Chalchiuhtlicue, she of the jade skirt, is the goddess of lakes, rivers and standing water, sixth among the nine Lords of the Night despite her female standing among a sequence dominated by male deities, a placement the sources record without comment on the gender pattern. She governed the ritual bathing of newborn infants, a ceremony Sahagun describes in close detail in the sixth book of the Florentine Codex, in which the midwife washed the infant and spoke prayers invoking Chalchiuhtlicue by name, asking her to cleanse the child of the impurity carried from the mother's womb, a rite performed for every Mexica infant regardless of the day sign into which it was born and one of the best documented life cycle ceremonies in the whole corpus.
In the Legend of the Five Suns she presides over the fourth of the five cosmic ages, the Sun of Water, an era Sahagun's sources say ended in a great flood that drowned the world and transformed its people into fish, after which the present, fifth sun began. She appears variously as wife or as sister to Tlaloc, the rain god and ninth night lord, the two water deities keeping close mythological company at opposite ends of the night lord sequence, and her iconography shows a jade or turquoise skirt, streams of water flowing from her hands, and the small child figures that mark her connection to birth and infancy.