Tepeyollotl

Tepeyollotl, heart of the mountain, is a jaguar aspect of Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror god whose many faces the Mexica read as distinct enough to receive separate names and separate ritual attention while remaining, at root, manifestations of one another. His name and iconography tie him to caves and to the interiors of mountains, the places Nahua cosmology treated as entrances to the underworld and as the source of echoes, which Sahagun's informants describe as understood literally as Tepeyollotl's own voice answering from within the rock.

The jaguar form carries the animal's standing as the most powerful predator known to Mexica experience, an association shared with Tezcatlipoca's own jaguar manifestations and with the elite warrior order of the jaguar knights, though Tepeyollotl himself is a calendrical and cosmological figure rather than a patron specifically of that military order. He governs, in the reckoning the codices assign him, the trecena opening on 1 Mazatl, the deer, a placement that pairs the mountain jaguar with a prey animal in a single thirteen day week, and this trecena patronage is a separate role from his standing as the eighth of the nine Lords of the Night, the two systems of trecena patrons and night lords running alongside one another rather than assigning the same deity the same duty in both.

Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of FateElizabeth Hill Boone

As the eighth of the Yohualteuctin, Tepeyollotl governs every ninth date from day eight of the tonalpohualli onward, his recurrence moving independently through the twenty day signs and thirteen trecenas in the same manner as the other eight, realigning with the full count only after 2340 days. A date under his night was read, in the layered method the tonalpouhque applied, as carrying the jaguar's severity and the cave's hidden depth, a reading consistent with Tezcatlipoca's own reputation across his several aspects as an unpredictable and testing power, one Sahagun's informants approach with more caution in their commentary than they show toward the gentler night lords such as Piltzintecuhtli or Chalchiuhtlicue.

The echo that Nahua thought attributed to him, the mountain's own voice answering a call sent into its caves, gave Tepeyollotl a mythic explanation distinct from the plain arithmetic that otherwise governs the night lord sequence, and this is one of the few night lords for whom the sources preserve a specific natural phenomenon read as his direct presence in the world beyond the calendar itself. His position just before Tlaloc, the rain god who closes the sequence as ninth, places two deities connected to mountains, caves and the sources of water immediately adjacent at the sequence's end, mirroring the pairing of fire and blade that opens it with Xiuhtecuhtli and Itztli.

Sources Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of FateElizabeth Hill Boone with Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble