Tlaloc

He is older than the Aztecs by more than a thousand years. Tlaloc’s goggle eyes and fanged mouth appear in murals at Teotihuacan around 100 CE, centuries before Tenochtitlan was built. When the Aztecs rose to power, they absorbed him into their pantheon and placed his shrine at the top of their most important temple.

His name in Nahuatl is usually interpreted as “he who makes things sprout” or “he who is made of earth.” Both readings point to the same function: the god who determined whether crops grew.

The Goggle Eyes

Tlaloc’s iconography is among the most stable in Mesoamerica. The goggle eyes, large circular rings framing each eye, appear consistently across a thousand years of representations, from Teotihuacan murals to Aztec codices. The origin of the goggle motif is debated. Some researchers see them as the rings left by pooled water around the eyes; others connect them to the eyes of a serpent or jaguar. What is clear is that by the time the Aztecs used the image, it was already ancient.

The Codex Borgia, a pre-Columbian manuscript now in the Vatican, shows Tlaloc across multiple scenes with consistent attributes: goggle eyes, fanged mouth or serpent tongue, blue-green body, headdress of foam and feathers. His blue-green color represented both water and the vegetation it sustained. In the Florentine Codex, Sahagún’s informants described him as wearing turquoise, the color of jade water.

His shrine at the Templo Mayor was painted blue. Huitzilopochtli’s was red. The two shrines sat at the same summit, rain and war sharing a peak.

Tlalocan: The Green Paradise

Tlaloc owned a heaven.

Tlalocan was a warm, lush realm in the south, described in the Florentine Codex as a place of abundant food and ease. It received a specific category of dead: those who drowned, were struck by lightning, or died of water-associated diseases: gout, dropsy, certain fevers, skin conditions linked to moisture. These dead belonged to Tlaloc. They were buried rather than cremated, because their bodies still held the god’s claim on them.

The Teotihuacan murals at Tepantitla, dated to around 450 CE, show what many scholars read as Tlalocan: small figures swimming, playing, and picking flowers in a green landscape irrigated by streams. A central figure, likely Tlaloc or a Tlaloc-associated deity, presides over the scene with outstretched arms, water and plants flowing from each hand. The mural predates Aztec civilization by centuries and suggests the idea of a water paradise was already established early.

Children and Tears

The Florentine Codex (Book II) describes the ceremony called Atlcahualo, held at the beginning of the dry season when rains were needed most. Children were taken to mountain-top shrines on the peaks surrounding the Valley of Mexico. They had to cry.

Their tears were rain. Priests pinched the children to produce tears and regarded steady weeping as a good omen for the coming season. More tears meant more water. Durán, writing in the 1570s, described the ceremony with visible discomfort but in precise detail: the children’s clothing, the mountain destinations, the offerings made alongside them.

The Tlaloque, Tlaloc’s helper deities, lived in those same mountain peaks. They produced rain by striking their water jars with sticks. The shards produced thunder; the spilled water became rain. The mountain-top sacrifices were therefore made at the homes of the beings who controlled precipitation.

Excavations at the Templo Mayor found Tlaloc offerings distinct from those on Huitzilopochtli’s side of the pyramid: coral, shells, water vessels, and the skeletal remains of children. The archaeological record confirmed what the Florentine Codex described.

The First Wife

Tlaloc’s first wife was Xochiquetzal, goddess of flowers, beauty, and the arts.

Tezcatlipoca stole her.

The Florentine Codex preserves the account: Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror god, abducted Xochiquetzal from Tlaloc. Tlaloc then took a second wife, Chalchiuhtlicue (She of the Jade Skirt), who became the goddess of rivers, lakes, and flowing water. Chalchiuhtlicue had her own significant role in Aztec cosmology: she presided over the Fourth Sun, the world age before the current one, which she destroyed by weeping for 52 years until the world flooded.

Tezcatlipoca’s pattern across Aztec mythology was consistent: he disrupted what other gods built. He took Tlaloc’s wife and drove Quetzalcoatl out of Tula.

Further Reading

• Huitzilopochtli — his partner at the Templo Mayor summit, the war god whose shrine faced Tlaloc’s across the peak
• Quetzalcoatl — god of wind whose aspect Ehecatl swept the sky before Tlaloc’s rains could fall
• Mictlantecuhtli — lord of the underworld who received those who died of ordinary causes, as opposed to Tlalocan’s water dead

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Florentine Codex (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España), Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, c. 1577 — Book II: the feast of Atlcahualo and child sacrifice; Book I: Tlaloc’s nature and Tlalocan
• Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, Fray Diego Durán, c. 1581 — rain rituals and the child sacrifice ceremony
• Codex Borgia (pre-Columbian, Vatican Apostolic Library) — primary iconographic source across multiple scenes
• Codex Borbonicus — ritual calendar imagery
• Teotihuacan murals (c. 450 CE) — Tlaloc at Tepantitla, with Tlalocan figures