to Boturini, quoting Gemelli Carreri (tom. 6, p. 83), Tlaloc was the deity who at the behest of Tezcatlipocâ raised the earth out of the waters of the universal flood, and who counsels men by his divine messages written in the lightning and the thunderbolt to live wisely and morally. Like most of the theories of this writer, this is pure allegory. Following the analogy of the calendar stone, we seem to see Tlaloc as the sun during the period of Naui Quiauitl, or “Four Rain,” which ended in a universal conflagration. The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus A alludes to Tlaloc as feminine, speaks of him as “goddess of water,” and explains Tlaloquê as signifying “fine weather.” Farther on he states that “on the 21st of December they celebrated the festival of this god through whose instrumentality they say the earth became again visible after it had been covered with the waters of the deluge; they therefore kept his festival during the twenty following signs, in which they performed sacrifices to him.”
The abode of Tlaloc was in Tlalocan, the heights on the road from Texcuco to Huetzotzinca and Tlaxcallan, a high and shady place.7 This locality remained verdant and moist because of its proximity to the snowy peaks above it even when the plains beneath languished in drought under merciless sunshine, and it seems natural that it should have appealed to the ancient Mexicans as a fitting abode for the god of rain. Of Tlalocan in its more mythical sense, Sahagun (c.