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 expre...