Tlalocan- Aztec LocationLocation · Realm"Paradise of Tlaloc"

The Green Abundance

Green plants grew in impossible profusion. Rivers ran clear and sweet. Food appeared without labor. Where the ordinary dead spent four years descending through Mictlan's ordeals of crashing mountains and obsidian winds, Tlalocan's chosen arrived the moment they died.

The Aztecs understood Tlalocan as both a paradise and a source. Mount Tlaloc, the highest peak east of the Valley of Mexico, bore the rain god's name. A temple stood at its summit where the emperor himself performed rain ceremonies. Inside the mountains, according to the Florentine Codex, vast caverns held the reservoirs from which all springs and rivers originated. Tlalocan was those caverns: the place where water existed in its purest form before being released into the world.

The Chosen

Not everyone could enter. Tlalocan was reserved for those Tlaloc had claimed through the manner of their death: the drowned and the lightning-struck, those whose bodies swelled with water-borne disease. The rain god had noticed them and wanted them.

Because they belonged to water, they were not cremated like the ordinary dead. They were buried. Seeds of edible plants were placed in their mouths. Images of mountains were painted on their foreheads, connecting them to the peaks where rain clouds gathered. Blue paper, Tlaloc's color, adorned their bodies. Durán records that the tears shed by mourners at these funerals were themselves believed to become rain. The dead nourished the underground waters; the waters rose as springs and fell as storms. Tlaloc's chosen had not been lost. They had been planted.

The Painted Wall

The most vivid surviving image of Tlalocan comes from the murals of Teotihuacan, painted nearly a millennium before the Aztec empire. At Tepantitla, a residential compound near the Pyramid of the Sun, a great mural covers an entire wall. At the top, a large divine figure presides over streams of water pouring from its hands. Below, small human figures swim and play ball games. Others chase butterflies. Speech scrolls curl from open mouths in loops of joy. Fish move through the streams. Trees bloom in every color.

The paradise the Florentine Codex describes in words a thousand years later is the same one the painters of Tepantitla put on the wall: water, flowers, and the perpetual play of the blessed dead.