Chalchiuhtlicue

The midwife spoke to the water before she spoke to the child. It came cold out of the jar and still smelled faintly of the lake, and it went first to the mouth, then to the chest, then over the small wet head, with a sentence for each: take this water, for it will guard your life. Four days later the child was bathed again and given a name. Behind those words stood a goddess understood to be handling the newborn personally, a goddess who lived in wells and irrigation ditches and the green shallows of Lake Texcoco.

Her name is a small poem two words long. Chalchihuitl, jade. Cueitl, skirt. Jade Her Skirt. The Nahua did not intend that decoratively. Jade and water were one substance thought about twice, both green, both precious, both bound up with breath and the inside of living things, and the painters of the codices went to remarkable trouble to say so. Her jade is not confined to the skirt at all. It is scattered across the whole of her array as beads, pierced discs and tubes, as the collar at her throat and the flare of her ear ornaments, until any single fragment of the picture can pronounce her name by itself. An abbreviated portrait in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis shows her only from the waist up, with no skirt in the frame at all, and the necklace alone still identifies her.

The fuller pictures are worth standing in front of. In the Codex Borbonicus she sits on a red stool in a headdress of broad bands trimmed with amaranth seed, a heavy tassel hanging at each side, a fringed cape across her shoulders. From beneath the stool a river pours out across the page, and two infants are swimming in it, one boy and one girl. On her cheeks are two short black bars. The Nahuatl phrase for them means roughly that her face paint consists of two things hanging, and the reading most scholars accept is that they are drops of water, laid on in liquid rubber. In one hand she carries a stick bunched with yellow pericón flowers, the plant burned with copal to make a smoke that looks like the cloud before rain. In the other she carries an ayauhchicahuaztli, a mist rattle. It is shaped as a serpent and wrapped in blue paper flecked with rubber, and when the woman who wore the goddess’s costume in ritual shook it, the sound was rain falling, with small bells at her ankles ringing underneath.

She arrives in the world by institution rather than by birth. In the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli set things in order, making fire, half a sun, the first human pair, the lords of the underworld and the layers of heaven, and then they make a god and a goddess of rain. She is the goddess. Her family is unsettled across the sources in the way these things usually are: wife of Tlaloc in some texts, his elder sister in others, and in another strand the wife of the fire lord Xiuhtecuhtli. She is elder sister to the tlaloque, the small scattered rain-bringers, and she stands beside Chicomecoatl of the maize and Huixtocihuatl of the salt in the group Sahagún’s informants called the nurturers. Where Tlaloc’s water falls, hers stays: groundwater, spring water, the ditch, the lake, the sea.

Then there is the age that carries her name. The world had already worn out three suns, the jaguar sun of Tezcatlipoca, the wind sun of Quetzalcoatl, the rain sun of Tlaloc that was put out by a rain of fire. Chalchiuhtlicue became the fourth. People lived on a maize-like seed called cincocopi, and the age lasted three hundred and twelve years by one reckoning and six hundred and seventy-six by another, because the sources disagree and never have been made to agree. Then the rain came and did not stop. The sky came down with it. Everyone alive was turned into fish. One couple, Tata and Nene, rode it out sealed inside a hollow log with a single ear of maize each on Tezcatlipoca’s instructions, and when the water sank they lit a fire and cooked a fish, which is to say they ate one of their drowned neighbours, and for the smoke of it Tezcatlipoca fixed their heads onto their hindquarters and made them dogs.

No source of any age gives her a motive. The retellings in circulation that have her drown the world out of spite, taking revenge on Tlaloc for mistreating her, have no footing in the codices or in the colonial chronicles; the old texts say only that the age was hers and that it ended in water.

