85. Tezcatlipoca

Tezcatlipoca: Aztec God of the Night, Death, Beauty, Sorcery, and War

100 Gods and Goddesses Challenge

"Ugghhh I hate it when this thing fogs up."

Usually I try to be subtle and keep the next god challenge relatively secret but a couple of people probably saw me looking up stuff for this guy.

Okay, awesome thing about Tezcatlipoca.
When you're reading about him, it comes up over and over how he is Quetzalcoatl's exact opposite and that they're rivals for all eternity. So it would be ridiculously easy to cast Tezzy here in the role of the evil villain, right? (Especially since the Spanish were a bit obsessed with Quetzalcoatl and kept saying that they looked like him...) BUT ACTUALLY IT'S A FUNNIER STORY THAN THAT.

The Christian missionaries tried evvverything to convert the Aztecs to Christianity, and nothing was working. Then they must have found out about the festival dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, which involves a young man impersonating the god being sacrificed. (Having his heart torn out, to be exact. Before, he'd live a year as if he were the god on earth.) The missionaries, for whatever reason, thought that this sacrifice somehow paralleled Jesus' suffering on the cross... painted a figure of Jesus black to try and convince the Aztecs to join their religion.

This must have been hilarious, especially since Aztec was such a troll to the Spanish and their missionaries.
Seriously I have to put this in a comic or something.

Of course, the Aztecs never would have thought of him as evil. He's kind of like the Aztec version of Thoth in my head, always playing both sides. XD;

Anyway, Tezcatlipoca literally means "Smoking Mirror" and is often depicted with an obsidian mirror or two. Sometimes his foot is shown as a mirror since he lost it while fighting an earth monster with Quetzalcoatl. IDK it must be difficult to admire your reflection when your mirror keeps smoking. XD

I saw a famous little rendition of him at the British Museum last summer: [link] Cute, eh?

Aggh there's a ton of stuff that I could say about him but I'm gonna go clean up around here a bit. I've got this huge stack of paper to go through ugghhh.

Good niiiiight! >w<