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Plate 1 A striding figure whose face is crossed by bands, with a smoking mirror in place of one foot

Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror)

The Aztec god whose name means “smoking mirror”: a powerful, unpredictable god of rulers and of fate, shown with a face painted in black and yellow bands and a smoking obsidian mirror in place of one foot.

Aztec symbols and gods. Also called smoking mirror, tezcatlipoca symbol.

Meaning

The historian Xavier Noguez translates the name as “the lord of the obsidian mirror that smokes”. Smoking obsidian mirrors give the god his name, Noguez writes, and are worn at his temple or in place of his left foot; his face is painted in yellow and black bands, or red and yellow. Sahagún, the sixteenth-century Franciscan, recorded that he was held to be an invisible god who went everywhere, in the sky, on earth and in the underworld, and who alone gave prosperity and wealth and took them away when he chose. Noguez adds that he chose rulers and could change their fate, and was the chief patron of the tonalamatl, the books of fate. Among Nahua villagers today, the anthropologist Alan Sandstrom writes, he survives only blended with the Owl-Man, Tlacatecolotl. Dictionary.com gives the name as tes-kaht-li-POH-kah.

Origin and history

Mexicolore ties the name to obsidian, the black volcanic stone whose polished face was used as a mirror. In Nicholson’s guide to deity insignia the smoking mirror at the back of the head and the black face with horizontal yellow stripes are his signs. He was painted in several codices: as Red Tezcatlipoca on plate 21 of the Codex Borgia, and on plate 89 of the Codex Magliabechiano, Noguez notes, with an obsidian mirror on his back, a turquoise serpent and a headdress like the one now called Moctezuma’s.

His chief yearly feast was Toxcatl, in May. Mexicolore describes the ixiptla, a young captive without a scar on his body, chosen to be the god’s living image for a year and sacrificed at the start of the feast.

How he lost his foot

Two stories explain the missing foot. In one, told by Mexicolore, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl turned into snakes to tear the earth monster Tlaltéotl in two, and she bit off one of his feet in the fight. A carved stone in the Mexica hall of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Noguez writes, has been read two ways. Henry B. Nicholson saw Tezcatlipoca emerging from the underworld, the forces below catching only his left foot. Guilhem Olivier reads it as the god losing his foot after violating the earth goddess, a scene of the earth’s fertilisation; for Olivier he is the god of fate, “who reflects in his mirror the fragile human condition”.

The rival of Quetzalcoatl

Tezcatlipoca is Quetzalcoatl’s brother and opponent. Together they created the world of the Fifth Sun; apart, it was Tezcatlipoca, disguised as an old man, who gave the priest of Tula the pulque that brought him down. His animal double was the jaguar: Olivier writes that the Mexica deified it as Tepeyóllotl, “Heart of the Mountain”, an aspect of Tezcatlipoca. The jaguar warriors are on the eagle warrior page.

See also

Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent), Eagle warrior, Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Mictlantecuhtli, Coatlicue.

Sources

  1. Una escultura de Tezcatlipoca (Xavier Noguez, Arqueología Mexicana), Xavier Noguez, “Una escultura de Tezcatlipoca”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 185, pp. 11–15, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  2. Tezcatlipoca en el Códice Magliabechi (Xavier Noguez, Arqueología Mexicana), Xavier Noguez, “Tezcatlipoca en el Códice Magliabechi”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 190, pp. 12–15, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  3. El nacimiento de Tezcatlipoca (Xavier Noguez, Arqueología Mexicana), Xavier Noguez, “Una escultura de Tezcatlipoca”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 185, pp. 11–15, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  4. El símbolo de Tezcatlipoca, el espejo humeante (Xavier Noguez, after Guilhem Olivier, Arqueología Mexicana), Xavier Noguez, “Una escultura de Tezcatlipoca”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 185, pp. 11–15, summarising Guilhem Olivier (2001), Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  5. God of the Month: Tezcatlipoca (Mexicolore), Julia Flood, Mexicolore, Mexicolore, article text
  6. Mexica/Aztec deity insignia (Mexicolore, after H. B. Nicholson), Ian Mursell, Mexicolore; abridged from H. B. Nicholson, “The Late Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican (Aztec) Iconographic System” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973), Mexicolore, facial painting; ornaments
  7. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, vol. 1 (Bernardino de Sahagún, ed. Bustamante, 1829), Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, ed. Carlos María de Bustamante, vol. 1 (Mexico: Alejandro Valdés, 1829), Book 3, Appendix, ch. 1, Internet Archive, Book 1, ch. 3
  8. El jaguar en la cosmovisión mexica (Guilhem Olivier, Arqueología Mexicana), Guilhem Olivier, “El jaguar en la cosmovisión mexica”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 72, pp. 52–57, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  9. What happened to the Aztec gods after the Conquest? (Alan Sandstrom, Mexicolore), Alan R. Sandstrom, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, answer in Mexicolore’s “Ask the experts”, Mexicolore, answer text
  10. Tezcatlipoca (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, pronunciation; etymology

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Last reviewed October 3, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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