What she did the rest of the time was wash things. The Florentine Codex keeps circling one formula about her, that with her they washed away their sins, and the range of that is startling once it is laid out. She presided over the bathing of newborns and over the bathing of the men and women about to be sacrificed, over purification in legal matters, over the investiture of rulers, over the disposal of spent ritual materials, and over the washing of a corpse. A Nahua life was bracketed by her at both ends, in the first bath and the last. Her feast fell in Etzalcualiztli, the sixth twenty-day month, roughly late May into June, when priests waded into the lagoons and imitated the motion and the croaking of frogs to call the rain down. At the close of it, hearts were placed in a vessel called the mixcomitl, the cloud pot, painted blue and marked on all four sides with the same black rubber double-stroke she wears on her face.

Her gifts follow from all of this without much strain. She brings water to planted ground, and with Tlaloc she keeps Tlalocan, the green well-watered paradise that receives those who die by water. She protects women in labour and the children who come out of it, and when a child sickened, a healer would look into a bowl of water to find where its tonalli had wandered. Her limit follows just as directly, and it is the same limit water has. She cannot be relied upon. Sahagún’s informants put it flatly: sometimes she sank men in the water and drowned them, the waves roared and dashed and resounded, the water was wild. Her secondary names read as a catalogue of exactly that. Acuecueyotl, wave. Apozonallotl, foam. Atlacamani, water gone tempestuous. Xixiquipilihui, the swell and the trough of a lake lifting and dropping. These are not the names of a goddess who can be talked round, they are the names of a substance behaving as it pleases, and the Nahua honoured her without ever quite trusting her.

In 1889 Leopoldo Batres had a twenty-ton block of carved stone hauled out of the plaza in front of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan and shipped to Mexico City, where it stands today in the national anthropology museum with her name on it. The identification is not secure and has been argued over for decades. Teotihuacan had been in ruins for centuries before anyone is known to have said the word Chalchiuhtlicue, and the figure is more likely a water goddess belonging to that city, given an Aztec name by later people who walked into the ruins and recognised someone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chalchiuhtlicue?

Chalchiuhtlicue is the Aztec goddess of water in its settled and running forms: springs, rivers, lakes and the sea. Her name means “Jade Her Skirt”, pairing the green of jade with the green of water. She is closely bound to the rain god Tlaloc, named as his wife in some sources and his elder sister in others, and she was one of the most widely revered deities in central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest.

What does Chalchiuhtlicue’s name mean?

It comes from the Nahuatl words chalchihuitl, “jade”, and cueitl, “skirt”, giving “Jade Her Skirt”, usually rendered in English as “She of the Jade Skirt”. The Tlaxcalans called her Matlalcueye, “She Who Wears a Blue Skirt”, after a sky-blue flowering plant, and gave that name to the mountain now called La Malinche, where the storm clouds gather. In the birth prayers she is also addressed as Chalchiuhtlatonac, “She Who Shines Like Jade”.

Why did Chalchiuhtlicue flood the world?

The sources do not say why. Chalchiuhtlicue ruled the Fourth Sun, the fourth world-age, which ended when rain fell without stopping, the sky collapsed and every living person was turned into a fish. Popular retellings that explain the flood as revenge on Tlaloc are modern additions with no support in the codices or the colonial chronicles.

What was Chalchiuhtlicue’s role in Aztec birth rituals?

Midwives invoked her by name while washing a newborn, sprinkling water on its mouth, chest and head with a set formula asking her to receive and cleanse the child, and the baby was bathed and named again four days later. Her authority over purification went far beyond birth: she presided over the bathing of sacrificial victims, the investiture of rulers, purification in legal matters, and the washing of the dead.

How was Chalchiuhtlicue depicted?

She is normally shown seated in a jade-beaded skirt and a fringed shoulder cape, wearing a broad banded headdress trimmed with amaranth seed with a large tassel falling on each side, and two short black bars painted under her eyes that are read as drops of water. A stream of water commonly flows out from beneath her, sometimes carrying swimming infants. She carries a stick of yellow pericón flowers and a serpent-shaped mist rattle wrapped in blue paper.

Related Entries

Tlaloc, Tlazolteotl, Xiuhtecuhtli, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Ilamatecuhtli, Cipactli, Xelhua, Xolotl, Ahuizotl, Mictlan, Chac