The Mirror and the Road East

The fall is told as a trick. In these accounts Tezcatlipoca comes to Tollan, shows Quetzalcoatl his own face in a mirror, and gives him pulque to drink; what follows is shame, and a departure. From there the sources diverge. In one he burns himself on the shore and his heart rises as the morning star; in another he leaves eastward over the water on a raft of serpents, promising to return. The two endings are never reconciled in the texts, and it is the second one, the promise, that the sixteenth century would later find a use for.