#aztec god

Q- THE WINGED SERPENT (1982)

uuuuhhh hey, i got a little too much into aztec/mexica mythology.

this guy is quetzalcoatl btw, it's a design i made a few years ago and even though it's not really accurate i'm too atached to it to change it.

Huehuecoyotl, Aztec god of music, rebellion, etc, says CRUSH ICE

I'm a queer, Latina artist working on a series about the importance of creating meaning in a world that hides it from us.

Meaning, just like hope, is something we create actively.

Found in Mexico City in 1969 this stone sculpture of a dancing spider monkey wearing the wind conch shell and wind mask and is sitting in a serpent he's holding on his back.

Currently at the MET in New York.

At the end of the of the second age Quetzalcoatl let loose the

hurricanes and the winds blew all the people away. Some hung on to trees and they were turned into monkeys.

8. Element

TEZCATLIPOCA

Category: Aztec mythology

Tezcatlipoca is one of the main gods of the Aztec pantheon, and one of the four deities known collectively as the “Tezcatlipocas” (Tezcatlipoca proper being the Black Tezcatlipoca, ruler of the North). He was also known by several other names such as Titlacauan (We are his slaves), Ipalnemoani (He by whom we live), Ome Acatl (Two reed), Yohualli Ehecalt (Night wind), Necoc Yaotl (Enemy of both sides), Tloque Nahuaque (Lord of the near and the night), or Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque (Possessor of the sky and earth). As you can tell by these various titles, he was a pretty ominous guy.

I) Attributes

As his title indicates, Tezcatlipoca was renowned for being a god associated with the color black, either with his body being black, or by having black lines of paint over his face (alongside yellow lines). He typically was depicted wearing a loincloth, knotted sandals, armbands, and a headdress made of heron feathers (with sometimes tinker bells around his ankles or neck). Tezcatlipoca is also usually seen holding several different items: arrows, a spear, a fan of feathers surrounding a mirror, or a shield with on it a ball of either feather or cotton.

One of the key features of Tezcatlipoca is that he only has one full leg, his right foot rather being replaced by either a snake, a bone, or an obsidian mirror. Interestingly, sometimes the obsidian mirror wasn’t replacing his missing feet, but rather attached to his chest, with smoke rising from it. Other depictions (and interpretations of this depiction) keep the idea of a disc strapped to the god’s chest, but lean more towards some sort of talisman carved out of abalone shell. But the idea of a smoking obsidian mirror is very interesting because Tezcatlipoca’s very name means… “smoking mirror”. And the reason his mirror is always obsidian, beyond the fact that obsidian was Tezcatlipoca’s sacred material, is… simply because Aztec mirrors were made of obsidian. That’s it. BUT mirrors in the Aztec society weren’t just every day item, they were rather used for specific prophetic rituals. Which is why, through his mirror, Tezcatlipoca is both the god of obsidian and the god of divination.

In fact the full list of Tezcatlipoca’s domain is actually pretty long, ranging from neutral things (rulership, sorcery, divination, north) to natural elements (obsidian, the night sky, night winds, the earth) – but most of his attributes were actually negative or downright evil. He was the god of hostility and discord, the patron of temptation and conflict, as well as the deity of the hurricanes. His only positive traits being that he was also a god of beauty, and a god of war. (Note: For the Aztecs, war is life. Literally. They had a mentality similar to the Norse where war was a beautiful, honorable thing on which their society relied and that they hoped to die in to get into paradise) Tezcatlipoca’s duality is well manifested in the various songs and prayers to him that honor the deity as “the Giver of Life”, “a poet and a scribe” – but more importantly as “the creator and the destroyer of the world”.

As with all the Aztec gods, Tezcatlipoca had a totem animal, and his was the jaguar. In fact, the jaguar deity known as Tepeyollotl was simply interpreted as being Tezcatlipoca when he manifested in his “jaguar aspect”.

II) Myths

Tezcatlipoca was thought to be one of the four sons of the primordial divine couple, Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, alongside the other three “Tezcatlipocas”: Xipe Totec, the Red Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli the Blue Tezcatlipoca, and Quetzalcoatl the White Tezcatlipoca. And the latter was known in texts as the regular enemy of Tezcatlipoca: the Black and the White god were renowned as bitter rivals constantly fighting with each other.

