The TLaTOani in TenochTiTlan • 65collect some of the water as it came surging through, with
members of the royal court joining Ahuitzotl at the end of
the course to celebrate the glorious excess of freshwater.
Durán’s account captures the joyous spontaneity of the
crowds—most of them at least part-time agriculturalists,
well aware of the liquid life-rescue that awaited them. It is
likely that even the lowest Mexica peasant who lifted her
terracotta vessel to catch the streaming water would have
understood it to be a source of teotl, and when she and her
neighbors pressed up against the newly built conduit in
1499 to collect its precious flow, they were perhaps availing
themselves of the teotl of the water itself.
But specific manifestations of teotl were often assigned
the name of a deity, and it is clear that the Acuecuexco
aqueduct of 1499 was linked to the teotl of Chalchiuht-
licue, a deity perceived as the animating force of water.
This linkage between water’s animate qualities and the
deity endured for more than two generations and was
captured by the indigenous artist working for Durán,
who shows us how the event was imagined in the early
1580s, when his Historia was finished (figure 3.6). In an
inset illustration that accompanied the beginning of the
chapter devoted to the opening of the aqueduct, the art-
ist shows three priests within the rectangular frame. The
first wears a water-patterned skirt and has a blue-painted
forehead and rubber-striped cheeks, his head is adorned
with a spray of feathers, and he burns incense and shakes
a rattle staff; the second blows a conch; the third sacrifices
a bird. They approach a rushing spring at left, depicted
with a circular blue disk to suggest the whirlpool, a marker
used in representations of Chalchiuhtlicue, the spiral form
making her animating force visible. From this spring flows
a wide blue band, representing the water in the aqueduct,
which traverses the bottom of the page before encircling
the base of the glyph for the city of Tenochtitlan, a cactus
growing from the glyph of a rock, which we saw in the
Codex Mendoza as well as the Teocalli of Sacred Warfare.
The stream of water, presumably canalized, receives the
priests’ recent offerings: a decapitated bird floats on its sur-
face, as does a sacrificed child with an open and bloodied
chest cavity. It flows across the image from left to right,
as if to trace the south-to-north flow of water up the new
aqueduct into the city. The flow depicted here resembles
the flow of water on the page of the sacred tonalamatl
calendar contained in the Codex Borbonicus showing the
thirteen-day period (a trecena) devoted to Chalchiuhtlicue
(see figure 2.12). The parallel to the image in Durán is
unmistakable, as emerging from the seated figure above
on the page of the Borbonicus is a stream of water, fringed
with shells and jade, holding offerings within to the deity.
That the Acuecuexco aqueduct in Durán’s text shares the
vital qualities that were taken as evidence of the presence
of Chalchiuhtlicue and that it receives the same offerings
as the deity suggest that they possessed the same animatefiguRe 3.6. Unknown creator, dedication of the Acuecuexco aqueduct,
from Diego Durán, Historia de las indias de Nueva España e islas de
la tierra firme, fol. 143r, ca. 1570. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.