Talking about Tlaloc, 2

A turkey feather and a candle for Tlaloc. This culvert carries Hardscrabble Creek under a road—what is left of it.

In her comment on my first Tlaloc post, Hecate Demetersdatter asks,  “What was/is it about Tlaloc that called/calls to you?”

It was my reading and re-reading of Craig Childs’ House of Rain that made me conscious of how important a deity Tlaloc (under various names) had been from antiquity to the present day in the American Southwest and on south into Mesoamerica. (Childs, no avowed polytheist, tends to regard him simply as the personification of the hydrological cycle.)

If we might regard deities as connected with place, then I am in that place and subject to that hydrological cycle—a cycle that seems to have stalled a bit this year.

And as Tlaloc has been addressed in many tongues already, why not add English to them?

Also, looking forward to the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, I obviously need to eat here.

 

3 thoughts on “Talking about Tlaloc, 2

  1. Pitch313

    You’d think that by now we (the late European immigrant children gone Pagan) would have met some watershed figures or deities of our own by now. But that does not seem to be the case.

    Mostly, I refer to them as “Spirit of [name of watercourse or body of water].” Because I’m antsy about taking names from Native American sources. Even though I have been drawn to Mayahuel and spirits of agave.

Comments are closed.