Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, is among the most powerful and complex gods of the Mexica pantheon, an all-seeing, capricious deity of night, sorcery, rulership, fate and the hidden. His name refers to the obsidian mirror of the diviner, and he is often shown with such a mirror in place of a torn-off foot or smoking at his temple. Where many Mesoamerican gods have fixed domains, Tezcatlipoca is protean: invisible and everywhere present, giver and destroyer of fortune, patron of kings, who were installed as his representatives, and of sorcerers, and the tester of human beings, whom he could raise up or ruin at will. He is bound up with the jaguar and with the telpochcalli, the schools of the young warriors.
Aztec cosmology organised Tezcatlipoca into a fourfold scheme tied to colour and direction: the Black Tezcatlipoca of the north, most often the one meant by the name alone, stood alongside a Red Tezcatlipoca in the east usually identified with Xipe Totec, a White Tezcatlipoca in the west identified with Quetzalcoatl, and a Blue Tezcatlipoca in the south identified with the tribal war-god Huitzilopochtli, so that a single divine principle, refracted through colour, was understood to preside over the whole compass of the world. This structure, recorded in colonial sources such as the Codex Rios and the writings of Bernardino de Sahagun, shows how thoroughly Mexica religious thought used spatial and chromatic symbolism to organise its highest gods.