Note 3 — Chapter VI · THE GODS OF RAIN AND MOISTURE

Concerning the Tlaloquê Sahagun remarks: “The Mexicans take for gods all those high mountains from which the rain comes in the rainy season, and for each of these they imagine an idol.… They also believe that certain maladies proceeding from cold have their origin in the mountains and that these gods have the power to visit them upon them. Those who were attacked by such complaints made a vow to this or that mountain, whichever chanced to be in the neighbourhood, or that for which they entertained the most devotion. A similar vow was made by persons on the point of being drowned in the rivers or in the sea. The maladies for which they made these vows were gout in the hands, feet, or any other part of the body, impotence in any member, or in the entire body, rheumatism, the contraction of the members or cramp. Those who were visited with these maladies made a vow to raise a statue to the following gods: to the idols of the volcano called Popocatepetl in the Sierra Nevada, to a mountain named Poyauhtecatl, or any other to which the feeling of devotion inclined them. When they proposed to offer up to the mountain or gods, they made an image in human form, a mass called tzoalli.”3 These the people did not make themselves, but called in the offices of those priests skilled in the making of idols, who moulded them out of the paste and gave them teeth of calabash pips and eyes of haricot beans. The rest of the process of manufacture is as described in the account of the festival of the atemoztli (see Tlaloc). These small figures were known as tepictoton, and, like the sacrificial victims to the rain-gods, their hair was dressed in two horns or whorls.