Topic: Flowers from Hell

[Yeshu]

https://medium.com/@amota005/hymn-to-tezcatlipoca-you-cant-serve-god-and-ser-mam%C3%B3n-20c290d1c74e

He had many epithets which alluded to different aspects: Titlacauan ("We Are His Slaves"), Ipalnemoani ("He by Whom We Live"), Necoc Yaotl ("Enemy of Both Sides"), Tloque Nahuaque ("Lord of the Near and the Nigh"), Yaotl (“Warrior”), Telpochtli (“Young Man”),  Yohualli Èhecatl ("Night, Wind"), Ome Acatl ("Two Reed"), and Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque ("Possessor of the Sky and Earth")

"The greatest depiction in Aztec mythology of this selfless selfishness/selfish selflessness, is the Sun god and creator god alongside Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca. As Nikolas Schreck states in his essay in Flowers From Hell: A Satanic Reader: “…the heathen priests of Tezcatlipoca referred to their patron deity as Yaotl Ihuic Necoc, Old Enemy Against Both Sides,” who, as a war god originating with the Toltec, feared even by the conquistadores as another iteration of the Satan himself — adversary to both god and man — creates new realities in the wake of every destruction, thereby transcending both of these concepts by the very act of unifying them. To be rebellious, even revolutionary, in this way is redefined: no longer is it the attainment of personal freedom by all means necessary, even if it costs you or your neighbor their life, but as the pursuit of any path that can lead to a new beginning; the sacrifice of every individual comfort (as Anzaldúa implies in her discussion of la facultad which itself seems to be a reiteration of Jung’s concept of individuation) for the sake of the health and happiness of the self as an aspect and reflection of a larger whole; as a subject and follower of only the sun, who provides us with the only movimiento of any value — the movement of the earth revolving in its orbit, seeking out (night and day, as we wander and work upon the land and even after they bury us back under it) the sun’s ever-present warmth. Even if we lose our way, if we fail to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure our continued existence, if in spite of all our theorizing and professing of whatever beliefs we think represent an ideology of sustainability — if we fail to honor Tezcatlipoca, and even if the world must burn as a result — life will prevail. As it is with Tezcatlipoca (the probable precursor to Huitzilopochtli, as explained by Emily Umberger in Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli: Political Dimensions of Aztec Deities), so too is it with the earth (Tonantzin/Malinalxochitl) that in the midst of utter destruction, lies the seed of rebirth (Human Sacrifice/Heart of Copil): even as the world is thrown into crisis by rising global temperatures, there is still the possibility of a renewal of life

[Yeshu]

A presence of absence defines the ambivalent nature of Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror), the supreme deity of the Late Postclassic Aztec pantheon. In the dark ephemeral refection 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...

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