The Templo Mayor and the Offerings to the Rain

Tlaloc's central importance to the Aztec state is written into the plan of their capital: the great double pyramid of the Templo Mayor at the heart of Tenochtitlan bore two shrines side by side, one to the war god Huitzilopochtli and the other to Tlaloc, the sun and war on one hand and the rain and fertility on the other, the two powers on which the Aztec world was felt to rest. He was served by a full ritual calendar, and, as the colonial sources record plainly, his worship included the sacrifice of children, whose tears were held to be a fitting and necessary offering to the god of rain; this is set down here as a matter of historical record, as it is in the accounts gathered by Sahagun and preserved in the Aztec sources themselves.

Tlaloc was assisted by a host of small rain-spirits, the tlaloque, who dwelt on the mountain-tops and poured out the rain from their jars, and the mountains where the rain gathered, above all Mount Tlaloc east of the valley, were his sacred places. In Tlaloc the Aztecs worshipped the sheer, ambivalent power of water in a land of uncertain rains: the god who could make the maize grow tall or destroy a whole year's harvest, and on whose favour life itself hung.