Entity

Tlaloc

The goggle-eyed rain-god of central Mexico, lord of the storm, the mountains, and the watery paradise of Tlalocan, and among the oldest and most widely worshipped of all Mesoamerican deities.

In the dry months before the rains, when the maize was not yet in the ground and the reservoirs ran low, the lords of the Valley of Mexico climbed a mountain. The peak rose more than four thousand meters above the eastern rim of the basin, and on its summit stood a walled enclosure open to the sky, and inside it the image of the god of the rain. They came carrying children. What the god granted in return — or withheld — was the difference between a harvest and a famine, and in a world built on maize that was the difference between a people and no people at all.

The god was Tlaloc. His name is read from the Nahuatl word for earth, tlalli, and glossed in several ways — “he who lies upon the land,” the way a cloud lies along a mountaintop; “the long cave”; the path beneath the ground where the waters gather. He was the rain and the storm, the lightning and the hail, the springs and the mountains and the caves where water is born. He was older than the people who built Tenochtitlan, older than the empire, older than almost any name they knew. And he was, in the plain arithmetic of survival, indispensable: the sun could be fed, the earth could be honored, but without the rain nothing the others gave would grow.

A face a thousand years old

Tlaloc’s face is among the most recognizable in all of Mesoamerican art, and it is among the most ancient. The marks are unmistakable: great round rings around the eyes, like goggles, and a row of long fangs across the upper lip, often with a curled or bifurcated tongue beneath. Where the rain-god appears, that mask appears with him — on painted vessels, in stone, on the walls of buried temples — and it appears for the better part of two thousand years.

The mask is already there at Teotihuacan, the vast city that flourished in the basin of Mexico in the early centuries of the common era and lay in ruins long before the Mexica arrived. A storm-god with ringed eyes and jaguar fangs is among the most frequently depicted figures in Teotihuacan’s murals and ceramics, worshipped there at least eight centuries before the Aztec state existed — so that the lords who climbed the mountain were petitioning a god their ancestors had already inherited from a city whose builders’ names they did not know. As the World History Encyclopedia records, the rain-god’s lineage runs back further still, sharing features with figures in Olmec art older than Teotihuacan itself.

He was also pan-Mesoamerican — the same god, or the same idea of a god, worshipped under many tongues across the whole region. The Maya knew him as Chaac, the long-nosed lord of rain and lightning; the Zapotec called him Cocijo; the Mixtec, Dzahui; the Totonac, Tajín. The agreement is not coincidence but the shape of a shared world: across the highlands and the lowlands alike, life ran on rain-fed maize, and the rain had a face. Tlaloc was central Mexico’s name for it, and by the time the Mexica raised him over their capital he was already the oldest god in the valley.

A blue-painted figure of Tlaloc with his characteristic ringed eyes and fanged mouth, from a pre-Hispanic central Mexican codex. Tlaloc with his goggle eyes and fangs, from the Codex Borgia, a pre-conquest central Mexican ritual book. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The tlaloque and the breaking of the jars

Tlaloc did not work the rain alone. Under him served a class of small rain-spirits, the tlaloque — minor gods, or aspects of the one god multiplied, who lived on the mountaintops where the clouds gather and the springs rise. In the standard reckoning they were four, stationed at the four directions, with a fifth at the center, and each held the rain of a different quarter and a different quality.

The mechanism of the weather was theirs. The tlaloque kept the waters in great jars in the mountains, and poured them out as rain; and when they struck the jars or broke them, the crack of the shattering was the thunder, and the lightning was the flash of it. The rain they poured was not all of one kind. One page of the Codex Borgia shows the rain-spirits sending their waters down upon the maize — and the waters are not uniform: there is the good rain, burnished like jade, that brings the harvest, and there are the rains that destroy, the rain of fire, the rain of fungus and blight, the rain of wind, the rain that falls as flint blades. The same hand gave both. This is the doubleness at the center of the rain-god: he was the giver of all life and the sender of the storm that ruins it, the drought that starves and the flood that drowns, and the same petitions that begged his bounty begged also that he hold back his wrath.

