Deity · Mesoamerican · c. 1550 CE
Tezcatlipoca
Also called Smoking Mirror
God of the night sky, sorcery and arbitrary fate — Quetzalcoatl's rival, and impossible to place on a good/evil axis.
Narrow source base
The smoking mirror, and the god in this corpus who wins. He is the one who shames Quetzalcoatl at Tollan into drunkenness and flight, working by disguise, by mirror and by drink rather than by force, and the tradition goes on honouring him for it. His festival is the clearest surviving case of a rite this compendium can describe but would never reproduce: a young man chosen to be him for a year, honoured, taught to play the flute, given companions, and killed at the end of it. Durán records all of this while arguing that the god is a devil, and the Nahua annalists record the same events as their own history. Both accounts are here, and they do not disagree about the facts.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Tenochtitlan, in the sacred precinct beside the Templo Mayor, where the youth chosen to impersonate him for a year was killed at the end of it.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Annals of Cuauhtitlan and the Legend of the Suns · c. 1570, from pre-conquest material
- Rank
- Lord of the Near and the Nigh
- Pantheon
- Mesoamerican
- Order
- Mesoamerican pantheon
- Base of operations
- Tenochtitlan, in the sacred precinct beside the Templo Mayor, where the youth chosen to impersonate him for a year was killed at the end of it.
- Era
- c. 1550 CE
- Traditions
- Mesoamerican
Traits
- Domain
- Night, sorcery, fate, rulership, conflict
- Traditional form
- Black-striped, with an obsidian mirror in place of a foot
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
Opposed by
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
now Mexico City
The sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan, where the god of the night sky and the god of the dead both had houses.
In the precinct, where his impersonator was killed after a year of being treated as the god.
19.435, -99.131 · Wikidata Q774021
5 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 5 offices attributed to Tezcatlipoca, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- divination1
- social1
- martial1
- transformation1
- malefic1
divination
social
martial
transformation
malefic
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
3 texts
Which texts say so?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 3 texts that names Tezcatlipoca, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
3 texts, all inside a single century
The agent of that fall, working by mirror, by disguise and by drink rather than by force — the god who ruins another god's reputation and takes the city. Set against the corpus's other adversaries he is unusual in that he wins, and the tradition goes on honouring him for it.
Sees all in his obsidian mirror; grants and withdraws fortune without appeal; drives Quetzalcoatl from Tula.
Recorded at length by a man who calls him a devil and a demon throughout, and who nonetheless preserves the festival, the impersonator kept for a year and honoured before being killed, and the obsidian mirror. The corpus's cleanest instance of its own subject: the description is evidence, the framing is the recruitment.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Tezcatlipoca?
What rank is Tezcatlipoca?
How else is Tezcatlipoca spelled?
What is Tezcatlipoca said to do?
How old is Tezcatlipoca?
Nearest in the corpus
If Tezcatlipoca is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Quetzalcoatl
Feathered Serpent · Mesoamerican
The feathered serpent who goes down into the underworld to recover the bones of humanity. Here, for once, the serpent is not the monster.
Huitzilopochtli
The War God of the Mexica · Mesoamerican
The Mexica war god, born fully armed to defend his mother from his four hundred siblings — a tribal patron who became the state god of an empire and the sun that had to be fed.
Mictlantecuhtli
Lord of Mictlan · Mesoamerican
The Aztec god who rules the ninth and lowest underworld, where the ordinary dead arrive after a four-year journey. Nothing is punished there.
Tlaloc
He Who Makes Things Sprout · Mesoamerican
The Nahua rain god, who takes the drowned and the lightning-struck into a paradise of his own — and whose rites, as the Spanish friars recorded with horror, were performed on children.
The Lords of Xibalba
Underworld Lords · Mesoamerican
Twelve Maya lords of the underworld, each named for the sickness he inflicts, who trap visitors in a sequence of houses of ordeal. The Hero Twins outwit them.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
The books behind Tezcatlipoca
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Annals of Cuauhtitlan and the Legend of the Suns
Anonymous Nahua annalists; the Codex Chimalpopoca · c. 1570, from pre-conquest material · Nahuatl
Read Annals of Cuauhtitlan and the Legend of the Suns in full ↗Florentine Codex
Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua informants · 1545-1590 · Nahuatl and Spanish
Read Florentine Codex in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Bernardino de Sahagún · Wikimedia file page
Historia de las Indias de Nueva España
Fray Diego Durán · c. 1581 · Spanish
Read Historia de las Indias de Nueva España in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.