There are two main legends concerning Tezcatlipoca, both being creation-myths retelling the origins of the world.

The first is the legend of Cipactli. According to this legend, before the world was created it was only a vast sea inhabited by a monstrous entity known as Cipactli. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca teamed up to create a world, but they could not do it as long as the destructive sea monster was there, so the gods planned to get rid of her. Tezcatlipoca plunged his right foot into the sea, for Cipactli was known to be eternally hungry – and the creature took the bait by eating the god’s foot, but this led to her capture. The two gods then distorted and reshaped the monster’s body so that it would become the land and continents we know today, before creating humanity to populate their new world. And ever since this day Tezcatlipoca is a one-foot god, while humanity brings offering to Cipactli – for while distorted, reshaped and immobilized, the monster is still alive and in pain, and when it groans or shakes it causes earthquakes humans must appease with food, to satiate her eternal hunger.

The second myth is much more well-known and famous: it is the Five Suns myth. According to this legend, there were five different world that existed one after another – each called a “Sun”, because the lifespan of a world was tied to the one of its sun. According to some traditions, when a god created a world he became the “Sun” of it – but other versions of the myth rather claim that each world was created collectively by all the gods, before they chose one specific deity to become its sun and bring light to it. All in all we know that Tezcatlipoca was the first sun of the first world, where men were renowned for their gigantic heights – but as it turns out he was a bad sun. Some say it was because he was a god of night and darkness, others say it was because he missed a foot, but overall he produced a dim, half-light and was a very poor sun, so Quetzalcoatl, unsatisfied with his brother’s job, knocked him out of the sky with a stone club. It created an endless night, and Tezcatlipoca was so enraged at being fired from his job that he ordered all of the jaguars in the world to devour humanity (or he himself turned into a gigantic jaguar to destroy the world in a fit of rage) – and so the first world ended.

Afterward Tezcatlipoca ended up playing a role in each of the future suns demises, probably jealous and bitter at the whole “first sun” ordeal. When Quetzalcoatl became the second sun, he loved too much his humans and pampered them, leading them to become uncivilized, bestial and unreligious. Tezcatlipoca, acting as a force of “authority and judgement” quickly stepped in to settle the matter. Some versions say he used his sorcery to turn all the humans into monkeys, and Quetzalcoatl, angry, send a huge wind to wipe off the surface of the earth and end his world ; others claim that rather Tezcatlipoca forced Quetzalcoatl to create a huge hurricane to destroy his world, while the few surviving humans naturally devolved into monkeys. When Tlaloc, the god of rain, became the third sun, Tezcatlipoca used a sly plan – he seduced and stole away Tlaloc’s wife, the goddess Xochiquetzal, and out of grief Tlaloc stopped all rain. As humanity begged him constantly to make it rain, he grew angry and in an outburst of rage caused a rain of fire that burned all of the world away – the few surviving humans becoming birds. When a fourth world was created out of the third’s ashes, Chalchihuitlicue the goddess of water became its sun – but Tezcatlipoca accused her of putting the façade of a loving goddess in front of her “true” selfishness, to be an hypocrite faking kindness merely to be praised by humanity. These harsh accusations hurt the actually very kind goddess, who cried blood for many years, her tears causing an enormous flood that destroyed the fourth world, with the few remaining survivors becoming fishes.

The only world/sun Tezcatlipoca hasn’t touched or destroyed yet is the Fifth, the one we live in today, the sun of the god Huitzilopochtli. Or at least… he hasn’t tried yet.