His consort in the rain was Chalchiuhtlicue, “she of the jade skirt,” goddess of the standing and running waters — the lakes, the rivers, the springs — where Tlaloc governed the water that falls from the sky. The pairing divided the world’s water between the heavens and the ground.

Tlalocan, the green paradise

Most of the Mexica dead went to Mictlan, the gray underworld of the common dead — a long, cold, difficult passage downward through nine levels to a place without joy and without torment, the ordinary destination of those who died ordinary deaths. The manner of dying, in this scheme, decided the destination, not the conduct of the life. And one of the manners of dying led not down into the gray but across into a paradise.

Those whom the rain-god took for his own went to Tlalocan, the country of Tlaloc: a green and watery otherworld of perpetual spring, heavy with flowers and fruit and the sound of running water, a place of ease and abundance set apart from the gray land of the dead. To Tlalocan went those who died by water and by the rain-god’s own hand — the drowned, those struck by lightning, and those carried off by the diseases the Mexica laid to Tlaloc’s account: dropsy and the swellings of the body, and the skin afflictions, leprosy among them, that were read as the rain-god’s mark. The bodies of those bound for Tlalocan were not burned, as most of the dead were, but buried, with a staff of dry wood laid beside them; in the paradise, it was said, the dry staff would put out green leaves. To be killed by the rain, in this theology, was not a misfortune but an election — the god gathering his own into the one corner of the afterlife where the dead were happy.

A Teotihuacan mural fragment depicting Tlalocan, the green and watery paradise of the rain-god, with small figures among streams and flowering plants. A reconstruction of the Tlalocan mural from Teotihuacan, showing the rain-god’s paradise of water and green growth. Photograph by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The petition of the children

The Mexica year ran in eighteen months of twenty days, and five of those months carried rites for Tlaloc and the tlaloque — a measure of how much of the ritual calendar bent toward the rain. The most charged of them fell at the end of the dry season, in the anxious weeks before the rains were due, when the failure of the water would mean the failure of the maize, and the failure of the maize would mean hunger across the valley.

In the first month, Atlcahualo, and again later in the year, the petition was made with children. They were carried in procession to shrines on the mountaintops and to places about the lakes — dressed in the colors of the rain-god, borne on litters strewn with flowers — and there they were offered to Tlaloc. Within the logic of this world the rite was not cruelty but exchange: the world the Mexica inhabited was the Fifth Sun, an age held in being against constant danger by the debt the living owed the gods, nextlahualli, the repayment, paid in the most precious thing a people had. For the rain, the most precious offering was a child, and the children’s tears were watched as an omen — the more they wept, it was held, the more abundant the rain that was coming, the falling tears a figure of the falling water the god would send. A child who did not cry was a poor sign for the year. The accounts that survive describe the rite soberly and from within; it was the extremity of a world for which the failure of the rain was the failure of everything, and it is recorded here as that, neither softened nor dwelt upon.

The deepest knowledge of this rite comes not from the chronicles alone but from the ground. In the northwest of the Templo Mayor, in the deposit cataloged as Offering 48, excavators of the great temple recovered the remains of more than forty children — the count usually given is forty-two — laid out with objects of the rain-god: greenstone beads, one set in each small mouth, shells, the bones of water-birds, miniature jars. Their bodies bore the marks of malnutrition and illness, and they ranged from roughly two to seven years of age. The archaeologist Leonardo López Luján, who directs the excavation of the Templo Mayor, has tied the offering to a documented catastrophe: a severe drought that gripped central Mexico from 1452 to 1454, recorded both in the native annals and in the tree-ring data of the region. The mass petition to the rain-god and the worst famine in living memory belong to the same years. The reckoning of how often and how widely such rites were performed remains contested — the Spanish and their native allies had every reason to magnify the numbers — but the practice itself, in the rain-god’s case, lies confirmed in his own temple, dated to his own drought.

