Cocijo

Cocijo is the rain and lightning deity of Zapotec tradition, worshipped across the Oaxaca valley of southern Mexico from the Preclassic period through the Zapotec state centered on Monte Alban. He is depicted on funerary urns, reliefs and effigy vessels with a distinctive goggle-eyed face, a forked serpentine tongue representing lightning, and a headdress marking him as a being of the sky, an image so consistent across centuries of Zapotec art that it serves archaeologists as a diagnostic marker of Zapotec religious material. Cocijo presided over the rains the valley's agriculture depended on, and his name survives in Zapotec compound terms for lightning, thunder and earthquake, reflecting his standing as one of the tradition's most widely attested deities.