I regard his several coloured forms as symbolic of various [[115]]kinds of weather. Thus, in his black form he appears to represent the rainy season; in his red, the torrid and dry period of the year; in his white, cold and frost; and in his striped painting, the embodiment of fair weather. Thus Tezcatlipocâ is the atmospheric god par excellence, ruler of all meteorological conditions. In the prayers offered up to him it is frequently stated that he may, if he so chooses, send rain and plenty, and this aspect of him seems to account for his variously coloured disguises. That these were, indeed, regarded as practically separate divine forms is clear from the first chapter of the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, which alludes to the Black and Red Tezcatlipocâ as two entirely different gods.

Tezcatlipocâ, at the period of the Conquest, had developed attributes of a more lofty kind than any of those already described. Like Quetzalcoatl, and because he was a god of the wind or atmosphere, he came to be regarded as the personification of the breath of life. In the mind of savage man the wind is usually the giver of breath, the great store-house of respiration, the source of immediate life. In many mythologies the name of the principal deity is synonymous with that for wind, and in others the words “soul” and “breath” have a common origin. It has been suggested that the Hebrew Jahveh (the archaic form of Jehovah) is connected with the Arabic hawah, to blow or breathe, and that Jahveh was originally a wind or tempest god.

Our word “spiritual” is derived from the Latin spirare, to blow; the Latin animus, “spirit,” is the same word as the Greek anemos, “wind,” and psukhe has a similar origin. All are directly evolved from verbal roots expressing the motion of the wind or the breath. The Hebrew word ruah is equivalent to both “wind” and “spirit,” as is the Egyptian kneph. If we turn to the American mythologies, nija in the language of the Dakota means “breath,” or “life”; in Netela piuts is “life,” “breath,” and “soul”; the Yakuna language of Oregon has wkrisha, “wind,” wkrish­mit, “life.” The Creeks applied to their supreme deity the [[116]]name Esaugetuh Emissee, Master of Breath,[67] and the original name for God in Choctaw was Hustoli, the Storm Wind. “In the identity of wind with breath, of breath with life, of life with soul, of soul with God, lies the far deeper and truer reason,” says Brinton, “of the prominence given to wind-gods in many mythologies.”[68]

But although Tezcatlipocâ was the Giver of Life, he was also regarded as a deity with power to take it away. In fact at times he appeared as an inexorable death-dealer, and in this guise he was named Nezahualpilli (“The Hungry Chief”) and Yaotzin (“The Enemy”). But he was also known as Telpochtli (“The Youthful Warrior”), from the fact that his reserve of strength, his vital force, never grew less and was boisterously apparent, as in the tempest. As the wind at night rushes through the roads with more seeming violence than it does by day, so was Tezcatlipocâ pictured in the Aztec consciousness as rioting along the highways in search of slaughter. Indeed, seats or benches of stone, shaped like those used by the chiefs of the Mexican towns, were placed at intervals on the roads for his use, and here he was supposed to lurk, concealed by the green boughs which surrounded them, in wait for his victims. Should anyone grapple with and overcome him, he might crave whatsoever boon he desired, with the surety of its being granted. The worship of Tezcatlipocâ previous to the Conquest had so advanced, and so powerful had his cult become, that it would appear as if the movement would ultimately have led to a monotheism or worship of one god equivalent to that of the cult of Jahveh, the God of the Old Testament among the ancient Hebrews. To his priestly caste is credited the invention of many of the usages of civilized life, and it succeeded in making his worship universal. The Nahua people regarded the other gods as objects of special devotion, but the worship of Tezcatlipocâ was general. [[117]]

[[Contents]]

QUETZALCOATL = “FEATHERED SERPENT”

ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

General.—The insignia of Quetzalcoatl is fairly constant in its appearance. He usually wears the Huaxtec cone-shaped hat painted in the design of the jaguar-skin, which is occasionally divided vertically into a black or blue and a red field, having an eye in the middle. The hair is bound by a leather strap set with jewels, which has a conventional bird’s head on the front, and in Codex Borgia consistently shows a black, stepped pattern on a white ground. Elsewhere a bow with rounded ends takes the place of this strap, but in Borgia (sheet 62) the hair is bound up with two intertwined snakes. At the back of the neck a fan-shaped nape-ornament is usually seen, consisting of black feathers, from which rise the red plumes of the quetzal bird, and it seems, from the account of the costume sent to Cortéz by Motecuhzoma, that this nape-appendage was made from grouse-feathers, although the Spanish account states that they belonged to the crow. The god usually wears white ear-pendants of hook-like shape, which, Sahagun states, were made of gold. The necklace is of spirally voluted snail-shells, and on the breast is worn a large ornament, also sliced from a shell. The ends of the loin-cloth are rounded off and are generally painted in two colours—brown, the colour [[118]]of the jaguar-skin, and white or red. The god’s atlatl, or spear-thrower, is painted with the stellar design of white circles on a black ground, and in his headdress is stuck the agave-leaf spike and the bone dagger, the implements of penance and mortification. The body-paint is frequently black, like that of the priests. Most of these insignia are of Huaxtec origin and show that Quetzalcoatl was usually associated with this coastal people. The snail-shell ornament on the breast, the hook-shaped ear-pendant, the fan-shaped nape-ornament, and the cone-shaped cap, were undoubtedly of Huaxtec origin, and such objects have been taken from Huaxtec graves and are found represented on vases and jugs from the State of Hidalgo. In many representations of him the god is seen wearing a long-snouted mask, usually painted a bright red, through which he was supposed to expel the wind in his guise of Eecatl, the Wind-god. This mask is frequently fringed with a beard.