Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

On Boxing Day I began reading Omega Point, a Whitley Strieber novel I’d never read before. It’s set in the then-future 2020, when the Earth has entered the atmosphere of a supernova, the extinction of humanity is imminent, and the protagonists must invent time travel in time to save the species.

You think you know what to expect from a sci-fi setup of that kind — but then, in an utterly Strieberian twist, it quickly becomes apparent that each of the major characters, none of whom is Mexican, “is” in some sense the incarnation of a different ancient Mexican god. Dr. David Ford, the main protagonist is, naturally, Quetzalcoatl; and a baddie called Mack the Cat is Tezcatlipoca.

In Mexico City, in the embassy's garden, he had watched the gods dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.

He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato, the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That's where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.

I’m only a third of the way through the book, and I’m not sure where the author is going with this, but it’s certainly unusual. (I note in passing that Quetzalcoatl being Jesus is a common Mormon folk belief, and that I myself have proposed that Abel was Osiris.)

Just after reading the passage quoted above, I put down the book and did a bit of browsing on 4chan. Someone had posted an /x/ thread called “ So Lucifer is Quetzalcoatl.” One of the replies was:

Once again, ol lucy does not have the copyright on scaly cylindrical bodies. Tezcatlipoca is what you are looking for.

Another character in the novel is named Caroline Light (as in Lucifer, “light-bearer”), and she, too, is secretly a member of the Mexican pantheon.

She was Citilalinique, the Lady of the Starry Skirt, and her work was to bring the light of understanding to an ignorant age. Light the bringer of light. Nominative determinism.

This led me to check the Wikipedia article on nominative determinism. In the background section, it explains how surnames originated and gives as an example that “John from Acton became John Acton.” The story in Omega Point takes place at the Acton Clinic, a high-end psychiatric institution founded by Herbert Acton.