Tlalocan

Thunder, in the Nahua account of it, was the sound of pottery breaking. Inside the mountains that ring the Basin of Mexico stood storerooms of water, and in them worked the Tlaloque, the small rain-bringers, who struck the great jars with sticks until they split and spilled their contents onto the fields far below. Four jars stood there according to one colonial manuscript, and only one of them held good rain; the others held frost, drought and blight, and the Tlaloque chose. The mountain holding those jars was not hollow rock. It was a country, and people lived in it.

Tlalocan takes its name directly from the rain god: Tlaloc, plus the ending Nahuatl uses to mean the place of a thing. Sahagún’s Nahua informants, describing it in the middle of the sixteenth century, told him that Tlaloc governed there and that they regarded it as an earthly paradise. The same corpus gives Tlaloc the title Lord of Tlalocan and credits him with making the food and the drink, the sustenance, the nourishment, the daily bread. That phrasing matters. The realm was not a reward tacked onto the end of a life. It was the source of the maize, and the people in it were on the supply side.

Who went there was decided entirely by how a person died. Ordinary death, from age or from ordinary sickness, meant the long descent to Mictlan and four hard years of it. Warriors killed in battle and women killed in childbirth went to the sun. Nursing infants went to Chichihuacuauhco, to a tree that dripped milk, which some accounts place inside Tlalocan itself. Tlalocan took a narrower category: the drowned, the lightning-struck, and those carried off by the illnesses the rain god was held to own, dropsy and gout and rheumatism and the wet swellings and skin complaints that come with damp. The Codex Vaticanus A adds the physically deformed to his charge.

The Florentine Codex puts the selection plainly. Those who are good of heart are struck by lightning because the Tlaloque desire them, it says; they long for them, and they carry them home to Tlalocan. A death by water was not misfortune. It was a summons, and the corpse was treated accordingly.

Almost everyone else was burned. These dead were not. The body was dressed in paper ornaments, seeds were put into its mouth, and it was laid whole into the ground, planted rather than buried, on the reasoning that a thing placed in wet earth with seed in it comes up again. The smell of that grave would have been the smell of any newly turned field. A digging stick sometimes went in with the body, which says something about the work expected on the other end.

What waited was green. The codex describes unending springtime, foliage everywhere, and the edible plants of the region growing without being fought for: maize, amaranth, beans, squash, chili, tomatoes. The people there lived in abundance rather than hardship, which for a society whose entire ritual calendar was an anxious negotiation about rainfall is a specific and pointed kind of heaven.

Where it sat is a question the sources themselves cannot settle, and the disagreement is old rather than modern. Some accounts place Tlalocan as the first of the thirteen upper worlds. Eduard Seler read it as the uppermost underworld in the east, which fits Tlaloc’s position as ninth Lord of the Night. Alfredo López Austin, working across texts, images and the beliefs of living Nahua communities in Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist (1997), argued for something closer to the literal reading: a terrestrial paradise inside a perpetually green and beautiful mountain. The three positions are not really reconcilable and nobody has reconciled them.

The mountain reading had an address. Cerro Tlaloc, east of the Basin, carries on its summit the remains of a walled shrine, one of the highest-altitude ceremonial structures anywhere, reached by a long processional causeway. During Huey Tozoztli, in the hottest weeks just before the rains broke, four rulers of the Basin climbed it together to petition for water. Whatever the cosmology said, this was where people physically went, in thin cold air, with the valley laid out beneath them and the sky they were bargaining with close enough to touch.

There is also a painting. In 1942 Alfonso Caso, working at Teotihuacan, identified a mural compound at Tepantitla as Tlalocan, and the patio has been called the Tlalocan Patio ever since. Its lower register is unlike anything else in Mesoamerican art: dozens of small figures in loincloths, swimming in criss-crossing rivers that pour out of a mountain, singing with speech scrolls curling from their mouths, catching butterflies, playing ball, one of them apparently pulling a tooth. Caso read them as the water-dead, reborn in the rain god’s country and busy in it. The reading has not held cleanly. Beginning with Peter Furst in 1974 and pressed further by Esther Pasztory, scholars argued that the presiding figure above them is not Tlaloc at all but a female deity of fertility and death, and that a Teotihuacan mural painted centuries before the Mexica should not be read through Mexica theology in the first place. The name stuck anyway.

Tlalocan did not end with the conquest. In the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Nahua curers described to the anthropologist Timothy Knab a Tlalocan that lies below rather than above, entered in dreams through underground water, through a whirlpool that takes the dreamer down and around into the dark. It has four quarters. In the north are caves where the lord of the winds and the lord of death keep the newly dead for their first year, and where toads mind the cooking pots that hold the ingredients of storms. In the south a spring of boiling water steams in a cave, and beneath it lives a giant worm that eats earth and chews out the caverns as it goes. In the east is apan, an underworld sea joined at its depths to all the water on the surface, with cities in it, where souls go once their first year is finished. A folktale recorded at Zongolica sends a poor man down to Tlalocan and brings him back rich, with a ring.

What the place grants is exemption. No four-year walk through Mictlan, no cold, no want, an endless growing season and, in at least one reading, a job. What it withholds is any say in the matter. Courage does not qualify a person, penance does not, and virtue only seems to, since the sources frame the lightning as desire on the part of the Tlaloque rather than reward on the part of the dead. The one real limit is stranger than a weakness. Nothing in the record describes anyone leaving.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tlalocan?

Tlalocan is the paradise of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc, described in colonial Nahuatl sources as a realm of unending springtime full of green foliage and edible plants. Its name means “the place of Tlaloc.” Sixteenth-century Nahua informants told Sahagún they considered it an earthly paradise rather than a distant heaven.

Who goes to Tlalocan after death?

Tlalocan received people killed by water: the drowned, those struck by lightning, and those who died of illnesses associated with the rain god such as dropsy, gout and rheumatism. Some sources add the physically deformed as being in Tlaloc’s charge. Manner of death, not conduct in life, decided the destination, and everyone else went to Mictlan, to the sun, or to the nursing tree Chichihuacuauhco.

Why were the Tlalocan dead buried instead of cremated?

Aztec dead were usually cremated, but those bound for Tlalocan were buried whole in the earth, dressed in paper ornaments with seeds placed in their mouths. The body was put into the ground as though it were seed corn, on the logic that something planted in wet earth comes back up. The rite made the burial an act of sowing.

Where was Tlalocan believed to be?

The sources disagree. Some place it as the first of the thirteen upper worlds, Eduard Seler read it as the uppermost eastern underworld, and Alfredo López Austin argued it was a terrestrial paradise inside a perpetually green mountain. In practice the Aztecs treated Cerro Tlaloc as its address, climbing to a summit shrine there during the festival of Huey Tozoztli to ask for rain.

Is the Tepantitla mural at Teotihuacan really a picture of Tlalocan?

Alfonso Caso identified the Tepantitla murals as Tlalocan in 1942, reading the small swimming, singing figures in its lower register as the water-dead. That identification has been contested since 1974, when Peter Furst and later Esther Pasztory argued the presiding deity is a goddess rather than Tlaloc and that Teotihuacan imagery should not be read through much later Mexica belief. The compound is still called the Tlalocan Patio.

Related Entries

Tlaloc, Chalchiuhtlicue, Mictlan, Mictlantecuhtli, Tonatiuh, Aztlán, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Tlaltecuhtli, Cihuateteo, Ahuizotl, La Llorona, Xibalba