Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli

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 Tezcatlipoca's material traces-the 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 deity's 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

Geography · Political science · Politics · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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