Most discussions of the rain god myth—two of the best in English are found in Miguel León-Portilla’s Aztec Thought and Culture and Davíd Carrasco’s Religions of Mesoamerica, both of which are drawn on here—explain that the rain god is one of the oldest deities in Mesoamerica. Of Toltec origin, the rain god was known to the Aztecs as Tláloc and to the Maya as Chac. He is a manifestation of the Giver of Life, causing the rains to fall and thus the earth to regenerate. In his role as lord of Tlalocan, a watery underworld realm, Tláloc makes possible a new life after death. Those who go to this earthly paradise are chosen by Tláloc himself, who calls them by means of a death by drowning, lightning, or dropsy. A benign quality surrounds the figure of the rain god, that is, until the time of Nezahualcóyotl, when the warrior religion of the Aztecs perverted Tláloc into a cult of death. Warfare and human sacrifice of captured enemies and children replaced prayers and offerings as the chief means of appeasing the rain god. But among the poet-philosophers (tlamatinime) who remained faithful to the old ways, the rain god became part of a search for truth of the beyond via poetry, or, as it was metaphorically called, “flower and song.” Only poetry—an art, then as now, that uses language, soul, and imagination to probe deeply into the nature of reality—could come close to discovering “the vast realms of the rain god,” and in the process create a thing of lasting truth and beauty.
In using the rain god myth as a subtext for his novel, Islas suggests oppositions and admixtures of time and timelessness, the seen and the hidden, the profane and the sacred, oblivion and living memory. This myth of the great beyond, no less than the fact of the Angels’ upper class presumption and moral rigidity, which have their basis in a denial of the Indian side, sheds light on the family’s disintegration and on the deaths of some of its members. One by one, the doomed characters are claimed by “a region without dimensions” (152) in the deepest movement in the life of humanity. Whatever we may think of this movement—away from history, downward, to the dark state of the gods—Islas evokes it poetically.
In archetypal terms, The Rain God concerns death as the underworld experience. Although we are dealing with the particular manifestation of a Mesoamerican mythopoetic truth, the depth involved here parallels that found in the Western world. It is the depth of the human soul through which we all awaken to death or the perspective of death, which is the shattering of natural consciousness, the deliteralization of being. As James Hillman explains, with reference to the myth of Persephone and its significance to psychology, it is not until we have been violated, that is, “pathologized” by the force symbolized by Hades, that “we see life through [Persephone’s] darker eye.”9 Similarly, in The Rain God, characters such as JoEl, Ernesto, and the protagonist, Miguel Chico, undergo a metaphorical rape that moves their souls from the literalism of society to a recognition of an invisible force that the human world is all too quick to label comic or unreal. Even the family matriarch, Mama Chona, learns a new meaning of death when the rain god takes her in his arms. Death in Islas’s novel is not the means of salvation that his Roman Catholic Mexican American characters are taught to believe it is. In both Islas’s novel and Nezahualcóyotl’s poem, death is an experience as well as a place that changes the life of the soul.10
In the context of death as both mythic landscape and psychic transformation, the subtitle of the novel, A Desert Tale, is quite significant. Using the desert as a metaphor, Islas evokes the presence of the rain god—a presence presiding over the lives of three generations of the Angel family. Through lyrically rendered images, the desert becomes “the vast realms of the rain god,” as in this passage from the chapter titled “Ants”:
Alone in his aunt’s living room, JoEl stared through the tunnel that led him once again to the night of his father’s death. He had not slept that night. The west wind was lifting the desert to their doorstep and March was a few weeks away. The sandstorms his father hated would begin soon. JoEl lay awake listening to the sand falling softly on the porch outside, a sound that made him think of veils sliding against each other or of the most delicate knives being sharpened—subtle, beautiful sounds which made him drowsy as he imagined each grain of sand falling. (151-52)
The emphasis here on sand and its associations for JoEl (knives and veils) turns the desert into something unfamiliar. As JoEl is led by memory, emotion, or both to thoughts of death, so the reader is led by the narration to different levels of reality, i.e. motion becomes sound which becomes imagery which in turn induces a state of being or near nonbeing (“drowsy”-ness). Notice how the rhythm creates the approach to the nadir of “that night.” This leading or tunneling is an inwarding that frames JoEl within the desert landscape, which then seems to dissolve into shadows of the otherworld. The moment becomes a descent toward the center of the desert, where the rain god awaits his chosen people.
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