Griff's Aztec Alley: Tlaloc

Most people have no idea who Tlaloc is.  A number of people who do don't think much of him.  This is a crying shame, because Tlaloc is not only one of the most important gods in Aztec religion, he may be one of the most important gods in Central America.

Here's a link to a diagram (which I tried and failed to post on this blog) from Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican artist and archaeologist who made much groundbreaking work involving the Olmec "mother culture" of Mesoamerica.  The originator in this diagram (A) is a stylized Olmec were-jaguar.  Each route from that are the subtly evolving Mesoamerican rain gods.  M is Cocijo, the Zapotec rain god.  T is the Gulf Coast rain god.  O is Tlaloc as the Mexica knew him.  P is Chaac, the Maya rain god.  No self-respecting Mesoamerican archaeologist would say they're all the same deity (Tlaloc appears in Mayan glyphs where Chaac also appears, representing concurrent Teotihuacan (Central Mexican) rulership, and Cocijo ceramics were found in Zapotec neighborhoods of Teotihuacan).  However... their forms and worship are so similar that, in terms of Scion, it would be ludicrous to call them anything but one god taking many names and faces.

Essentially, this means that Tlaloc is the oldest and most widespread of the Mesoamerican gods.  Only Quetzalcoatl comes close, also having ties to Olmec iconography.   As such, it's sad that studying Tlaloc for something like this leaves a lot of holes for us to either fill, or simply sidestep.

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Okay, while the Aztec Alleys have been fun so far, we're starting to approach one of the big issues when dealing with Mesoamerican religion: A lack of sources, particularly credible ones.  We have a bunch of surviving mythic cycles, but not all of the important gods are featured.  Most, we just have rituals or prayers to go by.  While the Aztecs and Maya were a literate culture, most of their books were burned by the Spanish, and their written language was lost to their culture within two generations.  We're only now starting to crack Maya hieroglyphs, and we don't have anything near that luxury when dealing with Zapotec glyphs, which might as well be from Mars given what we know.  And while the Spanish did record a lot of their religion... well, they weren't interested in preservation or accuracy, so we have a lot of chaff to separate.

So, basically, we're starting to get to the Problem Gods.  Gods who have a clearly strong cult and oodles of religious significance... and few myths (sometimes NO myths) to back that up.  Tlaloc is better than most... but he's where the trouble starts.

Tlaloc has no origin story.  No parent.  No crazy myth surrounding his birth.  He's merely there.  Always has been, always will be, near as we can tell.  He rules in Tlalocan, the fourth level of the Aztec's thirteen heavens, and there he resides over the souls of people who died in ways directly related to his various dominions.  Those who died of being struck by lightning, those who died of drowning, those who died of various diseases believed to be water-related (such as leprosy and gout), all were ushered into Tlalocan, a land of plenty, where it was eternally springtime and food was abundant and plentiful.

As mentioned in Tezcatlipoca's entry, he ruled as the Third Sun, the Rain Sun, in the cycle of the five suns.  Around this time, he had Xochiquetzal, the gorgeous goddess of erotic love, as a wife.  Of course, as with most Aztec myths, Tezcatlipoca takes what he wants and he wanted Xochiquetzal.  He seduced her and raped her, and afterwards, Tlaloc wants nothing to do with her.  Outraged by the theft of his smoking hot wife, Tlaloc continued his duties as the god of the sun, but not those as the god of rain, resulting in widespread drought and starvation.  People prayed for rain, but Tlaloc refused to do so.  Finally, Quetzalcoatl, fed up with these shenanigans, knocked Tlaloc out of the sun position and told him in no uncertain terms to bring the rain.  Still smoldering with rage and spite, Tlaloc made it rain, but the rain was fire.  The third world was destroyed, and the surviving humans became birds.

