this mirror symbolized the haziness which is supposed to cloud the surface of a divinatory glass prior to the phenomenon of vision therein.
Thus from the shape beheld in the seer’s mirror, Tezcatlipocâ came to be regarded as the seer. That into which the wizard gazed became so closely identified with sorcery as to be thought of as wizard-like itself; for Tezcatlipocâ is, of all Mexican deities, the one most nearly connected with the wizard’s art. He is par excellence the nocturnal god who haunts the crossways and appears in a myriad phantom guises to the night-bound wayfarer. “These,” says Sahagun, “were masks that Tezcatlipocâ assumed to frighten the people.”
He wears the symbol of night upon his forehead; he is the moon, ruler of the night, the wizard who veils himself behind the clouds; he bears the severed arm of a woman who has died in childbed, as a magical instrument, as did the naualli of old Mexico. From him all ominous and uncanny sounds proceed: the howl of the jaguar (in which we perceive Tezcatlipocâ as the wizard metamorphosed into the wer-animal), and the foreboding cry of the uactli bird, the voc, the bird of Hurakan in the Popol Vuh.
Tezcatlipocâ was undoubtedly connected with the wind, and this leads me to suspect that in the course of his evolution he came to be thought of as among that class of magical stones which in some mysterious manner is considered capable of raising a tempest under the spell of the sorcerer.63 Of such a belief world-wide examples exist. In the Irish island of Fladdahuan such a stone was anointed when the fisher desired a wind64 and was kept in wool wrappings. A piece of pumice-stone drifted to Puka-Puka, says Lang,65 and was regarded as a god of winds and waves, to which