Tlaloc

Also Known As: Nahuatl Tlāloc, from tlalli, “earth”; read variously as “he who is made of earth,” “he who lies within the earth,” and “he who makes things sprout”; also titled Tlaloc Tlamacazqui, the Provider
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He commands rain, lightning, hail and drought, rules the mountains where storm water is stored, and owns the diseases of cold standing water.
Role in Mythos: He is the great provider and withholder of central Mexico, seated beside the war god at the summit of the Templo Mayor and served by the lesser rain gods called the Tlaloque.
Relation to Humans: Every harvest in the Basin of Mexico depended on him, so he was petitioned constantly, climbed to on mountaintops, and paid in children when the rain failed. He was revered and feared in equal measure, since the same god who fed the valley could rot its fields or leave them cracked and empty.

Thunder over the Basin of Mexico was the sound of pottery breaking. Water was kept in great jars inside the mountains, and when the rain gods struck those jars with sticks the vessels cracked and the sky came apart. Which jar they broke was the whole question. One held the rain that swelled the maize. One held the rain that blackened it in the ear. One held hail, and one held the fine grey drizzle that could fall for a month and rot the seed in the furrow before it ever reached light. The gods carrying the sticks were the Tlaloque. The god who told them which jar to break was Tlaloc.

He wears a face nobody could mistake for another. Two heavy rings circle the eyes like goggles, commonly read as a pair of serpents coiled nose to nose, and below them a long upper lip curves down over fangs. The colour is blue and green, the blue of standing water and of turquoise, and the whole arrangement sits under a crown of heron plumes. It is among the oldest faces in Mesoamerica. Masked rain gods with those round eyes and those teeth were being carved at Teotihuacan between the third and eighth centuries, a thousand years before the Mexica came into the valley to claim it, and the Maya were shaping something very close in Chac. Whether the being behind the mask was already called Tlaloc that far back, no one can say. The mask is older than the name we have for it.

Certainty runs out faster than you would expect. A colossal carved stone lay for centuries in a ravine near Coatlinchan, east of the lakes, and to this day nobody agrees who it is. José María Velasco looked at it in 1889 and called it Chalchiuhtlicue. Leopoldo Batres looked at it in 1903 and called it Tlaloc, and Batres won in the sense that the label stuck. Details of the carving fit neither deity cleanly. In April 1964 the block was hauled the thirty miles into Mexico City on a purpose built trailer to stand at the door of the new National Museum of Anthropology, and heavy rain fell on the capital that day, out of season. People noticed.

The accounts of where he came from are brisk to the point of rudeness. In the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, the first gods make fire, then half a sun, then the first man and woman, then the days and the months, then the underworld and its lord and lady, then the crocodile monster they cut up to make the ground, and then, almost in passing, the god and goddess of rain. Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue arrive as a pair and work as a pair. She took the water lying on the surface, the lakes and springs and streams. He took the water that falls out of the air and the water hidden beneath the soil, which is where his name points, back to tlalli, the earth. Readings of that name pull in different directions and always have.

His first wife was Xochiquetzal, and Tezcatlipoca took her. Tlaloc married again, to Matlalcueye of the green skirt, another water deity, whose name the great mountain on the Tlaxcalan side of the valley still carries. It was not the last thing he would lose to a louder god.

He held his own age of the world once. Each of the suns before this one belonged to somebody, and the third belonged to Tlaloc, the Rain Sun, under which people ate a water seed and centuries passed without incident. Then Quetzalcoatl brought that sun down in a rain of fire and left the survivors scattering as turkeys. Chalchiuhtlicue took the sun after his, and hers ended in a flood that turned everyone into fish. The order and the arithmetic shift between sources. The shape holds: the rain god’s world was destroyed by falling fire, and his wife’s by falling water.

By the time the Mexica were raising their capital in the lake, Tlaloc had been the central god of the farming peoples of the highlands for many centuries, and the newcomers with their sun and their night sky did not try to unseat him. They put him alongside Huitzilopochtli instead. One pyramid at the heart of Tenochtitlan carried two shrines of equal size, the war god’s painted red and white, the rain god’s painted blue and white, and their high priests held equal rank. Five of the eighteen months of the ritual year were given to him and to the Tlaloque on their mountaintops.

