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(More customer reviews)If you are wanting to know everything there is to know about the fascinating Aztec deity, Tezcatlipoca, this is certainly the book for you. Granted, it is the only full length book in English on this figure, but its mastery of the subject makes all other books moot anyway. This is an academic book, and I suspect most people reading it are either specialists in Mesoamerican archeology or history, but I'd recommend it to someone interested in general mythology as well (at least someone well read in that area). You might want to start with _The Flayed God: The Mesoamerican Mythological Tradition_ by Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman for an introduction to the general mythology of the area. I know this isn't a great review, but I figure if you are looking for a book on Tezcatlipoca you won't really need a review (you probably already get the "Smoke and Mirrors" reference), I mainly wanted to give the book the five stars it deserves, so I figured I'd ramble a bit while I was at it. A deity as complex, ambiguous, interesting, and important (at least to the Aztecs - and as "Hurakan" to the Mayans) as Tezcatlipoca (he's even an amputee!) deserves wider attention.
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Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, "Lord of the Smoking Mirror" (Mesoamerican Worlds Series)Now available for the first time in English, Guilhem Olivier's Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God is a masterful study of Tezcatlipoca, one of the greatest but least understood deities in the Mesoamerican pantheon. An enigmatic and melodramatic figure, "the Lord of the Smoking Mirror" was both drunken seducer and mutilated transgressor and, although he severely punished those who violated pre-Columbian moral codes, he also received mortal confessions. A patron deity to kings and warriors as well as a protector of slaves, Tezcatlipoca often clashed in epic confrontation with his "enemy brother" Quetzalcoatl, the famed "Feathered Serpent." Yet these powers of Mesoamerican mythology collaborated to create the world, and their common attributes hint toward a dual character.In a sophisticated and systematic tour through the sources and problems related to Tezcatlipoca's protean powers and shifting meanings, Olivier guides the reader skillfully through the symbolic names of this great god, from his representation on skins and stones to his relationship to ritual knives and other related deities. Drawing upon iconographic material, chronicles written in both Spanish and the native Nahuatl, and the rich contributions of ethnography, Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God—like the mirror of Tezcatlipoca in which the fates of mortals were reflected—reveals an important but obscured portion of the cosmology of pre-Columbian Mexico.
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