Are you ready?
Almost every ancient civilization we have record of today believed in a panoply of gods; a trend that began with the Mesopotamians, and trickled on through the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus. We know those mythologies well enough. We read those tales and allude to those panthea with regularity.
But it is to this long line that the Aztecs belong as well -- faithful worshippers of fire, earth, sky, and everything between. Among the most revered of their deities was Tezcatlipoca, whose powers went far beyond the attributes of war and wind he was associated with -- the Nahuatl tongue is littered with his epithets, with none capturing his greatness completely: "Smoking Mirror"; "Enemy of Both Sides"; "Possessor of Sky and Earth"; "He by Whom We Live.