Tlaloc has another wife, Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of standing water.  Some sources call them brother and sister as well, but given that the Aztecs tended not to go for incest, I'd say this isn't the case.  The two make a decent team, and they gave birth to Tecciztecatl, once the rich god of shells and wealth who was appointed to become the sun, but chickened out at the last minute and became the moon.  He also had a sister, Huixtocihuatl, the goddess of salt and salt water, claimed by some to be one of Tezcatlipoca's four wives.  His children/servants are the tlaloques, equally grotesque minor gods of lightning who aid Tlaloc in his work.

As mentioned above, Tlaloc shares motifs with myriad other rain gods in Mesoamerica.  The Maya knew him as Chaac, which means "Thunder", and envisioned him as a reptilian humanoid with blue scales and an enormous nose.  He carried an axe (the source of thunderclaps) and threw snakes that were lightning bolts.  Aside from that, nothing verifiable (Wikipedia mentions that he was considered the brother of the sun, but I've found no sources to confirm this). 

In his Zapotec aspect as Cocijo, though, he is a MUCH bigger deal.  He's the top god in Zapotec culture.  Most surviving Oaxacan myths credit him as the creator god who made pretty much everything we know of... suns, stars, earth, plants, animals, people, you name it, he created it.  He's also the child of a more esoteric creator god, Pitao, and was the smallest of the many gods created by him, and because of his size and weakness wasn't trusted with any of the fundamental cosmic forces.  However, in a myth similar to the Aztec myth of Nanahuatzin and the birth of the Fifth Sun, Cocijo managed to gift men with fire, which the gods had and which was forbidden to mankind by Pitao unless his children passed the Test of Fire.  Each of his children stepped in, but were unable to jump into the flames.  Cocijo, however, doused his clothing in water and modified the winds as he jumped into the flames, allowing him to survive the burning.  As a result, lightning bolts descended from the sky and humans thus had fire to warm them, and they praised the gods.

And, lastly, there's the big thing when dealing with Tlaloc... namely his choice of sacrificial victims.  By Western standards, and indeed those of many civilizations, Tlaloc's worship was immensely cruel and tragic.  Tlaloc's sacrifices were always young children, who were drowned (Or perhaps, they had their hearts removed while they were drowning... there's some debate).  And, prior to being killed, the children had to cry.  Their tears heralded the rain.

(Sidenote, if you're an ST who likes to do some mythical revisionism, here's an idea if you want to make Tlaloc more sympathetic to modern standards: Tlaloc strongly disapproves of the murder of children in his name, but unfortunately his attempted status as patron of children metamorphosed into this view thanks to Fatebinding.  Tlaloc cannot bear children in pain, and their tears cause him to cry, which in turn brings the rain.  The priests abused this in order to avoid droughts, and thanks to the massive amounts of people who took this to heart, he cannot change that aspect of himself.  Just food for thought.)

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Powers-wise, Tlaloc starts with the following...

Earth, Fertility, Itztli, Sky

Unlike the other Aztec gods, no Epic Attribute immediately stands out on Tlaloc's list, but three major purviews do.  In all his incarnations, he is a god of rain and thunder.  This is his primary aspect.  However, rather than simply being a god associated with the sky, he's also highly associated with the earth, often seen as living in a mountain from which he slings lightning bolts.  Hell, his name is etymologically derived from the Nahuatl word for earth.  And there's the link between rain and earth: plants.  Tlaloc is a god who's primary association is plant life, often seen with a headdress of corncobs and his cult is predominately concerned with the growing of food.  Indeed, Tlalocan is first and foremost described as a land of plenty with neverending supplies of delicious food-plants growing everywhere.

As for the others...

Epic Attributes are the hardest to assign to Tlaloc, given his minimal presence in mythic narrative.  However, I believe that every Legend 12 god (and I will eat my own shoes before saying that Tlaloc isn't Legend 12) should have at least one Epic Attribute.  Also problematic is that none of the things Tlaloc does in myth, or just in every day-to-day descriptions of his godly duties, lend themselves easily to Epic Attributes.  Charisma, maybe from his widespread worship, but that's a stretch and not a great one (if he was so charismatic, Xochiquetzal wouldn't have left him!). 

