Tezcatlipoca

Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, is among the most powerful and complex gods of the Mexica pantheon, an all-seeing, capricious deity of night, sorcery, rulership, fate and the hidden. His name refers to the obsidian mirror of the diviner, and he is often shown with such a mirror in place of a torn-off foot or smoking at his temple. Where many Mesoamerican gods have fixed domains, Tezcatlipoca is protean: invisible and everywhere present, giver and destroyer of fortune, patron of kings, who were installed as his representatives, and of sorcerers, and the tester of human beings, whom he could raise up or ruin at will. He is bound up with the jaguar and with the telpochcalli, the schools of the young warriors.

Aztec cosmology organised Tezcatlipoca into a fourfold scheme tied to colour and direction: the Black Tezcatlipoca of the north, most often the one meant by the name alone, stood alongside a Red Tezcatlipoca in the east usually identified with Xipe Totec, a White Tezcatlipoca in the west identified with Quetzalcoatl, and a Blue Tezcatlipoca in the south identified with the tribal war-god Huitzilopochtli, so that a single divine principle, refracted through colour, was understood to preside over the whole compass of the world. This structure, recorded in colonial sources such as the Codex Rios and the writings of Bernardino de Sahagun, shows how thoroughly Mexica religious thought used spatial and chromatic symbolism to organise its highest gods.

One of the most striking rites reported for him is the festival of Toxcatl, at which, according to the Florentine Codex and related colonial sources, a chosen youth lived for a year as the living image of the god, honoured and adorned, before being sacrificed, a ceremony whose account, like all such, reaches us only through post-conquest texts and must be read with that limitation. In the myth-history of central Mexico Tezcatlipoca is the great adversary of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, and one widely told story has him trick Quetzalcoatl into drunkenness and disgrace and so drive him into exile, a rivalry that later chroniclers wove into the traditions surrounding the coming of the Spanish. He belongs, with Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec, to the group of creator gods the Mexica set at the origin of the world.

Spanish missionary chroniclers of the sixteenth century, confronting a deity of night, sorcery and moral testing whose favour and wrath seemed arbitrary, frequently described Tezcatlipoca in terms borrowed from the Christian devil, a reading modern scholars treat cautiously as an artefact of the friars' own theological categories rather than a neutral account of Mexica belief. Sahagun's informants, by contrast, preserved prayers to Tezcatlipoca that address him as an all-seeing, all-knowing judge of human conduct, closer to a stern moral governor than to a tempter, and the disparity between the friars' demonic gloss and the god's own devotional language recorded in Nahuatl is one of the clearer instances in Mesoamerican studies of colonial-era description distorting the deity it claims to record.