Stories of Tēzcatlīpōca
Tēzcatlīpōca's myths are all contest: with the earth-monster, with Quetzalcōātl, with the proud — he is the force that measures the strong by breaking them.
To make the world, Tēzcatlīpōca and Quetzalcōātl descended to the primordial waters where the caiman-monster Cipactli floated, all mouths, snapping at every god who offered a limb. Tēzcatlīpōca gave his own foot as bait; the jaws closed on it — the sources preserve the detail that his foot, torn off, became the obsidian mirror that smokes — and in the moment the monster held him, the two gods seized her and tore her apart: her back became the earth, her eyes the springs, her mouth the cave from which humankind would emerge (Leyenda de los Soles; cf. Florentine Codex Bk. 7). Every Aztec king thereafter ruled over ground purchased with the god's flesh, and every sorcerer's mirror carried the same debt. The myth defines the god in a single stroke: the one who will pay a body-part to win a world, and who keeps, forever after, the gleaming proof of what it cost.
The Leyenda de los Soles counts the ages: the first was Four Jaguar, Nahui Ocēlōtl, whose sun was Tēzcatlīpōca and whose people were giants; the second Four Wind, whose sun was Quetzalcōātl; the third Four Rain, the sun of Tlāloc, ended in fire-rain; the fourth Four Water, the sun of Chalchiuhtlicue, ended in flood. The first age ended by fratricide: Quetzalcōātl struck Tēzcatlīpōca from the sky with a club, and jaguars devoured the giant people of the fallen world. Through the succession of suns the two brothers keep unmaking each other's worlds — the Aztec cosmos is their long quarrel, and the present Fifth Sun, Four Movement, is only the latest armistice, held together by sacrifice. The doctrine is stark: time itself is strife, every order is temporary, and the god of the smoking mirror is the one who reminds the others of it, age after age.
Against Quetzalcōātl, priest-king of Tōllān, the night god came as a sorcerer. The sources differ in the details — the mirror in one telling, the enchanted pulque in another — but the sequence is constant: Tēzcatlīpōca showed the plumed god his own aged face in an obsidian mirror ('behold yourself, lord — your flesh is withered'), then broke him with drink until, shamed before his city, Quetzalcōātl burned his palace and departed eastward, immolating himself on a raft of serpents or sailing toward the dawn (Histoyre du Mechique; Anales de Cuauhtitlan). The Aztecs read the myth as the engine of history: Tēzcatlīpōca destroys every golden age, because every golden age conceals the strife that founded it, and he awaits his brother at every new shore. When the Spaniards came from the east, some wondered aloud which god had returned — and which had been waiting.
Each year the Aztecs chose a flawless captive youth to be the ixiptla, the god's living image. For a year he walked as Tēzcatlīpōca: taught the flute, adorned, decked with flowers, given four maidens as wives in the names of four goddesses; through the streets he blessed the people — 'I am Tēzcatlīpōca, I am the god.' Twenty days before the end he was wed to the goddesses in the temple. At the feast of Toxcatl he climbed the temple steps breaking his flutes one by one, and at the summit his heart was offered to the night (Florentine Codex Bk. 2; Durán, Bk. 1). The friars who recorded it called it devilry and could not stop describing it: the most beautiful death in the Aztec year, and the empire's meditation on how divinity wears the flesh for a season and then puts it off — the god discarding, as he always does, what he has finished using.
Night, Sorcery, Strife, and the God-Impersonator
Tēzcatlīpōca is the Aztec night given will: the god of the obsidian mirror in which all things are seen, patron of rulers and sorcerers, tempter and destroyer of his own brother Quetzalcōātl. He is not evil — he is the shadow the world requires, and the Aztecs honored him with their most terrible beauty: the year-long god made flesh.
Obsidian polished to black glass: it shows the future, the hidden, and the viewer's true face.
Torn off by the earth-monster Cipactli in the creation — the mirror smokes where the foot was.
He was the sun of the first age — the jaguar sun — devoured with his world when it ended.
At Toxcatl, a flawless youth lived as the god for a year — then climbed the temple steps to die as him.
From the original script to the living URL
Tēzcatlīpōca
The name survives only in scholarly transliteration. Tēzcatlīpōca is the standard Nahuatl romanisation, documented in academic sources — “Smoking mirror”. Its macron-length vowels preserve distinctions lost in plain ASCII.
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual nahuatl names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
tezcatlipoca
Reduced to plain tezcatlipoca, the name loses everything that made it specific: macron-length vowels. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Tēzcatlīpōca
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Tēzcatlīpōca restores macron-length vowels, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Tēzcatlīpōca.com → xn--tzcatlpca-bhb3yro.com
The non-ASCII characters in Tēzcatlīpōca are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Tēzcatlīpōca.
Owned, ideal, and ASCII forms of Tēzcatlīpōca
Tēzcatlīpōca
The live temple domain — tēzcatlīpōca.com.
Tēzcatlīpohca
A second live spelling — tēzcatlīpohca.com.
tezcatlipōca
A second live spelling — tezcatlipōca.com.
tezcatlipoca
The plain ASCII fallback — what DNS and legacy systems see.
How Tēzcatlīpōca was spoken
How Tēzcatlīpōca is preserved in writing
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual nahuatl names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
Contribute scholarly provenance →The lore you have read is the living myth. Extended Lore opens the scholarly vault beneath it: the cult and its material remains, a history of the image, the name after antiquity, a meditation on what the name still means, and the full scholarly apparatus — etymology, orthography, sources.
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