he so chooses, send rain and plenty, and this aspect of him seems to account for his variously coloured disguises. That these were, indeed, regarded as practically separate divine forms is clear from the first chapter of the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, which alludes to the Black and Red Tezcatlipocâ as two entirely different gods.
Tezcatlipocâ, at the period of the Conquest, had developed attributes of a more lofty kind than any of those already described. Like Quetzalcoatl, and because he was a god of the wind or atmosphere, he came to be regarded as the personification of the breath of life. In the mind of savage man the wind is usually the giver of breath, the great store-house of respiration, the source of immediate life. In many mythologies the name of the principal deity is synonymous with that for wind, and in others the words “soul” and “breath” have a common origin. It has been suggested that the Hebrew Jahveh (the archaic form of Jehovah) is connected with the Arabic hawah, to blow or breathe, and that Jahveh was originally a wind or tempest god.
Our word “spiritual” is derived from the Latin spirare , to blow; the Latin animus , “spirit,” is the same word as the Greek anemos , “wind,” and psukhe has a similar origin. All are directly evolved from verbal roots expressing the motion of the wind or the breath. The Hebrew word ruah is equivalent to both “wind” and “spirit,” as is the Egyptian kneph . If we turn to the American mythologies, nija in the language of the Dakota means “breath,” or “life”; in Netela piuts is “life,” “breath,” and “soul”; the Yakuna language of Oregon has wkrisha , “wind,” wkrishmit , “life.” The Creeks applied to their supreme deity the name Esaugetuh Emissee,