The god would seem to refer to some unknown myth relating to his own parentage in verse v. The name Acatonal (“Reed of the Sun”) given to his father seems to have a calendric significance. The ceremony of the mist rattle-board, the rattling of which was supposed to bring rain by sympathetic magic, was one of the ceremonies connected with rain-making at more than one of the festivals of the Tlaloquê. Poyauhtlan (“Place of Mugwort”) is a district of Tlalocan, as well as the name of his temple, and Toxcuecuex is Uitzilopochtli. The last verse seems to allude to the myth mentioned in the interpretation of Codex Vaticanus A, where it is stated that, as no rain had fallen for a period of four years, Quetzalcoatl began to make sacrifices to obtain it, and, the worshipper or priest hints, will receive the consequent honour. According 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. [255] 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. ii, Appendix to bk. iii) says that there was abundance of all refreshments, green maize, calabashes, and other vegetables and fruits. Here dwelt the Tlaloquê, who resembled the priests who ministered to their idols in that they wore their hair long. The folk who went to that paradise were those who had been killed by lightning, the leprous, gouty, and dropsical—any such, in fact, who had died from a “watery” complaint. In Tlalocan they enjoyed a perpetual summer. FESTIVALS