Tlalocan is a paradise of Aztec cosmology, the verdant, water-blessed realm of the rain god Tlaloc, and it illustrates the distinctive Aztec principle that the destination of the dead was determined chiefly by the manner of death rather than by moral conduct. Where most of the dead undertook the grim four-year journey to Mictlan, Tlalocan received a specific category: those who died by water or by the powers associated with the rain god, drowning, lightning strike, and certain diseases such as dropsy and skin afflictions that were reckoned Tlaloc's work. For them death was not a loss but a kind of election: Tlaloc had "chosen" them, and they went to a place of abundance, the sixteenth-century friar Sahagun's informants described Tlalocan as a land of unending springtime, rich with maize, squash, flowers, and every green and growing thing, where the blessed lived in ease.
The dead destined for Tlalocan were, unusually, buried rather than cremated, marking their different fate. Tlalocan reflects a religious logic quite alien to reward-and-punishment schemes: a violent or disease-ridden death that might elsewhere seem a curse was here the doorway to the fairest of afterworlds, because it marked the person as claimed by the god of the life-giving rain.