One of the most striking rites reported for him is the festival of Toxcatl, at which, according to the Florentine Codex and related colonial sources, a chosen youth lived for a year as the living image of the god, honoured and adorned, before being sacrificed, a ceremony whose account, like all such, reaches us only through post-conquest texts and must be read with that limitation. In the myth-history of central Mexico Tezcatlipoca is the great adversary of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, and one widely told story has him trick Quetzalcoatl into drunkenness and disgrace and so drive him into exile, a rivalry that later chroniclers wove into the traditions surrounding the coming of the Spanish. He belongs, with Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec, to the group of creator gods the Mexica set at the origin of the world.
Spanish missionary chroniclers of the sixteenth century, confronting a deity of night, sorcery and moral testing whose favour and wrath seemed arbitrary, frequently described Tezcatlipoca in terms borrowed from the Christian devil, a reading modern scholars treat cautiously as an artefact of the friars' own theological categories rather than a neutral account of Mexica belief. Sahagun's informants, by contrast, preserved prayers to Tezcatlipoca that address him as an all-seeing, all-knowing judge of human conduct, closer to a stern moral governor than to a tempter, and the disparity between the friars' demonic gloss and the god's own devotional language recorded in Nahuatl is one of the clearer instances in Mesoamerican studies of colonial-era description distorting the deity it claims to record.