Realizing that some definite and important meaning must underlie the remarkable representations of Tezcatlipoca, I resorted to all possible means to gain an understanding of them. Referring to Nahuatl dictionaries, I found a variety of synonymous names for a person who limped or was lame or maimed. Amongst them was Popoztequi from poztequi, the verb, "to break a leg." Other names were xopuztequi, xotemol and Icxipuztequi (icxitl=foot). The latter name happened to be familiar to me, for the commentator of the Vatican Codex, Padre Rios, gives it as the name of a god and translates it as "the lame devil." He records it immediately after Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of the North, and designates it as the name of one of the four principal and primitive gods of the Mexicans.
The commentator of the Telleriano-Remensis Codex, moreover, records that these four gods were "said to have been stars and had fallen from the heavens. At the present time there are stars in the firmament named after them" (Kingsborough, vol. v, pp. 132 and 162).
Other synonymous terms for lame persons were icxinecuiltic and xonecuiltic. Tzimpuztequi, on the other hand, besides meaning lame, also signified something crooked, bent or incurvated. The second name furnished me with an important clue, for Sahagun distinctly records that the native name for the constellation Ursa Minor was Xonecuilli and that it was figured as an S (Historia, 1. VII, cap. 3). Besides, the Academia MS. of his monumental work contains the native drawing of this star-group reproduced as fig. 16, no. 1. He also states that S-shaped loaves of bread named xonecuilli were made at a certain festival in honor of this constellation, while the B.N. MS. records that a peculiar recurved weapon, figured in the hands of deities, was named xonequitl (fig. 16, nos. 2 and 3).
The above data furnished me with indisputable evidence of the existence, in ancient Mexico, of a species of star cult connected with the circumpolar constellations and with Tezcatlipoca, the lord of the North, the central figure of the native cosmogony. It was puzzling to find this god connected not only with the Ursa Major but also with Ursa Minor, but an indication suggesting a possible explanation or reconciliation of these apparent inconsistencies is furnished by the descriptions of the strange ritual performance, which was annually repeated at the festival Tlacaxipehualiztli and was evidently the dramatization of a sacred myth.