tezcatlalli (FCbk11f216r)

The frame around the mirror may represent a colonial innovation, but this requires further research. [See Ian Mursell, “See and Be Seen,” {a href=”https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/artefacts/smoking-mirrors/1000”>Mexicolore.] Also, this is the first hieroglyph or glyphic element of a mirror in this digital collection that shows it was conceptualized (at least by the last third of the sixteenth century) as something being used for viewing a face. Frontal views of faces are rather rare in this collection, seemingly preserved for divinities or supernatural beings. In pre-contact Nahua culture, mirrors were associated with Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), who was believed to be able to view all that was going on in the world by using his mirror. [See Aztecs, Eduardo Matos Moctesuma and Felipe Solis Olguín, eds. (2002), 473.] In Classic-period Teotihuacan and the Maya zone, mirrors seem to have been viewed as supernatural portals, and they were placed in bowls, symbolically representing water, which could also reflect things, of course. [See Karl Taube’s work on mirrors in Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacan, Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., (2003), 115.] Viewing one’s own face, while surely practiced by Nahuas, was perhaps more of a vanity concept in European cultures and more of a religious one among Nahuas. Finally, the use of the term tlalli for ground stone adds another meaning to the many translations, which more commonly refer to a piece of land, land in general terms, a region, and the Earth.