Her name means She of the Jade Skirt, and in the Aztec world jade was more valuable than gold. Chalchiuhtlicue was the goddess of rivers, lakes and the sea, and of everything that flows, and she was one of the most important deities in Mexica life. When a baby was born, the midwife washed it in her name.
The Aztecs understood the world as a sequence of ages, called Suns, each destroyed by catastrophe. In one version, Chalchiuhtlicue presided over the fourth age, and it ended in a flood. The people were turned into fish, and the sky fell into the water. The goddess who gave water for life could also take it away, and sculptures of her often combine both sides, as a kind of generous strength.
This stone figure shows her in a simple, powerful pose, a compact block of carved stone with a cropped, geometric face and arms folded across the chest. Mexica sculptors liked to carve gods in this way, massive and monumental, as if each figure were a piece of the mountain. Many such sculptures were once brightly painted, and traces of red remain on this one.
Her power was practical. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan sat on an island in a lake, with its fields on floating gardens called chinampas. Water meant food, trade and survival, and Chalchiuhtlicue was close to everyone's daily life. She is often paired with Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms.
Works like this sculpture, made before the Spanish arrived, are among our best evidence of how the Mexica saw her.
The sculpture of Chalchiuhtlicue appears on our: