waTeR and The sacRed ciTy • 51microcosm of the larger cosmic order, as Eduardo Matos
Moctezuma’s work has revealed. In addition, the Templo
Mayor also served as a model for the ideal altepetl, a moun-
tain at whose base tamed water flowed. There is abundant
evidence for Chalchiuhtlicue’s presence in the caches that
were buried within the Templo Mayor, although we know
little of her visible sculptural representations at that site,
given the widespread post-Conquest destruction. 72 We
also find evidence that the primordial landscape at the
foundation of Tenochtitlan —that is, those streams called
Tleatl (fiery water), Atlatlayan (burning water), Matlal-
latl (blue water), and Toxpallatl (yellow water)—was re-
created at the Templo Mayor. 73 The Florentine Codex lists,
among the buildings and features of the temple precincts,
four pools, the first three used for bathing rituals of the
priests: Tlilapan (upon the black water); Tezcaapan (upon
the mirror water); and Coaapan (upon the serpent water).
The fourth was fed by a spring with the same name as
that of the foundation account: Toxpallatl. 74 These four
pools may have been oriented to the cardinal directions,
and two of them bear colors associated with those direc-
tions (black and yellow). 75 Like the pyramid itself, which
re-created the birthplace of Huitzilopochtli at Coatepec,
these four pools with their distinct waters evoke the four
streams that flowed out from the caves at the site of the
city’s foundation. 76
But since Chalchiuhtlicue’s presence was seen in the
way that water moved, it is worth attending to the quality
of the water at the Templo Mayor and where its sources
may have been. Three of the pools have no noted origin
point, but they were certainly calm water, allowing the
priests to bathe in them. More vivacity was to be found in
the pool of Toxpallatl, whose source was identified in the
Florentine Codex as flowing springwater that was captured
in some kind of public fountain, described as where “the
common folk drank water.” 77 While underground springs
may have fed this pool, by the fifteenth century its source
was more likely the freshwater aqueduct from Chapultepec
that ran down the Tlacopan (later bastardized as “ Tacuba”)
causeway, which ran east to west to connect to the west-
ern lakeshore and brought a current of water into the site
(see figure 1.10); it too was described as “provid[ing] drink,
refreshment to the Mexican nation.” 78 Thus in the pools
at the Templo Mayor, one encountered Chalchiuhtlicue in
her most desirable state, calm and constant, providing for
the priests and the people of the altepetl alike. If we are to
return to the Teocalli of Sacred Warfare and understand
that one of its many meanings was to serve as a replica of
the larger Templo Mayor, with the shallow “steps” cut into
its front and the receding crowning “temple” at its top and
at its base, the body of the female sacrifice on its back face
was to be found in the pool of “tamed” water also associ-
ated with Chalchiuhtlicue (figures 2.14 and 2.15).
In both the Templo Mayor and the Teocalli, we find
a towering temple over a calm body of water. Given that
temples were conceived of as man-made mountains, we
confront once again the image of the altepetl, the harmoni-
ous human collective, the site of unstinting natural bounty
that the rulers of Tenochtitlan were engineering, again
and again, for the benefit of their peoples, in sculpture, in
architecture, and in the city itself. By the beginning of the
sixteenth century, the Mexica rulers of Tenochtitlan had
created altepetl models, or maquettes, expressing the ideal-
ized water hill not only at the Templo Mayor, but in other
sites they controlled around the valley, in Tepetzinco and
Chapultepec and beyond. These and other sites, like that
in Tetzcotzinco, created by the rulers of Tetzcoco, gave a
series of ambitious dynastic rulers in the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries an opportunity to show themselves in
relation to the idealized altepetl, but they are largely beyond
the scope of this study. Instead, it is to the presence of the
Mexica rulers in the urbanscape that we will now turn.