offerings were made during hurricanes. Tezcatlipocâ is none other than the original “hurricane,” for he has been identified with the Hurakan of the Quiches of Guatemala alluded to in the Popol Vuh, from whose name the meteorological expression has been borrowed.
Whether or not he came to be looked upon as the wind of night which ravined through the empty streets and deserted countryside by virtue of the train of thought suggested above, many aspects of Tezcatlipocâ are eloquent of his boreal attributes. Thus, he is invisible and capricious, the object of mistrust among the people, who discerned in tempestuous weather a manifestation of his freakish bad temper. The myth in which he was described as pursuing Quetzalcoatl in tiger-form will, in the section which deals with that god, be indicated as an allegory of the clashing of the hurricane with the rain-bringing trade-wind. Lastly, as patron of war, of the warrior’s club and dance-house, he is, as the boisterous storm, emblematic of strife and discord. Seats of stone over-arched with green branches were provided for him throughout the city so that he might rest from his wanderings if he thought good.
In the Aztec mind stone was symbolic of sin. Thus Tezcatlipocâ in his variant, Itzlacoliuhqui, is the just avenger, who punishes evil swiftly and terribly, for obsidian as the sacrificial knife was the instrument of justice.66 The coldness of stone, its hardness and dryness, seem also to have given rise to the conception of him as god of the Toxcatl festival in the fifth month of the year, the dry season, when the sun stood at the zenith above Tenochtitlan. Thus, as the prayers to him eloquently affirm, he was the god of drought, of sereness, and barrenness.
In common with the majority of the greater Mexican deities, Tezcatlipocâ had a stellar connection. He