Tlaloc- Aztec GodDeity"He Who Makes Things Sprout"

He Who Makes Things Sprout

Tlaloc's face is unmistakable: great round goggle-eyes like reflecting pools, fanged teeth bared in a grimace, skin the jade-green of deep water. A curling volute frames his mouth. Images of this face appear at Teotihuacan centuries before the Aztec rise, and the Aztecs painted him the same way. The rain god's mask had not changed.

He controlled all the waters that fell from the sky: the gentle mist that nursed young maize and the hailstorm that could destroy a harvest in a single night. Both answered to the same god.

The Third Sun

Tlaloc ruled the Third Sun, Nahui Quiahuitl, the Sun of Rain. For an age the world flourished under his waters, the rains falling in perfect measure. Then Quetzalcoatl sent a rain of fire to end Tlaloc's era, and the people of that world were transformed into turkeys and butterflies. Chalchiuhtlicue, Tlaloc's consort, presided over the Fourth Sun, which ended when a great flood drowned the earth and its people became fish.

Between these cataclysms, Tlaloc suffered a personal blow. Tezcatlipoca stole his first wife Xochiquetzal, goddess of beauty and flowers, and in his grief Tlaloc's rains ceased. Drought gripped the world until he took Chalchiuhtlicue, "She of the Jade Skirt," as his new consort.

The Tlaloque

Tlaloc did not work alone. He commanded the Tlaloque, a host of lesser rain deities stationed at the four corners of the world. Each held a jar of different water: one containing gentle rain that nurtured crops, another holding frost and hail that could destroy a harvest overnight. When Tlaloc gave the word, a Tlaloque would shatter his jar against the clouds. Thunder was the sound of breaking vessels. Lightning was the flash of Tlaloc's jade axes striking the firmament.

The Tlaloque also tended Tonacatepetl, the Mountain of Sustenance, within which maize and other vital foods were stored. When Quetzalcoatl sought to feed newly created humanity, the Tlaloque split open the mountain with their lightning bolts, scattering maize of four colors across the land.

The Templo Mayor

At the summit of Tenochtitlan's great pyramid, Tlaloc shared equal place with Huitzilopochtli. Tlaloc's shrine crowned the northern summit, painted blue and white for water and clouds. Huitzilopochtli's occupied the southern summit in red and white. Offerings recovered from the temple's caches include jade figurines, shells, and the bones of sacrificed children: treasures drawn from the world of water and tokens of the rain god's need.

The Festivals of Rain

Tlaloc's rituals marked the agricultural year. The sixth month, Etzalcualiztli, was his grandest festival: priests spent days fasting and performing penance in the lake waters, then the entire city feasted on etzalli, a thick stew of maize and beans. Those who refused to share their portion could be doused with water or pelted with reeds. Tlaloc's generosity was not optional.

Each spring, before the rains began, the emperor himself led a pilgrimage to a shrine high on Mount Tlaloc, climbing through pine forests and thin mountain air to over four thousand meters. At the summit, within a walled enclosure, stone idols represented Tlaloc and the surrounding mountains that caught the rain clouds as they rolled in from the east. There the emperor offered rubber balls and copal incense, burning them in stone braziers to summon the season's first storms.

Tlalocan

Those who died by water did not journey to dark Mictlan like the ordinary dead. Tlaloc claimed them for Tlalocan, his paradise of eternal spring. The Tepantitla murals at Teotihuacan paint this realm: green plants grow everywhere, tiny figures swim in jade-colored rivers, and the blessed dead sing among flowers that never wilt.

The drowned were not cremated but buried, their faces painted with liquid rubber, their graves adorned with paper flags. Seeds were placed beside them rather than ashes in urns.

The Tears of Children

During droughts and at the onset of the rainy season, Tlaloc demanded children. Those born under water signs or bearing a double cowlick were marked as his. Priests dressed them in blue and white, adorned them with paper streamers to represent falling rain, and led them in procession to mountaintop shrines or to Pantitlan, a sacred whirlpool in Lake Texcoco where the waters swallowed offerings whole.

If the children wept along the way, the priests took heart: tears from young eyes would coax tears from the clouds. Sahagún records that bystanders wept too, and the priests counted this collective grief as further inducement for rain. The children went directly to Tlalocan, spared the dark descent to Mictlan. Their deaths fed the rain cycle. Their souls, the Aztecs believed, knew only the paradise of eternal spring.