A Lake at the Center of the Cosmos

Tenochtitlan's builders treated the lake as more than a physical setting, laying the city out with its great ceremonial precinct and the Templo Mayor at the intersection of causeways running to the cardinal directions, an arrangement scholars generally read as expressing the Aztec conception of their capital as the fixed center of the cosmos, itself encircled by the surrounding waters much as Mesoamerican cosmology more broadly pictured the inhabited earth as an island set within a cosmic sea. The chinampa system, artificial garden islands built up from lakebed mud and reeds, extended this relationship into daily agricultural life, drawing sustenance directly from the same waters that framed the city's religious geography.

The lake's physical extent did not survive Spanish colonization intact. Colonial and later Mexican drainage projects, undertaken chiefly to control flooding, progressively emptied most of Lake Texcoco over the centuries following the conquest, so that the religious and cosmological landscape the Mexica built their capital around now survives mainly in the documentary and archaeological record rather than in the lake itself, a small fraction of which remains today east of modern Mexico City.