The rain and the sun, enthroned together

The greatest pyramid of Tenochtitlan, the Templo Mayor at the center of the island city, was not one temple but two. It rose as a single stepped mountain to a double summit, and on the platform at the top stood two shrines side by side, reached by twin stairways. The southern shrine belonged to Huitzilopochtli, the war-god and sun-god of the Mexica, the patron who had led them to their city and whom the sun’s daily rising depended upon. The northern shrine belonged to Tlaloc.

The pairing was deliberate and exact. At the very summit of the imperial cult, over the heart of the capital, the Mexica set the two powers without which their world could not stand: the sun and the rain, the dry season and the wet, war and agriculture, the god who must be fed for the sky to move and the god who must be petitioned for the earth to bear. Huitzilopochtli was the newer god, the Mexica’s own, raised with the rising fortunes of their dynasty; Tlaloc was the ancient one, inherited from the deep past of the valley, belonging to no single people. To set them shoulder to shoulder at the top of the temple was to say that the Mexica order rested equally on both — that for all the empire’s glory in war, it stood or fell on whether the rain came. On the Tlaloc side, excavators found the temple furnished as the god required: a reclining stone figure, a chacmool, painted in his colors, that bore the rain-god’s image and held the vessel for the offerings, and around the shrine the buried gifts of his element — shells, sand, the creatures of the water — set down as a sea beneath the mountain.

His other great shrine stood on the mountain that bore his name, Mount Tlaloc, the high peak on the eastern edge of the basin. There, within a long walled court open to the weather, stood the image of the god surrounded by the smaller stone figures of the neighboring mountains, each a lesser rain-power gathered around the chief. By one account the shrine held four jars of water, and the fate of the year’s harvest turned on which was used: one brought a good crop, one rotted it, one dried it out, one froze it — the four faces of the rain made into four vessels. To this summit the rulers of the valley made pilgrimage in person at the turn of the dry season, climbing above the clouds to the place where the rain was made, to petition the god at the source.

The colossal stone monolith of Tlaloc, the so-called Tlaloc of Coatlinchan, now standing before the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The colossal Tlaloc monolith, moved from San Miguel Coatlinchán to Mexico City in 1964 and set before the National Museum of Anthropology. Photograph by Jaontiveros, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

Recovery and survival

Tlaloc came down to the modern world by two roads at once — out of the earth, in the recovered antiquity of his cult, and out of an unbroken practice, in the rain-petitions still made on the mountains of central Mexico.

The earth gave him back his depth. The excavation of Teotihuacan revealed how far his face reached into the past, eight centuries and more before the empire that the Spanish overthrew, so that the rain-god could be seen for what he was: not a Mexica invention but the inheritance of the whole valley, the longest-lived god in it. The excavation of the Templo Mayor, begun in earnest after a chance discovery in the heart of Mexico City in the late twentieth century, opened his own shrine and its offerings — the chacmool, the buried sea, the deposit of the children dated to the drought of 1454 — and turned what had been read only in the colonial chronicles into something held in the hand and dated to the year. His sheer scale survived too: a colossal stone Tlaloc, the largest known carving of a Mesoamerican deity, long lay at San Miguel Coatlinchán until in 1964 it was hauled to the capital and set before the new National Museum of Anthropology, where it stands at the entrance still — the rain-god, by local account, arriving in a thunderstorm.

But the older survival is the living one. In the villages of the central Mexican highlands, on the slopes of the very mountains where the tlaloque were said to keep their jars, there are still men and women called graniceros — and tiemperos, and misioneros del temporal, by region — who hold themselves responsible for the rain and the hail. Many are called to the work, the tradition holds, by having been struck or marked by lightning, which is to say by Tlaloc’s own touch. As the rain-petition rite recorded on Mount Tlaloc shows, they still climb the mountains in May, at the turn of the dry season, to ask for the rain and to ward off the hail from the crops, in ceremonies that have folded the old powers into the new — where, as the practitioners put it, Christ is the sun and the mountain is the Virgin, and the cross set on the peak stands where the rain-god’s image once stood. The names have changed and the saints have come, but the address is the same and the place is the same: a people still dependent on the rain, climbing to ask for it where their ancestors asked, of a power as old as the valley.