Tezcatlipoca’s Smoking Mirror

Also Known As: Nahuatl tezcatl, “mirror”, and poctli, “smoke”, the pairing that gives the god his name; the stone itself is itztli, obsidian, which the Mexica also called the talking stone
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A disc of polished obsidian that shows its holder what is hidden, whether that is a fate, a distant army, or a sin the holder would rather not have had named.
Role in Mythos: It is the instrument through which Tezcatlipoca watches the world and the world catches sight of him, and it works in both directions at once.
Relation to Humans: Rulers, diviners and sorcerers owned mirrors and used them, and the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan kept one specifically to observe the conduct of his subjects. Ordinary people met the mirror on the other side of the glass, as the thing that saw them.

Black glass takes a long time to warm. Lift an Aztec mirror off a cloth and it is cold against the palm, colder than stone has any business being, and it stays that way while you hold it up to a torch and find your own face waiting inside it. The reflection is not the bright, flat, unforgiving thing a silvered glass gives back. It sits a little behind the surface, softened, drowned, the whites of the eyes gone grey. You look like yourself the way a person looks like themselves underwater. The Mexica called this stone itztli and the object tezcatl, and they named their most dangerous god after the two things a mirror does: it reflects, and it smokes.

The making was patient work. Obsidian comes out of the ground as a natural volcanic glass, the cooled skin of a lava flow, and it fractures into edges sharp enough for surgical blades, which is what the Mexica mostly used it for. To turn a nodule into a mirror a craftsman ground it against wet abrasive sand, hour upon hour, until a flat face came up out of the grit, then polished that face until it held an image. Some mirrors were circular and a hand’s breadth across; others were rectangular slabs. They were framed in wood, fixed with an adhesive made from bat droppings, and decorated with feathers. They belonged to rulers, and they were valuable enough that the Spanish carried them home as curiosities.

Mesoamerica had been using mirrors for a very long time before obsidian took over. The older ones were iron pyrite, sometimes cut into mosaic tiles and set on a slate backing, and older still were the finely ground concave stone mirrors of the Olmec, drilled through the back so a priest could wear one at the throat. Those early concave mirrors could focus sunlight hot enough to kindle fire. Obsidian could not do that. What obsidian could do was be made easily and be made black, and in the Late Postclassic centuries it became the standard, turning up above all in Michoacán, the Valley of Mexico and Oaxaca.

What the mirror was for was seeing what the eye could not. Divination in ancient Mexico had always run on reflective surfaces, on water in gourd bowls and still pools, and the mirror joined a working kit that also included knotted cloth and maize kernels thrown onto a mat. The interesting thing is that the practitioners called all of it a tezcatl. A day-keeper reading the sacred almanac called the book a mirror and greeted a client with a line that sounds almost like a shop formula: you have come to see yourself in the mirror, you have come to consult the book. The Nahuatl word for predicting, itzpopolhuia, is built out of itztli and a verb for casting a spell. Obsidian was where the seeing happened.

In the painted books the mirror is how you find Tezcatlipoca. It sits at his temple, or in his headdress, or on his chest, and sometimes it sits where a foot should be. That absence has a story behind it. In the creation accounts Tezcatlipoca used his own leg as bait to draw the earth monster Cipactli up out of the primordial sea, and the creature took the foot, and he tore off its lower jaw in return, and the world was built out of what was left. The fight is painted in the Codex Borgia and the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer. Sources disagree on which foot the mirror replaced, and the substitution is frequent rather than universal. The glyph itself is a disc with volutes curling off it, the same scrolls Aztec scribes drew for speech and song, which is why the smoke reads as something being said. Around the disc sit balls of eagle down, anything from two to seven of them, the standard shorthand for sacrifice. In some versions the axis of the mirror is a human bone.

A wise elder, in Nahuatl praise, was a large mirror, a mirror pierced on both sides. That phrase is the whole theology of the object in eight words. The mirror has two faces and does two jobs: it shows Tezcatlipoca’s will to people, and it shows people’s conduct to Tezcatlipoca. Every Great Speaker of Tenochtitlan owned one and used it to watch his subjects and their transgressions, standing in for the god who was doing the same thing from further away. The arrangement went back to the beginning. On the migration out of Aztlán, a deity-bearer walked at the head of the people with a sacred bundle on his back, and inside the bundle, painted in the Codex Azcatitlan with four balls of eagle down around it, was a smoking mirror.

The most famous thing the mirror ever did was destroy someone. At Tollan, Tezcatlipoca came to Quetzalcoatl carrying a mirror wrapped in cotton, and unwrapped it, and held it up. Quetzalcoatl looked and saw a face: aged, fleshly, mortal, the face of something that would end. He had not known. He covered himself, and in time he left the city, and the story of the Toltec collapse turns on that moment of a god being shown to himself. The trick is entirely in character. Tezcatlipoca could make his mirror shine or dim at will, and in his bright aspect he was called Tezcatlanextia, the mirror that makes things appear.

Its power is the power of revelation, and revelation is the only thing it does. The mirror does not strike, transform, heal or defend. It shows, and what it shows is not negotiable, and it cannot be walked through: a viewer sees into the other world and stays firmly on this side of the glass. The Florentine Codex records the limit case. Fishermen brought Moctezuma a crane-like bird with a mirror set in its head, and looking into it at midday he saw the night sky and its stars, and then, on a second look, a mass of warriors coming on riding what looked like deer. He called for his astrologers. By the time they arrived the bird was gone and so was the vision. Knowing changed nothing.

The mirrors themselves are brittle, portable and easy to take, and a great many were taken. Four in European collections have now been chemically fingerprinted by X-ray fluorescence, including the black disc that belonged to the Elizabethan magus John Dee, who used it for conversations with angels. The obsidian in Dee’s mirror came from Pachuca, north-east of Mexico City; two of the others came from Ucareo, off to the north-west. They were made in the last decades before 1521. Nobody knows how Dee’s reached England. Others were broken up and reset into Christian crucifixes, or remounted in Europe as emblems of vanity, which is one reading of a thing that shows you your own face and then shows you what is behind it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tezcatlipoca’s smoking mirror?

It is a disc of polished obsidian, the ritual mirror that gives the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca his name, which means Smoking Mirror in Nahuatl. Real mirrors of this kind were made across central Mexico and used for divination, and the god is shown carrying one at his temple, in his headdress, on his chest, or in place of a missing foot.

What does the smoking mirror do?

It reveals. Tezcatlipoca uses it to see what people do and to show them their fates, and Aztec diviners and rulers used obsidian mirrors the same way, gazing into the dark surface to see the hidden or the distant. It has no other power: it does not strike, heal or transform, and a viewer cannot pass through it.

Why does Tezcatlipoca have a mirror instead of a foot?

In the Aztec creation accounts Tezcatlipoca baited the earth monster Cipactli with his own leg and lost the foot to it, and the painted books often substitute a smoking mirror for the missing limb. The episode appears in the Codex Borgia and the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer. Sources disagree on which foot it was, and not every depiction makes the substitution.

How did Tezcatlipoca use the mirror against Quetzalcoatl?

At Tollan he brought Quetzalcoatl a mirror wrapped in cotton and unwrapped it in front of him. Quetzalcoatl saw his own aged, mortal face for the first time, was undone by it, and eventually abandoned the city. The deception is the central episode in the Aztec account of how Tollan fell.

Were Aztec obsidian mirrors real objects?

Yes. Dozens survive in museum collections, and four in Europe, including the mirror owned by the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee, have been chemically traced to the Mexican obsidian sources of Pachuca and Ucareo and dated to the last decades before the Spanish conquest of 1521.