{"id":3043,"date":"2011-08-13T17:02:11","date_gmt":"2011-08-13T23:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3043"},"modified":"2011-08-13T18:49:24","modified_gmt":"2011-08-14T00:49:24","slug":"talking-about-tlaloc-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3043","title":{"rendered":"Talking about Tlaloc, 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Reproduction Aztec sacrificial "Tlaloc" knife offered on eBay. Click to embiggen.<\/p><\/div>\n

As I wrote about earlier, I have been maintaining a small shrine to the rain god Tlaloc under a nearby county-road bridge<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

When my shrine washes away, I will be happy to rebuild it in a different place!<\/p>\n

The culvert is as near as I can come to the classic site:<\/p>\n

Tlaloc did not only dwell in temples and on mountain tops. He lived in moist, fertile, and secluded caves too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the reason you will not find me going too far in any kind of neo-Aztec direction is that I am a little squeamish about sacrificing kids. Just candles and turkey feathers so far.<\/p>\n

Yep, children were (are?) Tlaloc’s favorite\u2014or so the Aztecs thought. Some were kids from enemy tribes, captured during raids or the flower wars<\/a>. (As a euphemism, doesn’t “flower war” beat\u00a0 Obama’s “kinetic military action<\/a>” completely?) Or sometimes not. You had to be tough to be Aztec nobility.<\/a><\/p>\n

The children were beautifully adorned, dressed in the style of Tlaloc and the Tlaloque. On litters strewn with flowers and feathers; surrounded by dancers, they were transported to a shrine and their hearts would be pulled out by priests.<\/p>\n

If, on the way to the shrine, these children cried their tears were viewed as signs of imminent and abundant rains. Children who did not weep could have their fingernails torn off in order to achieve this effect. Every Atlcahualo festival, seven children were sacrificed in and around Lake Tetzcoco in the Aztec capital. They were either slaves or the second born children of nobles. . . According to the chronicler Dur\u00e1n<\/a>, Tlaloc had the additional name of \u2018Path Under the Earth\u2019 or \u2018Long Cave\u2019.<\/p>\n

Investigators such as Doris Heyden <\/a>suggest that the little passages that lead off of the main caves underneath the Sun Pyramid in Teotihuacan could have been used to house the bodies of children that were sacrificed to this god each year. At an excavation elsewhere, the burial chambers of seven infants placed in a circle inside a cave were found. The centre of the cave roof was open and let in rain. There were also storing facilities thought to have once been grain deposits. The archaeologist who worked on this site, Linda Manzanilla<\/a>, equated the caves, water, childrens\u2019 bodies and grain with the mythical Tlalocan; the Tlaloque who lived there were small, like children, and it was abundant with both water and grain. Out of Tlalocan\u2019s opening came the rain, seeds and new life and into it came the dead and retreating rain clouds<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, there is a cosmology for you. How far down that road to go?<\/p>\n

Was Tlaloc “the same” as the Mayan “Chaac<\/a>,” or did one god displace the other, as this article (in Spanish) suggests, during a desperate time of drought?<\/a><\/p>\n

Afterthought:<\/strong> the school bus used to stop almost on top of the shrine. Currently it does not, because there are no kids on our road young enough to ride it\u2014except for two who are apparently homeschooled.\u00a0 You cannot escape these connections?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 washes away, I will be […]<\/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":[41,40,149],"class_list":["post-3043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mexico","tag-polytheism","tag-tlaloc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-N5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3426,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3426","url_meta":{"origin":3043,"position":0},"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":1875,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1875","url_meta":{"origin":3043,"position":1},"title":"Get Right with Tlaloc","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2824,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2824","url_meta":{"origin":3043,"position":2},"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":3043,"position":3},"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":4372,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4372","url_meta":{"origin":3043,"position":4},"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":[]},{"id":5529,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5529","url_meta":{"origin":3043,"position":5},"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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043","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=3043"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3048,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions\/3048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}