Tezcatlipoca

Tezcatlipoca's name means Smoking Mirror, after the polished obsidian disks Aztec diviners used to see distant places and the hearts of men. Codices paint him with bands of black and yellow across his face and a smoking mirror set at his temple and again at his right ankle: at the beginning of the world he dangled that foot into the primordial sea as bait for the earth monster, and the creature bit it off. He is Yohualli Ehecatl, Night and Wind, invisible and everywhere; men are Titlacauan, his slaves; the jaguar Tepeyollotl, Heart of the Mountain, is his animal double.

With Quetzalcoatl he is both co-creator and destined rival. In the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, Tezcatlipoca served as the First Sun until Quetzalcoatl struck him from the sky with a great club; he rose from the sea as a jaguar and devoured the giants of that age. In the Tollan cycle it is he who, disguised as a foreign chili vendor and a sorcerer bearing a mirror and pulque, unravels the priest-king Quetzalcoatl's rule step by step.

His feast of Toxcatl was among the most solemn in Tenochtitlan. Each year the priests chose a flawless young war captive to live as the god's ixiptla, his embodied image: for a year he walked the city playing clay flutes and receiving reverence, in his last twenty days he was wed to four young women dressed as goddesses, and on the feast day he climbed the temple steps of his own accord, snapping a flute on each stair, to be sacrificed at the summit. The next embodiment was chosen at once.