Do Thou Likewise/Poem to the Unknown God

"Then a recent king of Texcoco, the long-reigning poet Nezahualcoyotl, with a group of cultivated courtiers, had apparently been drawn to the potentially explosive idea of a single 'Unknown God', Ipalnemoani, a deity who was never seen and who was never represented by portraits: 'My house is hung with pictures. So is yours, one and only God,' Nezahualcoyotl had written, in one of his many moving poems. This poet-king's eloquent devotion to the god Tezcatlipoca, 'smoking mirror,' might seem to foreshadow the coming of a single inspiration: 'O lord, lord of the night, lord of the near, the night and the wind,' Mexicans would often pray, as if, in moments of perplexity, they required a unique recipient of supplication. Even if Nezahualcoyotl's poems are dismissed (as they sometimes are) as the skillful embroideries of his descendants, the Mexica plainly accepted that there was a grand supernatural force, of which all other gods were the expression, and which assisted the growth of man's dignity: one divine poem talked of precisely such a person. This force was the combination of the Lord of Duality, Ometecuhtly, and his lady, Omecihuatl, the ancestors of all the gods, who if almost in retirement, still decided the birth date of all beings. They were believed to live at the top of the world, in the thirteenth heaven, where the air was 'very cold, delicate and iced.'
In the remote past, in the nearby city which the Mexicans called Teotihuacan, 'place where gods are made,' there may even have been a cult of the immortality of the soul. There had thus been those who had said, 'When we die, it is not true that we die. For still we live. We are resurrected. We still live. We are awakened. Do thou likewise.'
Yet Nezahualcoyotl's 'Giver of Life' was not the focus of a major cult. The handsome, empty temple to him in Texcoco was not copied. Nor did Nezahualcoyotl abandon his belief in the traditional gods. There seems to have been no contradiction between Nezahualcoyotl's stress on the Divine Giver and his acceptance of the conventional pantheon." - "Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico," by Hugh Thomas