Tezcatlipoca

The mirror was a disc of obsidian, ground and polished until it held a face the way still water holds one, darkly and with something moving behind it. Diviners across ancient Mexico used them, and the Nahuatl word for them, tezcatl, sits inside the name of the god who owned the practice outright. Tezcatlipoca means smoking mirror. The smoke was not a flaw in the stone. It was him, on the other side, looking back.

He is easy to recognise in the painted books and hard to pin down anywhere else. The codices give him a young man’s body painted black, with broad yellow and black bands laid across the face, heron feathers in the headdress, and the mirror set somewhere on him: at the temple, at the chest, or in the socket where a foot should be. The sources do not agree on which foot he lost, and the earliest certain images, carved in stone at Chichén Itzá between roughly 900 and 1200, give him a serpent there instead of a mirror. He sometimes carries four arrows in one hand, held ready rather than nocked, for use on people who have earned them. One of the most famous surviving objects associated with him is a human skull, its front worked over in alternating bands of turquoise and black lignite fixed with pine resin, eyes of polished pyrite ringed in shell, the jaw cut free and rehung on leather so it swings. It is a real skull. Whatever it was for, it was not decorative.

His origin is a wound. Before there was a world there was water, and in the water floated Cipactli, a vast reptilian thing with mouths at every joint, hungry in the way that only the first hungry thing can be. Tezcatlipoca put his own foot into the water as bait. When Cipactli took it, he and Quetzalcoatl seized the creature and tore it apart, and out of the halves came the earth and the sky. Her hair became trees and flowers, her eyes and nose became springs and caves, her open mouth became the valleys. Some accounts name the monster Tlaltecuhtli rather than Cipactli, and some say she never stopped screaming for human hearts afterwards, which is one of the reasons the Mexica gave her so many. The foot did not grow back.

That missing foot cost him the sky. In the reckoning of successive suns, the first was his, Nahui Ocelotl, Four Jaguar, and it failed. Quetzalcoatl struck him out of the heavens with a club and sent him into the water, and the jaguars came out of the dark and ate the people who had been living underneath. He climbed back out. The two of them would go on cooperating and betraying each other in roughly equal measure for the rest of creation, which is as close as Mesoamerican myth comes to a stable friendship.

Names multiplied around him because so did his forms. He was Yaotl, the Enemy, patron of the warrior houses where boys were trained, and he did not always favour the boys; he was known to wait at crossroads after dark to see what a young man would do when something enormous stepped out in front of him. He was Telpochtli, the Young Man. He was Yohualli Ehecatl, Night Wind, a phrase that in Nahuatl means something closer to invisible and untouchable than to weather. He was Tepeyollotl, the jaguar in the heart of the mountain, whose voice is the echo. He was Chalchiuhtotolin, the Precious Turkey, which sounds absurd until you learn that this is the form in which he carried disease. The jaguar was his nagual, his animal double, and the choice makes sense: a big spotted cat that moves between the daylight world and the dark under the hills, and that nobody sees until it wants to be seen.

His masterpiece was the ruin of Tollan. Working through a set of guises that the accounts treat as separate sorcerers, he set out to break Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec priest-king, and he did it without a single blow. He brought him a mirror. Quetzalcoatl, who had not looked at himself in years, saw an old and sagging face and hid in shame; then came the featherworker with the turquoise mask and the plumed beard to make him beautiful again, and then came the pulque, five cups of it, offered as medicine for the humiliation. The rest followed on its own: the broken vows, the shame in the morning, the road east out of the city. Other sorceries came with it. There was a corpse in the marketplace that stank and could not be lifted no matter how many men pulled on the ropes, and there was a night of dancing at Texcalapan where the singing went on until people fell into the ravine, and by then the Toltecs were killing themselves faster than any army could have managed. He never needed an army.

Once a year the Mexica gave him a body. A captive was chosen for his beauty and his nerve, and for twelve months he was Tezcatlipoca in the streets of Tenochtitlan: taught courtly speech, taught the flute, garlanded with flowers, dressed in fine ornaments, greeting passers-by graciously with a smoking pipe in his hand, because the sound of that flute was understood to be the god’s own voice. Twenty days before the end he was married to four women who bore the names of goddesses, Atlatonan, Huixtocihuatl, Xilonen and Xochiquetzal. Then, in the month called Toxcatl, he walked up the steps of a small temple by himself, and on each step he broke one of his flutes, and at the top the priests took his heart with an obsidian knife. Nobody dragged him. That was the point of the whole year.

What he could do had few edges. Through the mirror he saw every deed and every thought, which made him a god you confessed to rather than one you deceived. He gave rulership and took it away, granted wealth and sickness and reversal, moved unseen, and wore whatever shape suited the errand, up to and including a stinking corpse. He gave the world music, sending a wind god across a bridge of turtle and whale to steal singers from the sun. He also once beheaded an old couple who annoyed the stars by grilling a fish and reattached their heads to their backsides, which is where dogs come from.

His limits were the ones built into him from the start. He could not hold the sky with a body that was incomplete, and Quetzalcoatl put him in the water to prove it. Every gift he handed out could be recalled, which meant nobody who received one could ever quite relax, and a god feared in that particular way is not a god who is loved. The bargain ran both ways: the mirror showed him everything, but he had to be fed to keep looking, and a great deal of the reverence paid to him was really a form of insurance. The Mexica did not pretend otherwise. Their word for his followers was slaves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tezcatlipoca?

Tezcatlipoca is one of the principal gods of the Aztec pantheon, whose Nahuatl name means “Smoking Mirror”. He is a creator god, patron of rulers, warriors and sorcerers, lord of the night, and the divine rival of Quetzalcoatl. He was worshipped across Postclassic Mesoamerica and was especially important at Texcoco and Tenochtitlan.

Why is Tezcatlipoca missing a foot?

Tezcatlipoca lost a foot using it as bait to catch Cipactli, the primordial reptilian monster floating in the waters before creation. He and Quetzalcoatl tore the creature apart to make the earth and sky, and in the codices an obsidian mirror or a serpent is shown where the foot should be. The sources disagree about which foot it was.

What did Tezcatlipoca do to Quetzalcoatl?

Tezcatlipoca destroyed Quetzalcoatl’s rule at Tollan by trickery rather than force. He showed the priest-king a mirror that revealed his aged face, then had him dressed in a turquoise mask to restore his beauty and plied him with five cups of pulque, which broke his vows and drove him into exile. Further sorceries, including a corpse that could not be moved and a lethal night of dancing, finished the city off.

What was the Toxcatl festival?

Toxcatl was the annual festival at which a chosen captive who had spent a year living as Tezcatlipoca’s living image was sacrificed. He was taught courtly speech and the flute, dressed in flowers and fine ornaments, and married to four women named for goddesses shortly before the end. He climbed the temple steps unaided, breaking a flute on each one, and his heart was removed with an obsidian knife.

Why is Tezcatlipoca associated with the jaguar?

The jaguar was Tezcatlipoca’s nagual, or animal double, and suited a god of night, sorcery and hidden power. Jaguars were understood to move between the earthly world and the underworld, and Tezcatlipoca appears as the jaguar god Tepeyollotl, the “Heart of the Mountain”. His first sun was called Nahui Ocelotl, Four Jaguar, and it ended when jaguars devoured the people living under it.

Related Entries

Quetzalcoatl, Cipactli, Huitzilopochtli, Xipe Totec, Tlaloc, Xochiquetzal, Xolotl, Cōātlīcue, Itzpapalotl, Tzitzimitl, Cihuateteo, Mictlan, Nagual, Ahuizotl, Camazotz