RAW Scion gave him negative Epic Appearance... but nothing in the myths seems to designate that the gods themselves thought he was ugly or fearsome, or that the Aztecs themselves saw him that way (In contrast to Mictlantecuhtli, who IS that ugly and IS that fearsome).  It's just that people outside the culture look at depictions of him and go "OH HELL NO WHAT IS THAT WHAT?!" Not exactly a convincing argument.

But if not for Epic Appearance, what else?  The only other possibility is the Zapotec's tale of Cocijo sacrificing himself in a fire and surviving granting him Epic Stamina... but even then that's a product of him using water and wind to diminish the fire's effectiveness, rather than innately being a function of his awesome staying power.  So, Tlaloc gets Epic Appearance, but I don't really like it.

For a more concrete roster of Tlaloc's powers, we look at Purviews...

Animal - While a large number of Aztec gods have Animal associated, since that was a big thing for them, Tlaloc's connection to his totem(s) is far more nebulous.  He's famously based off of a werejaguar motif, with aspects of snakes, frogs, and crocodiles added in and either enhanced or downplayed in each iteration of him in Mesoamerica.  All are clearly reptilian, and all share the same goggle eyes and fangs, but his connection to any singular animal is nebulous.  The Zapotecs were the most zoomorphic, and made him more closely resemble a snake, and the serpent motif was shared in the Maya cultures, where that was what lightning bolts were.  Turtles were also associated with Chac, since turtle shells were used to make drums that imitated the sound of thunder.  And the caiman, also associated with fecundity, earth, and water, was often conflated with Tlaloc in Nahua faiths... but the truth of the matter is that while Tlaloc definitely has animalistic features and probably has tons of Animal Boons, his connection to any singular species is so minimal that I can't apply this Purview to him.  NO.

Death - Tlaloc is in charge of an afterlife, picking those who enter his kingdom thanks to the circumstances of their deaths.  Lost City of Atlanta has this sort of feature as a potential feature of Sanctums, but mythically, Tlaloc spends more time cavorting with and taking care of his chosen dead than dealing with rain, which he typically farms out to his Tlaloques.  So, YES.

Fire - Two of Tlaloc's myths involve fire: Cocijo giving humans fire and the Third Sun ending in a rain of fire.  However, the truth is that both of these are an aspect of Tlaloc's use of Sky.  Cocijo gives humans fire by casting lightning bolts to cause flames.  And when Tlaloc ends the world of the Third Sun, he's just making it rain a different substance than he usually does. NO

Health - Tlaloc is believed to be a god in charge of water-borne diseases, and to boot, he's a god of human fecundity.   He's often prayed to so as to encourage childbirth, which is a powerful function of Health.  YES.

Water - Mneeeeeeeh.... I really don't know, folks.  I went into this with clear convictions and now... now I'm on the fence.  On the one hand, Tlaloc is a rain god, a thunder god, one who clearly is associated with the sky, whereas his wife and sister are the ones who deal in water on the ground level.  The problem is that descriptions of him and most of his religious rituals all involve water to a heavy degree.  He's seen as controlling water in the heavens.  His victims are drowned.  The diseases associated with him are all seen by the Aztecs as waterborne.  Further complicating matters is that the Aztecs often saw Rain and Water as separate entities, particularly when you look at their calendrical signs.  In the end, I have to look at the fact that most of what we know about Tlaloc isn't in mythic narrative, but in hymns and rituals and relations.  And while Animal requires specificity in the totem, Water does not.  So, after some debate, YES, I'm giving him Water associated.  And part of me feels terrible for it.

In the end, he has..

Death, Earth, Epic Appearance, Fertility, Health, Itztli, Sky, Water (8)