42 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
figuRe 2.10. Unknown creator, chacmool with Tlaloc mask, ca. 1500.
Museo Nacional de Antropología, México. Archivo Digitalización de
las Colecciones Arqueológicas del Museo Nacional de Antropología.
cOnacULTa-inaH-canOn. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia.were. We have seen how histories emphasize the role of
the rulers in building the dikes that controlled the water.
But we have also seen how daily experience and practice
taught the Mexica that they lived in an environment of
lightning, thunder, drops of rain, and flows of streams. The
idea of teotl held that the world around was animated by
divine forces. As such, all these elements were alive, and
provided another cosmic model for the watery environ-
ment of Tenochtitlan.
TeOTL and The waTeR deiTy
chaLchiuhTLicue
The pluralism of teotl led Spanish observers to marvel at
the expanse of the Mexica pantheon that was the focus of
the devotional life of the people of Tenochtitlan, envision-
ing it to be a thickly peopled one, even more expansive than
that of Olympian gods. One wrote that “they had many
idols, so many that it seemed as if there was one for each
t h i n g .” 54 These deities dwelt in a vertically stratified uni-
verse composed of a thirteen-tiered sky and a nine-layer
underworld, these upper and lower levels intersecting upon
the terrestrial plane. Modern scholarship has clarified the
enormous and nebulous pantheon recorded by sixteenth-
century chroniclers, showing that the large number of
central Mexican deities are simply different expressions
of just three fundamental themes: celestial creation; rain/
moisture/agriculture; war/sacrifice/solar nourishment. 55
Perhaps the most important of these “deity complexes,”
because of their vital necessity to agricultural life, were
those associated with water, particularly Tlaloc and Chal-
chiuhtlicue. Water coming from the sky as well as electrical
storms and lightning were associated with the agricultural
deity Tlaloc, who also caused water to be stored within
mountains, spaces with which he was intimately associ-
ated, which were like great water-filled vessels. Corre-
spondingly, he was linked to rainfall and mountain cults
(for rain was born of cloudy mountaintops); his temple
was the northern half of the Templo Mayor. 56 Because of
his association with both mountains and life-giving water,
Tlaloc was worshipped in every altepetl. The Florentine
Codex gives us this account: “ To him was attributed the
rain; for he made it, he caused it to come down, he scat-
tered the rain like seed, and also the hail. He caused to
sprout, to blossom, to leaf out, to bloom, to ripen, the trees,
the plants, our food. And also by him were made floods of
water and thunder-bolts.” 57 Among the Mexica, images
of Tlaloc often decorated hollow vessels, analogies of his
watery capacities, as well as monumental sculpture. One
major work found in the Templo Mayor is a chacmool, a
reclining figure, wearing the mask of Tlaloc with standard
iconography (figure 2.10). He has round, goggle eyes and a
mouth that appears fanged as it sports curling barbules. He
is laden with jade jewelry, in the form of a beaded necklace
and wrist- and ankle-bands. In other examples, he wears
a crown-like headdress of serrated paper or one carved
out of pieces of precious greenstone, its surface rendered
smooth and shiny like the surface of water.
In contrast, once water emerged from spaces of the hol-
low mountains, it became “the property of ” the female deity
Chalchiuhtlicue. 58 Like her frequent companion, Tlaloc,
Chalchiuhtlicue was a deity associated with water, par-
ticularly lakes and streams. Cults to her were celebrated at
the Templo Mayor (it was here that many of the activities
of the four monthly, or veintena, festivals [Cuahuitlehua,
Tozotontli, Etzalcualiztli, and Tecuilhuitontli] centered
on her were carried out). There exist a multiplicity of stone
images of this deity, in which she can be identified by the
butterfly-shaped double fan of paper at the nape of her
neck (the amacuexpalli, a fan shared by other water and
fertility deities as well) and the headdress with two large
tassels over her ears (figure 2.11). Around her head, a cap of
stacked coils decorated with small tassel-like spheres runs
above her eyebrow line. 59 Like other female deities, she
wears the quechquemitl, a triangular upper-body garment.
She is frequently represented in small sculptures carved