Tlalocan

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Tlalocan is the fourth level of the "upper worlds", or 'heavens', according to the mythic cosmographies of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of pre-Columbian central Mexico, noted particularly in Conquest-era accounts of Aztec mythology. To the Aztec there were thirteen levels of the Upper Worlds, and nine of the Underworld; in the conception of the Afterlife the manner of a person's death determined which of these layers would be their destination after dying.

The name Tlalocan comes from Nahuatl, meaning "place of Tlaloc", for it is associated in particular with that major Mesoamerican deity of rain and lightning.

Tlalocan is described in several Aztec codices as a paradise, ruled over by Tlaloc and his consort Chalchiuhtlicue. In the Florentine Codex, a set of sixteenth-century volumes which form one of the prime sources of information about the beliefs and history of Postclassic central Mexico, Tlalocan is depicted as a realm of unending Springtime, with an abundance of green foliage and edible plants of the region.^[1]

As a destination in the Afterlife, the levels of heaven were reserved mostly for those who had died violent deaths,^[2] and Tlalocan was reserved for those who had drowned or had otherwise been killed by manifestations of water, such as by flood, by diseases associated with water, or in storms by strikes of lightning. It was also the destination after death for others considered to be in Tlaloc's charge, most notably the physically deformed.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ As described in Miller and Taube (1993, p.167)
^ Those dying of "natural causes", i.e. the majority, would instead endure a perilous journey through the layers of the Underworld to finally reach Mictlan, the lowest layer. See Miller and Taube (1993:178).
^ See for example the Vaticanus A Codex, per Miller and Taube (op. cit.)