Elizabeth Baquedano - Tezcatlipoca. Trickster and Supreme Deity

Symbolizing Tezcatlipoca

NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS AND ELIZABETH BAQUEDANO

DOI: 10.5876/9781607322887.c000

A presence of absence defines the ambivalent nature of Tezcatlipoca, the supreme deity of the Late Postclassic Aztec pantheon. In the dark ephemeral reflection of his obsidian mirror and the transient sound of his ceramic flower pipes lies the sensuous nature of a god who mediates materiality and invisibility with omniscience and omnipresence. These qualities are evident not only for the Aztecs but also for scholars today. As Michael Smith (this volume) points out, only recently have we begun to move beyond the written words and painted images of the codices to assess a different kind of Tezcatlipocas material tracesthe objects in which the numinous becomes tangible.

In one sense, Tezcatlipoca was a reification of age-old Mesoamerican patterns of symbolic thought, which abstracted supernatural connotations from the natural world. Specifically, Tezcatlipoca emerged as a supernatural embodiment of cultural attributes inspired by, and bestowed upon, aspects of regional geography/geology and local fauna by the Late Postclassic, pre-Aztec cultures of the Valley of Mexico that were shaped by analogical symbolic reasoning and political exigencies (see Umberger, this volume). Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the deitys relationship with obsidian (itztli) and the jaguar (ocelotl)two natural kinds imbued with ideational significance across Mesoamerica, recombined in metaphysics, and given physical expression in a distinctive kind of material culture: obsidian mirrors (Smith, this volume).

These reflective devices were powerfully ambiguous, not least because they shone with a dark light. They partook of what has been called a pan-Amerindian aesthetic of brilliance, ). Baquedanos (this volume) analysis of Tezcatlipocas golden ornamentation, where brilliance and the sounds of bells (symbolic of warfare) reinforce this conceptual association, is epitomized by Durns description.

Tezcatlipoca was thus a product of both a conceptual landscape that drew upon the physical environment (and what was made of it metaphorically) and a cultural landscape composed of the ever-changing political milieu in which he operated, from the Late Postclassic to the Early Colonial period (, 22527).

Hitherto, with the exception of Guilhem ). Our focus is on the relationships among landscape, deity, and constructions of worldview as mediated by objects and their role in ideological enforcement.