June 22, 2025

The old god

Notes on Tlaloc

I believe in one god and one god only, and that is Tlaloc. He’s the Mexica rain god, and you only have to experience one rainy season storm in Mexico City to be converted. There’s something undeniably supernatural about how they unfold: A sunny summer day darkens in an instant. The wind suddenly picks up. A few light drops, barely noticeable, lull you into thinking there’s a chance you’ll make it home in time—before they multiply exponentially into pummeling sheets of water. Sometimes the streets and anyone in them are battered by hail, falling so densely it covers the ground like snow. You’re trapped wherever you happen to be until it’s over. If the city is lucky that day, that’ll be in 20 minutes, the only sign it rained at all being the enormous puddles left behind. If it’s unlucky, it could be hours, or days, and those puddles become floods.

Tlaloc was one of two gods worshipped in Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor, alongside Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun, and of war. Huitzilopochtli was the Mexica patron, and he had protected them as they wandered for centuries and guided them, finally, to place where they would built their capital, on an island in a lake. When the Mexica arrived, they found Tlaloc already here. “Tlaloc was the old god of the land who had sustained the great capitals of pre-Aztec Mexico,” writes Davíd Carrasco in City of Sacrifice¹—the urban ideal of Tula, the mysterious ruins of Teotihuacan, the volcano-doomed Cuicuilco, and everything before them, reaching as far back into eternity as human civilization can go. Tlaloc was the god who made cities possible, because he made agriculture possible. When the Mexica built their own city in Tlaloc’s land, they adopted him. But really, it should be said, Tlaloc adopted them.

After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the European invaders tried with all their might to destroy the Mexica pantheon; they were especially terrified of “Uichilobos” (Huitzilopochtli), linked as he was to Mexica imperial power. And indeed, Huitzilopochtli’s presence has mostly faded. But Tlaloc, the old god, didn’t disappear so easily. No city in this land could survive without him. In one of the invaders’ first churches, someone inlaid a stone bearing Tlaloc’s face.

Within a century, the invaders would try to break Tlaloc’s hold on their new capital by draining the lake in which he had allowed the Mexica to settle. They were tired of the floods his storms caused, either not realizing or not caring that the inundations weren’t the result of rain, or even the lake, but of their own targeted destruction of the infrastructure that had managed the city’s water. And so, of course, the floods got worse. By rejecting Tlaloc’s eternal place in this land, the invaders didn’t erase him. They guaranteed he would grow ever more powerful. And here we are, 420 or so rainy seasons later, in a city still at his mercy, and without his grace.

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If you liked this, you’ll love my book APOCALYPSE! See especially Chapter 9, where I go deep on Mexico City and water. Click the image below to order, or find it at your local bookstore!