Chalchihuitlicue

Chalchihuitlicue is the jade-skirted goddess of lakes, rivers and standing water in Central Mexican tradition, consort of the rain god, who presided over a former world that ended in flood.

Chalchihuitlicue — her name refers to the jade or greenstone of her skirt — governs the waters of the surface in Central Mexican tradition: lakes, rivers, springs and the standing water people depend on, as distinct from the rain that falls, which belongs to the storm god with whom she is paired. Her imagery carries the same association consistently, with flowing water and jade ornament, and she appears frequently in the surviving screenfold manuscripts.

In the sequence of world-ages she presides over one of the former suns, which ends when the waters rise and drown it; the people of that age are described in the accounts as becoming fish. She is also central to birth and to the ritual bathing of newborns, where the water she governs is the medium of purification and of naming, and midwives addressed her directly in the recorded prayers.

The combination is the interesting part. The same goddess who ends a world by flood is the one invoked over an infant's first washing, and the tradition does not treat this as a contradiction: water sustains and water drowns, and the deity who holds it holds both. The colonial-era compilations that preserve much of this material were recording from informants a generation or more after the conquest, which affects how the prayers and attributions should be read.

[Generated Content] Read as a personality, Chalchihuitlicue comes across as possessed of a steady, impersonal authority — a presence invoked at the most vulnerable moments of a life, whose favour matters enormously and whose disposition is not described as warm. The pairing of the birth-bath and the world-drowning suggests something that does not distinguish between its gentle and its terrible uses; it is the water either way. What the prayers imply is a being that must be addressed properly rather than one that responds to feeling.