Tezcatlipoca

Trickster and Supreme Deity

Elizabeth Baquedano

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781646421138
  9781607322870
• eBook ISBN:
  9781607322887
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity brings archaeological evidence into the body of scholarship on "the lord of the smoking mirror," one of the most important Aztec deities. While iconographic and textual resources from sixteenth-century chroniclers and codices have contributed greatly to the understanding of Aztec religious beliefs and practices, contributors to this volume demonstrate the diverse ways material evidence expands on these traditional sources.

The interlocking complexities of Tezcatlipoca's nature, multiple roles, and metaphorical attributes illustrate the extent to which his influence penetrated Aztec belief and social action across all levels of late Postclassic central Mexican culture. Tezcatlipoca examines the results of archaeological investigations—objects like obsidian mirrors, gold, bells, public stone monuments, and even a mosaic skull—and reveals new insights into the supreme deity of the Aztec pantheon and his role in Aztec culture.

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The Archaeology of Tezcatlipoca

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MICHAEL E. SMITH

DOI: 10.5876/9781607322887.c001

From the seminal nineteenth-century works of Eduard Seler (1990–98) through the present day, scholars have emphasized the works of the chroniclers (primarily Sahagún and Durán) as primary sources on Aztec gods, myths, and ceremonies, coupled with ample use of the ritual or divinatory codices to illustrate religious themes and activities. This body of scholarship can be considered the standard or dominant approach to Aztec religion. Although intellectual perspectives and paradigms have changed through the decades, scholars return again and again to this same small set of primary sources. As a result, ethnohistorians and art historians now pose questions far more sophisticated and detailed than their predecessors of a few decades ago. Fortunately, the primary material is quite rich, and we are far from exhausting its potential to add to our understanding of Aztec religion.

The continuing reliance on a small number of sources by scholars working in the dominant scholarly approach to Aztec religion comes at a cost, however. Although our understanding of the details of Aztec iconography and symbolism has advanced greatly, we still know very little about many important topics that—for whatever reason—are not featured in the works of the chroniclers or the codices. Unless scholars can begin to incorporate other kinds of information, research on Aztec religion could become so detailed, involuted, and esoteric that it ceases to contribute to the wider task of illuminating the Prehispanic past. Fortunately, a nascent trend suggests that scholars are beginning to move beyond the confines of the chroniclers and codices to produce important new insights into Aztec religious beliefs and practices. The chapters in this book are part of that trend.

It is no accident that the new scholarly trend focuses on the deity Tezcatlipoca. Not only is the Lord of the Smoking Mirror one of the most important Aztec deities, but he is the god whose scholarship has clearly surpassed that of his siblings in quantity and quality. Although a number of significant studies of Tezcatlipoca have appeared in recent years (e.g., Carrasco 1991; Heyden 1989; Matos Moctezuma 1997; Olivier 2002; Saunders 1990; Valencia Rivera 2006), the majority of the credit for advancing scholarship on this deity must go to Guilhem Olivier. His detailed book-length examination of Tezcatlipoca is an important breakthrough in many ways (Olivier 1997); subsequent citations to this work will be to the English translation (Olivier 2003). Strange as it may seem, Olivier’s book is the first comprehensive book-length treatment of an Aztec deity. ¹

Among the significant accomplishments of Olivier’s book are its systematic comparisons among sources (e.g., tables of attributes of the deity images of Tezcatlipoca in the codices), the breadth of written sources consulted, the judicious analyses and evaluations of data and interpretations, and a serious regard for the material manifestations of the Tezcatlipoca cult. Olivier treats cult objects not just as objects that may contain iconographic texts but as important sources of material and contextual data in their own right. Although his approach to such objects is not as systematic or comprehensive as an archaeologist might hope, Olivier does demonstrate the very real advances in scholarship that can come when new kinds of data—beyond the chroniclers and codices—are brought to bear systematically on a topic in Aztec religion.

The chapters in this book build on the foundation of Olivier’s book, and they illustrate diverse ways of expanding traditional emphases on the standard sources. Olivier’s own chapter expands the perspective to incorporate another major deity, Quetzalcoatl. Careful comparative analysis is always a productive way to increase understanding of a topic, and the juxtaposition of these two deities is a productive approach. Susan Milbrath also applies a comparative framework in her comparison between Tezcatlipoca and the Maya deity Kawil. Her analyses encompass a much broader range of symbols and associations, and this is both a strength and a weakness. On the positive side, her study provides wider contextualization of the deities and their symbolism than the other chapters do, but on the negative side, this broad perspective makes specific comparisons more difficult to evaluate.

Juan José Batalla Rosado works within the framework of the standard sources—codices—but his work departs from past studies in its minute attention to visual detail in a highly systematic framework. He has shown the value of this approach in a variety of publications (Batalla Rosado 1997, 2002a, 2002b, 2007), and that tradition continues in the present chapter. The systematic comparisons and analyses carried out by Olivier (2003) and Batalla Rosado (this volume) represent a valuable method for continuing to derive insights from the standard sources. Elizabeth Baquedano’s chapter confirms the notion that the codices and chroniclers are far from exhausted as sources of continuing insight. The military and warfare associations of Tezcatlipoca have long been recognized in the literature, but numerous iconographic and symbolic details have remained unclear. By focusing on gold and bells, Baquedano extends our knowledge of an important aspect of Tezcatlipoca’s domain.

Two chapters move far beyond the standard documentary sources on Tezcatlipoca. Emily Umberger focuses on large stone public monuments, many of which have some sort of Tezcatlipoca imagery. She shows that these depictions relate less to the Tezcatlipoca cult than to the political rhetoric and propaganda that employed Tezcatlipoca as an icon of imperial power. The simple presence of images or attributes of this deity cannot therefore be assumed to relate to religion or ritual per se. This insight comes only by analyzing these monuments in their spatial and visual contexts. Cecelia Klein moves so far beyond the standard sources that her chapter is not really about the Aztec period at all but rather concerns the relevance of Tezcatlipoca for Christian representations in the Colonial period.

The Material Culture of Aztec Religion

One of the limitat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Archaeology of Tezcatlipoca
• 2 Iconographic Characteristics of Tezcatlipoca in the Representations of Central Mexico
• 3 Enemy Brothers or Divine Twins?
• 4 Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli
• 5 Tezcatlipoca as a Warrior
• 6 Gender Ambiguity and the Toxcatl Sacrifice
• 7 The Maya Lord of the Smoking Mirror
• References
• Index