Tezcatlipoca is a god with considerable pretensions to an abstract and lofty divinity. His appearance was not prepossessing; his image, as Bernal has described it, wore the head of a bear, and was covered with tiny mirrors.** Various attributes, especially the mirror and a golden ear, showed him forth as the beholder of the conduct of men and the hearer of prayer. He was said, while he lived on earth, to have been a kind of Ares in the least amiable aspect of the god, a maker of wars and discord.*** Wealth and power were in his gift. He was credited with ability to destroy the world when he chose. Seats were consecrated to him in the streets and the public places; on these might no man sit down. * Compare Maspero on "Egyptian Beast-Gods," Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel., vol. i. and chapter postea, on "Egyptian Divine Myths". **The name means "shining mirror". Acosta makes him the god of famine and pestilence (p. 353). *** Sahagun, i. 3. He was one of the two gods whose extraordinary birth, and death by "happy despatch," that their vitality might animate the motionless sun, have already been described.* Tezcatlipoca, like most of the other gods, revived, and came back from the sky to earth. At a place called Tulla he encountered another god or medicine-man, Quetzalcoatl, and their legends become inextricably entangled in tales of trickery, animal metamorphosis, and perhaps in vague memories of tribal migrations. Throughout Tezcatlipoca brought grief on the people called Toltecs, of whom Quetzalcoatl was the divine culture-hero.** His statues, if we may believe Acosta, did him little credit. "In Cholula, which is a commonwealth of Mexico, they worship a famous idol, which was the god of merchandise.... It had the forme of a man, but the visage of a little bird with a red bill and above a combe full of wartes."*** * _Antea_, "Myths of the Origins of Things ". ** Sahagnn, iii. 5, 6. *** Acosta, _Nalurall and Morall Historic of the East and West Indies_, London, 1604.