30 May 2025 / 10 House
Potty about pots
Aztec Tlaloc pot
Most children in the UK are now familiar with party piñatas; but even if you can find a good ‘proper’ one made of papier maché, few are aware that the oldest Mexican piñatas were always made of paper-covered pots... (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
In the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City is the suggestion that piñata-breaking could go back to the days of the Aztec rain-god clay pots (with the face of Tlaloc on the front): on major festive days dedicated to the twin gods of water and rain, the tlaloque (servants of Tlaloc) filled these pots with water and proceeded to invoke rain and fertility by upturning them and emptying the contents over the earth below. The manuscript Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas records that, if (accidentally) broken, the noise ‘sounded like thunder’. The famous English author D H Lawrence described a storm in Mexico (in The Plumed Serpent) like this: ‘Down came the rain with a smash, as if some great vessel had broken.’ Several of these pots (usually containing jade beads and amaranth or chía seeds) have been found in recent years, intact but almost always lying on their side, near the Templo Mayor.
In pre-Hispanic days pots were believed almost to be sacred: they had the power to store and bear life and the elements that make life possible - they could represent the warm, wet interior of a mother’s womb or even the moon, which was often compared to a giant pot containing the sacred drink pulque (a gift from the gods).
Alfonso Caso (The Aztecs: People of the Sun) spells out the legend connecting pots and sticks with water-pouring:-
’This god of water, in order to send rain, created many priests with small bodies, and they live in the four rooms of the rain god’s house and they hold small containers in one hand in which they draw the water from those jars, and in the other hand they hold sticks, and when the rain god commands them to go and take the rains to certain areas, they take their pots and their sticks and they pour forth the water that was ordered of them, and when it thunders, that is when they break their containers with their sticks, and when the lighting flashes, that is because of what they had in their pots or a part of the pot.’ (NOTE: This is based on the History of the Mexicans as Told by their Paintings, chapter 21.)
Whilst it would be naive to claim any pre-Hispanic ancestry for the piñata - for which we have no evidence - the parallel between symbolically and ritually emptying Aztec rain pots and the practice of upturning (unbroken) piñatas - originally made of clay pots - in an equally symbolic and evocative act of sharing remains an appealing and intriguing one...
Thanks to Dr. Leonardo López Lujan for contributing valuable information on this topic.
Photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.
Comments (1)
Ana Gonzalez
12th Apr 2013
Hi guys! Well I am mexican and according to what i have heard traditional mexican piñatas (used mostly on parties before christmas) are made with seven triangles attached to a circle made of paper representing the seven capital sins... so it seems it could have been either some way of the spaniards introducing some of the previous rituals to their evangelization task as it is known that they did with plays named “pastorelas” representing mexican pastors that went in the search of baby Jesus
Mexicolore
Intriguing, Ana! Many thanks for offering this insight.
Aztec Tlaloc pot
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