. Over the eyes sits a blue or green goggle-mask, a pair of ringed circles set around the eyes like the rims of the storm itself. The mouth is open on exposed incisors and, curving down past them, long curled canines — jaguar’s teeth — emerging from curled lips. Sometimes a blue-green protrusion issues from the nose. It is the same visual grammar that clothes the storm across Mesoamerica: the Aztec Tlaloc wears the goggle and the fangs, the Maya Chaac carries the long-lipped mask of the thunder, and among the neighboring Be’ena’a the Zapotec Cocijo stares from a thousand years of urns with the same jaguar-serpent muzzle. These are four regional lords of one shared rain-god complex, a family of offices whose roots reach back through Teotihuacan to the Olmec, and Dzahui is the Mixtec face of it — a distinct god in a distinguished lineage, not a local copy of a foreign one.

The teeth are the tell. The rain-god belongs to a water-jaguar iconography in which the great cat of the earth and the fertility of the storm are bound together, and the stone that suited his image was the one that carried the same meaning: green jadeite, the precious water-colored stone of fertility. The Vilcek Foundation holds a standing figure of Dzavui carved from green jadeite, dated to around 900 CE, in which the god stands with his arms crossed and stares forward out of large goggle-like eyes, a curled-up lip and large teeth below them, an authority headdress above — the whole grammar of the rain-lord compressed into a hand-sized image in the stone that meant water and growth. Jadeite was not a neutral material. To cut the rain into green jade was to say twice over what he was.

Behind the consistent face, the register shifts from the seen to the reconstructed. That Dzahui was “the tutelary god of the Mixtecs” — in one careful formulation literally Rain, divinity of rain and celestial water — is the settled understanding of his standing; the rain-cult mattered so much that the people took their very name from him, and to be Ñuu Savi is to be the people who belong to, and are chosen by, the rain. But the finer detail of his personality, his myths, his exact place among the other Mixtec powers, is drawn from sources that are thin, late, and often hostile, and much of what can be said of him as a character is genuine reconstruction. The mask is documented across a millennium. The god who wears it is recovered, and the two claims do not stand on the same footing.

The houses of the rain

Within the sacred world of the Ñuu Savi, Dzahui is not a symbol of the rain. He is the rain, and the rain is life. In a mountain agriculture worked on rain-fed terraces, the storm over the peaks decides each year whether the maize stands or the season fails, and the god who is that storm is therefore the giver on whom everything hangs — benevolent provider of the celestial water, and, if neglected, the power who can withhold it. He is petitioned, and he is reckoned with. The two faces are one face, because the water that grows the crop is the same water that can be kept back.

His dwellings are not only the temples raised to him in the towns. They are the land itself. The tradition knows a category of sacred place called the Vehe Savi, the House of the Rain God — the caves and mountaintops and great rocks, the springs and the rock-shelters, the places where water gathers or emerges and where the storm is understood to reside. As the researchers Liana Ivette Jiménez Osorio and Emmanuel Posselt Santoyo describe them in their study of the rain-god’s sanctuaries in the Mixtec Highlands, the Vehe Savi are the natural sanctuaries of each community, the sacred landscape into which the rain is called. They are where the god is met, and they are not made of masonry. They are the country’s own features, held sacred.

The offerings carried to those places belong in the record as the record has them, in their context and without spectacle. In times of drought, of sickness, and before the harvest, offerings were borne up to the hilltops; the sources attest, soberly noted, that these included the offering of children. The logic is the terrible logic of a rain-anxious agrarian world in which life was understood to be owed back to the power that gave it, where a failed rains meant a failed harvest and a failed harvest meant hunger. It is set down here as it stands — neither softened into euphemism nor sharpened into a lurid tableau — as one extremity of a people’s dependence on a storm they could not command.

The Mixteca Alta, the highland core of western Oaxaca: the rain-dependent mountain country whose terraced maize lives or fails by the storm, and whose caves, peaks, and springs are the Vehe Savi, the Houses of the Rain God. Photograph by Fani Lugo, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The rain that outlived the temples

The historical arc runs first through the great Postclassic kingdoms of the Ñuu Savi. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the dynasties of the Mixteca were chronicled in the codices with a precision unmatched in ancient America, above all the reign of the warlord Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw,” born around 1063 and killed in 1115, who out of the throne of Tilantongo — Ñuu Tnoo, the Black Town — drew a great part of the Mixtec world into a single hand; his life fills the Codex Zouche-Nuttall folio by folio. Through the kingdoms and their painted histories the rain-god presided over the water that fed the terraces on which all of it stood.

Then came the Aztec pressure from the north, and after 1521 the Spanish, and with the friars the campaign against what they called idolatry. That vocabulary — idolatry, superstition, devil-worship — is a historiographic frame to be named and set aside, not adopted; what it called the worship of demons was a literate people’s long knowledge of their own sky and their own land. The extirpation burned screenfolds and images and razed the temples that stood inside the towns, replacing them with churches. The fuller account of that conquest and its aftermath belongs with the history of the Mixtec people; here what matters is a single structural fact about Dzahui in particular.

Dzahui was never confined to the temples the church-builders could reach. His houses were the Vehe Savi — the caves, the springs, the peaks, the rocks in the countryside beyond the towns — and natural sanctuaries cannot be pulled down and rebuilt as a nave. The mountains stayed where they were. The springs went on rising. And so the rain-god’s cult was not destroyed but relocated fully into the land it had always inhabited, surviving in the places the extirpation could neither reach nor replace. This is the load-bearing point of the living tradition, and it turns on the geography of worship: a god housed in stone temples could be unhoused, but a god housed in the mountain could only be pursued into the mountain.

He is worshiped there still. Among the Ñuu Savi of the Mixteca Alta today, rituals of “Bringing the Rain” are carried out at the Vehe Savi, now folded into the annual Christian liturgical calendar in a synergy of Mesoamerican and Catholic practice — the rain called at the sacred spring or the cave-mouth in its proper season within the year the church also keeps. Jiménez Osorio and Posselt Santoyo trace this continuity of the rain-cult across some 3,200 years, from the effigy vessels of the Late Preclassic to the offerings a community carries up its own mountain now. The friars who once wrote of the Houses of the Rain as the houses of the demon are three centuries gone; the Houses of the Rain are still visited.

And the people remain what their name says they are. Tu’un Savi, the language of the rain, is spoken today by somewhere between 450,000 and, by other counts, more than 800,000 people — in the Mixteca and in a large diaspora that the rain-name has traveled with: an estimated 150,000 Ñuu Savi in California, tens of thousands more in New York City, communities strung along the border and up the length of the migrant road. In a contemporary revitalization of language and identity they go on calling themselves the People of the Rain and honoring the old bond with the god whose single syllable still holds, undivided, the water and the power and the name. The word never separated in the mouth of anyone who speaks it. It falls, it is a lord, and it is who they are, all at once — and in a highland where the maize still waits each year on a storm no one can command, that has not become a metaphor.

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