Tezcatlipoca

In creation, he worked alongside Quetzalcoatl to raise the world. In the same creation, the Earth Monster bit off his foot. He replaced it with a smoking obsidian mirror and continued.

The name means Smoking Mirror: tezcatl (mirror) joined with poctli (smoke). He carried a black obsidian mirror in which he saw everything happening in the world. It could show a person their own face and fate. When he held it up to the Toltec priest-king Topiltzin, what Topiltzin saw in it destroyed him.

The Mirror and the Creation

The Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, a manuscript compiled around 1535, describes the four creator gods at the beginning of the current world cycle: Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totec. Together they made the world from nothing, or from each other, which amounts to the same thing in Aztec cosmology.

The earth itself came from destruction. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl reached into the primordial sea and pulled up the Earth Monster, Cipactli, a vast crocodilian creature floating in the waters before creation. They used her body to make the land. Before they subdued her, she bit off Tezcatlipoca’s foot.

The wound became his mark. In every codex representation, one foot is replaced: sometimes by a smoking obsidian mirror, sometimes by a serpent. The Florentine Codex describes the mirror as embedded where the foot was. The gods who made the world paid for it in flesh.

The Destruction of Tula

The Anales de Cuauhtitlan records Tezcatlipoca’s methodical dismantling of the Toltec golden age under Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl.

He came carrying a mirror.

Tezcatlipoca came to the priest-king and showed him his own face in the obsidian glass, aged and wrinkled. The sight broke Topiltzin’s composure. Tezcatlipoca then gave him pulque, the fermented agave drink Topiltzin had never consumed. Four cups. When Topiltzin came back to himself, his celibate life was over. Tula’s prosperity, sustained by the priest-king’s spiritual discipline, collapsed with it.

But Tezcatlipoca did not stop there. The Anales describes additional attacks: he appeared as a merchant selling green chilies and seduced Topiltzin’s daughter, forcing Topiltzin to accept him as a son-in-law against his will. He appeared as a warrior and incited the people of Tula against the city’s rulers. He danced and played a drum until people fell into a ravine and died. Each attack eroded something different: the priest-king’s discipline first, then the city’s social order.

The destruction was patient. Tula unraveled rather than fell.

The Ixiptla: One Year as a God

The Toxcatl festival, held in the fifth month of the Aztec solar calendar, was Tezcatlipoca’s primary ritual. The Florentine Codex (Book II) describes it in precise detail.

One year before each festival, priests selected a young man to become the god’s ixiptla, his living image. He had to be physically perfect: unblemished skin, straight teeth, no scars. He had to know how to play the flute, to walk gracefully, to speak well. For twelve months he lived as Tezcatlipoca. He wore fine garments, walked the city with flower garlands, played his flute as people bowed before him.

Twenty days before the festival end, he was given four women as companions. The women’s names were those of four goddesses: Xochiquetzal, Xilonen, Atlatonan, and Huixtocihuatl.

On the day of the festival, the women left him at the lakeshore and he walked alone to a small temple near the coast. He climbed the steps. On each step he broke one of his flutes. At the summit, the priests sacrificed him.

The next day, the selection of the new ixiptla began.

How He Looked

Tezcatlipoca’s iconography in the codices is consistent. His body was painted black with yellow horizontal stripes across the face. His missing foot was replaced with a smoking mirror or a serpent from which he appeared to step. He wore a headdress of eagle feathers. An obsidian mirror appeared in every image, sometimes on his chest, sometimes at his ankle, sometimes held in hand.

The Codex Borgia shows him and Quetzalcoatl as a facing pair, black body against white, framing the same cosmic cycle from opposite ends. The Aztecs appear to have understood them as complements: what one built, the other dismantled, and the cycle required both.

He could take jaguar form. He could appear as a young warrior or an old woman. His multiple forms were aspects, not disguises. A god of sorcery looks like whatever he needs to be.

Further Reading

• Quetzalcoatl — the feathered serpent whose golden age at Tula Tezcatlipoca systematically destroyed
• Tlaloc — the rain god whose first wife Xochiquetzal Tezcatlipoca stole
• Huitzilopochtli — fellow creator god and one of the four paired with Tezcatlipoca in founding the current world age
• Xipe Totec — the fourth creator god, the Flayed One, who governed seasonal renewal

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Florentine Codex (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España), Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, c. 1577 — Book I: Tezcatlipoca’s attributes; Book II: the Toxcatl festival and the ixiptla sacrifice
• Anales de Cuauhtitlan (c. 1570, Nahuatl) — Tezcatlipoca’s destruction of Topiltzin and Tula
• Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas (c. 1535) — the four creator gods and creation of the Earth Monster
• Histoyre du Mechique (French manuscript, c. 1543) — creation myths based on lost Spanish source
• Codex Borgia (pre-Columbian, Vatican Apostolic Library) — primary iconographic source
• Codex Borbonicus — ritual calendar, Toxcatl festival imagery