Prayer to Tezcatlipoca in Time of Plague

This prayer to Tezcatlipoca, one of the principal and most feared deities in the Aztec pantheon associated with fate, night, sorcery and the unpredictable exercise of divine power, is recorded in Book Six of the Florentine Codex as a communal petition spoken during an epidemic, reflecting on the fragility of human life and appealing for the removal of the affliction, and its content combines formal, elevated address to Tezcatlipoca with sustained meditation on human suffering and mortality that scholars of Nahuatl literature have compared favorably, in its rhetorical sophistication, to some of the more developed philosophical and poetic material surviving from other ancient Mesoamerican and world religious traditions.

Book Six of the Florentine Codex preserves an unusually rich collection of formal Nahua oratory, called huehuetlatolli, or 'ancient word,' alongside prayers such as this one, giving scholars valuable insight into pre-conquest Nahua rhetorical and religious tradition beyond myth and ritual description alone, since huehuetlatolli represented a genuinely developed and highly valued genre of formal Nahua speech in its own right. Tezcatlipoca's name, generally translated as smoking mirror, refers to obsidian mirror imagery associated with divination and his capacity to see and judge human conduct, an attribute that gave this particular prayer's appeal to him during an epidemic added theological weight, since he was understood as a deity whose judgment concerning human affairs was already believed to be searching and largely unavoidable.

Bernardino de Sahagun, the Franciscan friar responsible for compiling the Florentine Codex, worked with Nahua informants and Nahua-trained scribes using a methodology scholars regard as remarkably systematic for its sixteenth-century context, cross-checking accounts and organizing material topically across the codex's twelve books, though his underlying missionary purpose, better understanding Aztec religion partly in order to more effectively work against it, means even this valuable and relatively careful source passed through significant colonial-era mediation before reaching its surviving written form.

The prayer's communal voice, speaking on behalf of the entire afflicted population rather than a single individual petitioner, situates it within public ritual response to crisis rather than private devotion, a pattern also visible in other ancient communal crisis prayers catalogued in this atlas, including the Hittite Plague Prayers of Mursili II, though the two traditions developed entirely independently on opposite sides of the ancient world. Whether the specific wording of this prayer as recorded by Sahagun's project precisely reflects pre-conquest liturgical practice or was shaped by the recording context remains, as with most Florentine Codex material, a matter requiring appropriate scholarly caution rather than unqualified confidence.