The gods of Mexico

by Lewis Spence

Tezcatlipocâ was unquestionably the god of the itztli (obsidian) stone, and Seler[58] has identified him with Iztli, the stone-knife god, the second of the lords of the night. In certain codices, too, he is represented as having such a knife in place of a foot, and we know that it was a fairly common practice of the Mexican artists to indicate the name or race of an individual by drawing one of his feet in a hieroglyphical manner.[59] I believe, too, that the net-like garment worn at times by the god above his other attire is an adaptation of the mesh-bag in which Mexican hunters carried flints for use as spear- and arrow-heads.

This, as well as the fact that he was the god of the sharp-cutting obsidian from which such weapons were made, caused him to be regarded as patron deity of the wild hunting Chichimecs of the northern steppes, a connection which is eloquent of his erstwhile primitive character. It is clear, too, that Chalchiuhtotolin, the jewelled fowl, which is ruler of the eighteenth day-sign, tecpatl (obsidian knife), is merely a variant of Tezcatlipocâ.[60] [[112]]

But another important link connects Tezcatlipocâ with obsidian. Bernal Diaz states that they called this “Tezcat.” From it mirrors were manufactured as divinatory media by the wizard. Sahagun says[61] that it was known as aitztli (water obsidian), probably because of the high polish of which it was capable. Another such stone he mentions was called tepochtli, which I would translate “wizard stone,” and from which I think, by a process of etymological confusion, Tezcatlipocâ received one of his minor names, Telpochtli, “the youth.” The name of the god means “Smoking Mirror,” and Acosta[62] says that the Mexicans called Tezcatlipocâ’s mirror irlacheaya (an obvious error for tlachialoni) “his glass to look in,” otherwise the mirror or scrying-stone in which he was able to witness the doings of mankind. It is possible that the “smoke” which was said to rise from this mirror symbolized the haziness which is supposed to cloud the surface of a divinatory glass prior to the phenomenon of vision therein.

Thus from the shape beheld in the seer’s mirror, Tezcatlipocâ came to be regarded as the seer. That into which the wizard gazed became so closely identified with sorcery as to be thought of as wizard-like itself; for Tezcatlipocâ is, of all Mexican deities, the one most nearly connected with the wizard’s art. He is par excellence the nocturnal god who haunts the crossways and appears in a myriad phantom guises to the night-bound wayfarer. “These,” says Sahagun, “were masks that Tezcatlipocâ assumed to frighten the people.”

He wears the symbol of night upon his forehead; he is the moon, ruler of the night, the wizard who veils himself behind the clouds; he bears the severed arm of a woman who has died in childbed, as a magical instrument, as did the naualli of old Mexico. From him all ominous and uncanny sounds proceed: the howl of the jaguar (in which we perceive Tezcatlipocâ as the wizard metamorphosed [[113]]into the wer-animal), and the foreboding cry of the uactli bird, the voc, the bird of Hurakan in the Popol Vuh.

Tezcatlipocâ was undoubtedly connected with the wind, and this leads me to suspect that in the course of his evolution he came to be thought of as among that class of magical stones which in some mysterious manner is considered capable of raising a tempest under the spell of the sorcerer.[63] Of such a belief world-wide examples exist. In the Irish island of Fladdahuan such a stone was anointed when the fisher desired a wind[64] and was kept in wool wrappings. A piece of pumice-stone drifted to Puka-Puka, says Lang,[65] and was regarded as a god of winds and waves, to which offerings were made during hurricanes. Tezcatlipocâ is none other than the original “hurricane,” for he has been identified with the Hurakan of the Quiches of Guatemala alluded to in the Popol Vuh, from whose name the meteorological expression has been borrowed.

Whether or not he came to be looked upon as the wind of night which ravined through the empty streets and deserted countryside by virtue of the train of thought suggested above, many aspects of Tezcatlipocâ are eloquent of his boreal attributes. Thus, he is invisible and capricious, the object of mistrust among the people, who discerned in tempestuous weather a manifestation of his freakish bad temper. The myth in which he was described as pursuing Quetzalcoatl in tiger-form will, in the section which deals with that god, be indicated as an allegory of the clashing of the hurricane with the rain-bringing trade-wind. Lastly, as patron of war, of the warrior’s club and dance-house, he is, as the boisterous storm, emblematic of strife and discord. Seats of stone over-arched with green branches were provided for him throughout the city so that he might rest from his wanderings if he thought good. [[114]]

In the Aztec mind stone was symbolic of sin. Thus Tezcatlipocâ in his variant, Itzlacoliuhqui, is the just avenger, who punishes evil swiftly and terribly, for obsidian as the sacrificial knife was the instrument of justice.[66] The coldness of stone, its hardness and dryness, seem also to have given rise to the conception of him as god of the Toxcatl festival in the fifth month of the year, the dry season, when the sun stood at the zenith above Tenochtitlan. Thus, as the prayers to him eloquently affirm, he was the god of drought, of sereness, and barrenness.

In common with the majority of the greater Mexican deities, Tezcatlipocâ had a stellar connection. He was one of the Tzitzimimê who had fallen from heaven, and the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas remarks of him, “the constellation of the Great Bear descends to the water because it is Tezcatlipocâ, who has his seat there,” thus also indicating that he ruled the northern quarter, out of which, it was considered, no good thing might come. His Tzitzimimê shape appears to have been the spider. In American-Indian myth the stars are frequently regarded as having spider form, and especially so in Mexican myth. In several of the codices, notably in Codex Borbonicus, the Tzitzimimê or star-demons are represented in insect shape. Thus, Tezcatlipocâ, when he descended from heaven to harass Quetzalcoatl, did so by means of a spider’s web, so that we are justified in regarding the spider as his stellar form.

The origin of his conception as the sun of the north and as the setting sun seems reasonably clear and is secondary in character. As the sun sinks in the west its brilliant gold turns to a glassy red, reminiscent of the dull reflex of light in a surface of polished obsidian. The mirror held by Tezcatlipocâ, with its fringe of feathers, obviously represents the sun of evening. But he is also to be thought of as the torrid and blazing orb of the dry season, scorching and merciless.