{"id":1875,"date":"2010-10-18T20:08:16","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T02:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1875"},"modified":"2011-08-16T19:00:55","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T01:00:55","slug":"get-right-with-tlaloc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1875","title":{"rendered":"Get Right with Tlaloc"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a recent trip to look at some Anasazi \/ Ancestral Puebloan ruins<\/a> in northeast Arizona, I took Craig Childs’ book House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest<\/a> <\/em>as my guide book.<\/p>\n

Driving and backpacking from southwest Colorado down into Sonora, Mexico, over a period of years, Childs interviews archaeologists, walks trails, and examines ruins to try to begin to construct a narrative history of what might have happened in the Southwest between the 11th and 15th centuries CE.<\/p>\n

A god’s presence lurks throughout the book but is not revealed until the latter parts. That god is Tlaloc (his Aztec name, but he is cross-cultural), the god of rain,\u00a0 whose cult he calls “the oldest recognizable religious complex in the Americas.” (But might not some hunters’ gods be older?)<\/p>\n

In essence Tlaloc is a rain god and has long been the focus of mountaintop and cave offerings and sacrifices …. Both the symbolic and the practical aspects of Tlaloc religion are very similar to those of the Pueblo katsina religion still practiced in the Southwest (459).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This “pan-American rain god” is still acknowledged in the United States. Climbing a mountain in one of the isolated “sky island” ranges of southeastern Arizona, Childs notes, “Caves throughout the Sky Islands are stashed with wooden katsinas and painted offerings. Hanks of human hair are hung in natural subterranean passages, and precious stones are positioned around springs” (364-5).<\/p>\n

His is a religion “centered on the mechanics of water,” the spiritual expression of the hydrological cycle.<\/p>\n

Here where we track thunderstorm cells <\/a>on the NOAA radar via the Web, wishing them to veer north or south and pass over our house, where we monitor the creek levels day by day, water is serious business. (In my newspaper days, I referred to the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District <\/a>as “the secret government.”\u00a0 Who needs the Freemasons, Communists, or Opus Dei?\u00a0 None of them control the water.)<\/p>\n

Tlaloc needs a local shrine, and I know just the place, <\/a> about thirty minutes’ hike from the back door. It will do for a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a recent trip to look at some Anasazi \/ Ancestral Puebloan ruins in northeast Arizona, I took Craig Childs’ book House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest as my guide book. Driving and backpacking from southwest Colorado down into Sonora, Mexico, over a period of years, Childs interviews archaeologists, walks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,40,149],"class_list":["post-1875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-polytheism","tag-tlaloc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-uf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2824,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2824","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":0},"title":"Talking about Tlaloc, 2","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"In her comment on my first Tlaloc post, Hecate Demetersdatter asks,\u00a0 \"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/tlaloc-culvert_sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2776,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2776","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":1},"title":"Talking about Tlaloc","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"On Friday morning, April 29, back from a early morning fire call (shed + trash + grasses at the edge of the prairie), I climbed the ridge behind the house and made an offering to Tlaloc, the god of rain. (I think I need to make a lot more of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"Feather offering for Tlaloc","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/TlalocOffering4-29-11_sm-225x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3043,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3043","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":2},"title":"Talking about Tlaloc, 3","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"As I wrote about earlier, I have been maintaining a small shrine to the rain god Tlaloc under a nearby county-road bridge. Our creek\u2014currently dry except for a couple of beaver ponds upstream\u2014goes through a culvert there, one big enough for me to walk through standing straight. When my shrine\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/tlaloc_dagger-300x193.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5529,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5529","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":3},"title":"An Offering to Tlaloc in the Burned-Over Forest","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Last week M. and I climbed over the ridge to \"Camera Trap Spring\" (our personal name for it) to leave an offering to Tlaloc. Thing have changed a little bit since a year ago. The ground is black with ash. Stones have cracked from the heat of a forest fire.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"bioregion\"","block_context":{"text":"bioregion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=bioregion"},"img":{"alt_text":"offering_at_spring_sm","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/offering_at_spring_sm1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/offering_at_spring_sm1.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/offering_at_spring_sm1.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3426,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3426","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":4},"title":"Talking about Tlaloc, 4","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Last June, as our creek began to dry up, I blogged about building a little shrine to Tlaloc, \"god of the hydrological cycle\" as Craig Childs described him, in a big culvert under our county road. It snowed, nearly a foot on October 26. The combination of trees pulling up\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4372,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4372","url_meta":{"origin":1875,"position":5},"title":"Talking about Tlaloc, 5","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I think it is time to rebuild the shrine to Tlaloc under the bridge \u2014 the one that was mysteriously augmented last summer.\u00a0 I had taken it down before the spring run-off, which is just a memory now. Once the heat abates a little, I need to hike back over\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1875"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1878,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}