In the sixth of those months the rain priests waded into the lake before first light. They called back and forth across the cold water in the voices of waterfowl, ducks and herons, and shook fog rattles whose noise was meant to carry up into the cloud and be recognised there. Then they climbed out and ate the dish of maize and beans that gave the month its name.

In April, at the worst of the dry season, when the heat peaked and nothing had fallen for months, the rulers of the allied cities gathered at Tetzcoco and walked east and upward, onto the flank of the mountain that carries his name. Diego Durán, writing in the sixteenth century, recorded what waited at the top: the clouds turned cold, and thunder and lightning and hail gathered around the summit while the men were still standing in it.

Rain was not a gift. Rain was a transaction with a stated price. Children were offered to Tlaloc in the first month of the year and again in the third, some of them the children of slaves and some of them not. Between 1452 and 1454 the rain failed across central Mexico three years running. The state opened the royal granaries, and it also killed children at the Templo Mayor in numbers it had not reached for before. One deposit uncovered there in 1980, Offering 48, held the remains of at least forty two of them, roughly two to seven years old, and their bones record what three failed harvests do to a small body. They were sick and malnourished before anyone laid a hand on them.

What he could do followed from what he was. He sent the rain and he kept it back. He threw lightning at the ground and drove the storms that came in off the coast. He lived inside mountains, in the wet dark of them, with the Tlaloque who carried the jars out. He owned a set of illnesses too, and they are precisely the illnesses of cold and standing water: dropsy, gout, rheumatism, the sores and swellings, the wasting conditions the sixteenth century writers grouped under leprosy. Anyone who died of those belonged to him, and so did anyone who drowned or was struck by lightning.

His limits are stranger than his powers. He never seems to act with his own hands. The water sits in jars, the jars sit in mountains, and the Tlaloque hold the sticks, so a prayer to Tlaloc is in practice a request that a crowd of smaller gods be pointed the right way. He can be fed, climbed to and shouted at in the voice of a duck; he cannot be made to do anything. And his blessing and his punishment are the same substance arriving at the wrong volume, since too little of him is famine and too much of him is a drowned field, both poured from the same vessel. A god of fire can be put out. There is nothing you can do to a god who is already water.

The dead he claimed were not burned. Cremation was the ordinary Mexica practice, but the drowned, the lightning struck and the water sick went into the ground intact, with a seed placed in the mouth, and from there to Tlalocan: unending springtime, green growth, streams running through it, food that costs no labour. It is the most comfortable afterlife the Nahua imagined, and there is exactly one road into it, and he decides who walks it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tlaloc?

Tlaloc is the Aztec god of rain, lightning, hail and drought, and one of the two supreme deities of Tenochtitlan alongside the war god Huitzilopochtli. He ruled the Tlaloque, the lesser rain gods who lived in the mountains and released the water stored there. His cult was far older than the Mexica themselves and was central to farming peoples across highland Mexico.

What does Tlaloc look like?

Tlaloc is depicted with two heavy rings around his eyes that resemble goggles, widely interpreted as a pair of intertwined serpents, and a long upper lip drawn down over prominent fangs. His face is painted blue and green, the colours of water and turquoise, and he often wears a headdress of heron feathers and carries jars holding different kinds of rain. Versions of this same goggle-eyed, fanged mask were carved at Teotihuacan centuries before the Aztecs.

What is Tlalocan?

Tlalocan is Tlaloc’s paradise, a place of permanent spring with green plants, running water and food that requires no work. It was reserved for people who died in ways connected to water: drowning, lightning strike, and illnesses such as dropsy, gout and rheumatism. Those dead were buried rather than cremated, with a seed placed in the mouth, unlike most Mexica dead.

Why did the Aztecs sacrifice children to Tlaloc?

Children were offered to Tlaloc during the first and third months of the ritual year as payment for rain. The practice intensified dramatically during the drought of 1452 to 1454, when three consecutive harvests failed; Offering 48 at the Templo Mayor, excavated in 1980, contained the remains of at least forty-two children aged roughly two to seven, most of them malnourished and in poor health before death.

Who was Tlaloc’s wife?

Tlaloc’s first wife was the flower goddess Xochiquetzal, who was taken from him by Tezcatlipoca. He then married Matlalcueye, the green-skirted water goddess. He is also paired throughout Aztec myth with Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of lakes, rivers and springs, who ruled the world age that followed his own.