waTeR and The sacRed ciTy • 43out of stone, and the number and small size of these works
suggest that the locus of her worship was decentralized,
taking place in the numerous neighborhood temple pre-
cincts around the city as well as in the regions around. The
ubiquity of these rather humble sculptural representations
is an index of her hold on the Mexica sacred imagination,
but while she appears calm and ordered in her stone mani-
festation, other representations show her to be dangerous
and unpredictable.
The informants of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex associ-
ated Chalchiuhtlicue with the movement of groundwater,
most perceptible when it was most violent. Their descrip-
tion runs thus:
The goddess named the Jade-skirted, who was [goddess
of ] the waters.
She was considered a god[dess]; her likeness [quixiptla]
was that of a woman. It was said that she belonged among
the rain-gods, as their elder sister.
Hence she was esteemed, feared, and held in awe;
hence she terrified men. [For] she killed men in water, she
plunged them in water as it foamed, swelled and formed
whirlpools about them; she made the water swirl; she car-
ried men to the depths.
She upset the canoe, she emptied it; she lifted it, tossed
it up and plunged it in the water.
And sometimes she sank men in the water; she drowned
them. The water was restless: the waves roared; they dashed
and resounded. The water was wild. . . .figuRe 2.11. Unknown creator, stone sculpture of Chalchiuhtlicue, front
and back views, late fifteenth to early sixteenth century. 14.5 × 8 in.
(37 × 20 cm). Christy Collection. © Trustees of the British Museum.
And when (there was) no wind, it was calm; the water
spread like a mirror, gleaming, glittering. 60The Florentine’s description captures some of the Mexica
understanding of this deity, particularly her violence toward
human beings (the “men” of the translation is genderless in
the Nahuatl original), and its designation of her likeness
(quixiptla) as a woman (cihuatl) suggests an anthropomor-
phic being. The Codex Borbonicus, a manuscript contain-
ing a ritual calendar, shows us an image of Chalchiuhtlicue
as the patron of one of the trecenas, or ritual “weeks” of
thirteen days (figure 2.12). She appears in the large square
in the page’s upper left, a seated female, elaborately garbed
in blue and green clothes, the color of water, with a num-
ber of offerings set in front of her. Around her head is her
diagnostic headdress, wrapped bands of blue and white
decorated with small spheres at top and bottom and tied
with an elaborate double tassel that hangs behind her right
ear. Her face is painted bright red, edged in yellow, and a
black stripe appears on her cheek. An enormous pleated
fan is attached to the nape of her neck, just as in her stone
representations. Her clothes are decorated with small
doughnut-shaped gems, carved of jade. She is seated on a
small red stool, and from it, a great gush of flowing water
emerges, carrying within it images of two small human
figures; the one closest to the deity is her human coun-
terpart, with the same face paint, the red extending down
her torso. They are swept up the stream of water as if in a
flood. Indeed, both the visual descriptions of the deity in
the Codex Borbonicus and the verbal one in the Floren-
tine Codex seem to be colored by the experience of flood
(“sometimes she sank men in the water; she drowned them.
The water was restless: the waves roared; they dashed and
resounded. The water was wild”), for despite the careful
manipulations of causeways and dikes, Tenochtitlan did
flood both before the Conquest and after, with one particu-
larly bad flood sweeping through the city in 1499.
From the perspective of lived experience, Chalchiuhtli-
cue was a terrifying presence in the city; in the rainy sum-
mer months, Chalchiuhtlicue’s waters could break like an
uncontrollable surge of amniotic fluid, invading the city,
rushing down its streets, uprooting the carefully planted
chinampas, washing away the adobe buildings that many
called home. In the Florentine passage quoted above, Chal-
chiuhtlicue is fairly static at the beginning (“the goddess
named the Jade-skirted”), but as the passage proceeds,
she becomes more and more like a force that animates the