III) Worship

The festival of Tezcatlipoca was called Toxcatl, and held in what we know today as the month of May. Each Toxcatl festival a young man was selected to become an ixiptlatli (an “impersonator” that is to say a form of actor embodying and representing a god for ritual purpose) – usually a war prisoner and a warrior (though sometimes slaves were bought, even though they had to be bathed by priests to be free of impurities). Throughout the year the Tezcatlipoca-impersonator would parade in the streets of Tenochtitlan (Aztec empire capital) in a Tezcatlipoca outfit (skin painted black, precious jewelry, embroidered cotton clothes, snail-shell lip pendant, headdress of eagle feathers, bracelets of turquoise and golden bells at his ankles) and be treated with outmost reverence as if he was the god himself. He was taught courtly speech, the art of singing, and how to play a flute, because his activities were to play the flute, smoke tobacco, burn copal incense and smell flowers everywhere he went. The impersonator would regularly be adorned by the Aztec emperor himself, and in the month previous to the next Toxcalt the impersonator would be wed to four maidens embodying four different goddesses (Xochiquetzal, Xilonen, Huixtocihuatl and Atlatonan). He lived with them for twenty whole days, and it should be noted that before this wedding the impersonator was to follow a strict rule of abstinence.

The week before the next Toxcalt the fake-Tezcatlipoca spent his days singing, dancing and feasting as merrily as he could, and four days before the next Toxcalt he would parade with his wife through the streets. On the next Toxcalt the group would travel by a small boat to a sacred island, where the fake Tezcatlipoca would leave his wives at a temple before climbing the stair of a pyramid – breaking a flute with each step. At the top of the pyramid, he was laid on a sacrificial stone and there ritualistically killed: his chest opened with an obsidian dagger to remove his heart, his head cut off so that his skull could be displayed, his body flayed, and finally his flesh given to eat to the nobles of the city. Then, a part of the god’s flesh was given to another young male war-captive, who also wore the skin of the impersonator, and thus he was to become the next ixiptlatli of Tezcatlipoca for a whole new year.

This festival was a BIG thing in the Aztec empire: all throughout it people prepared offerings of food and flowers for the gods, and many dances were performed that involved lot of “kissing and playing between men and women”: men danced the “dance of the snake”, women danced “the dance of the grilled corn”, and when presenting offerings people did “the leap of Toxcatl”. We also known that after these dances, participants to the festival were usually to receive ritualistic scars by the priests of Tezcatlipoca.

This whole sacrificial festival was seen as something of outmost importance for the nobility because Tezcatlipoca was seen as the patron deity of the royal house, and so each Aztec ruler had to be very faithful to him, with numerous hymns having the emperor comparing himself to a “blind, deaf imbecile” or an “excrement” in front of the “lord of the night and the wind who is our master”, and other texts identifying Aztec rulers as mere vessels expressing the god’s will and speaking with the god’s voice. Similarly, the Tezcatlipoca impersonator was always described as climbing the sacrificial staircase with “dignity and pride” because being killed in this ritual was seen as a great honor. The entire ceremony has been interpreted in numerous ways by scholars, with unsure and conflicting theories – the most common being that this ritual was a form of renewal ritual that could mean the chance of seasons or the cycle of deaths and rebirths ; others reject the idea that the festival was held in May and rather see it as a fall festival for the harvest celebration ; some argue it was simply a grandiose sacrifice offered by the Aztec ruler to the very god of rulership to maintain his power to dominate the empire ; and people have pointed out a possible interpretation of the “twenty days of sexuality culminating in a sacrifice” after one year of abstinence symbolized a period of fertility at the end of a drought.

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Another genealogy I haven’t talked about claims that the four Tezcatlipocas were born out of another primordial Aztec goddess, Coatlicue (you might know her as the two-snakes-headed lady) – in the myth Quetzalcoatl was her firstborn, alongside his twin Xolotl, born of the goddess as she was still a virgin ; Tezcatlipoca only being born second, fathered by… an obsidian knife. Then following the Tzitzmitil, the gods of the stars, and finally Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun, born out of a… ball of feathers. Similarly the creation myths I detailed above have several variants : for example, while some claim in the Cipactli legend that only Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca did the “creating the world” business, others talk of them as merely being responsible for the “fishing” of the primordial sea-monster, and binding it outside of the water, while the whole “reshaping her body into the land” was done by their brothers, Xipe Totec and Huitzilopochtli. A third yet claims that Tezcatlipoca did the whole “capturing Cipactli” alone, and that it was him who alone dismembered the hungry water creature to create the land (hence his title as god of the earth).