Tlalocan

Tlalocan is a paradise of Aztec cosmology, the verdant, water-blessed realm of the rain god Tlaloc, and it illustrates the distinctive Aztec principle that the destination of the dead was determined chiefly by the manner of death rather than by moral conduct. Where most of the dead undertook the grim four-year journey to Mictlan, Tlalocan received a specific category: those who died by water or by the powers associated with the rain god, drowning, lightning strike, and certain diseases such as dropsy and skin afflictions that were reckoned Tlaloc's work. For them death was not a loss but a kind of election: Tlaloc had "chosen" them, and they went to a place of abundance, the sixteenth-century friar Sahagun's informants described Tlalocan as a land of unending springtime, rich with maize, squash, flowers, and every green and growing thing, where the blessed lived in ease.

The dead destined for Tlalocan were, unusually, buried rather than cremated, marking their different fate. Tlalocan reflects a religious logic quite alien to reward-and-punishment schemes: a violent or disease-ridden death that might elsewhere seem a curse was here the doorway to the fairest of afterworlds, because it marked the person as claimed by the god of the life-giving rain.

Tlalocan is the paradise of water and green growth, and admission to it depends entirely on the manner of death. Drowning, lightning strike, and diseases understood as sent by Tlaloc, dropsy and gout among them, all qualified. Those who died these ways were buried rather than cremated, which was the normal treatment, and the change in rite is the clearest evidence that the doctrine was acted on and not merely stated.

The best-known image of it is a mural at Tepantitla in Teotihuacan, showing small figures playing, swimming, singing with speech scrolls, and moving among streams and flowering plants, beneath a large central figure. Alfonso Caso identified the scene as Tlalocan and the reading became standard. It has been challenged since, notably by Esther Pasztory, who argued the presiding figure is a goddess rather than Tlaloc, and the identification is now treated as probable rather than settled.

The doctrine is worth holding onto because of what it implies. A cosmology in which the manner of your death, and not your conduct, decides where you go is describing a world governed by which power claimed you. Being struck by lightning is not misfortune in that frame. It is selection.