This figure can be read facing forward or backward with equal coherence—and that ambiguity appears deliberate. Facing forward, the jade mask covers the figure's face, transforming it into an active divine being; facing backward, the mask sits at the back of the head, facing west, toward where the Sun travels each night. Both readings are internally consistent but yield different meanings, and that possibility of dual interpretation is not accidental in Teotihuacan art. It appears in at least four other murals at the site where a figure admits simultaneous interpretations depending on the condition assigned to it—living or dead, present or absent. The ambivalence is not a flaw, but a device for representing entities that exist in two planes at once, simultaneously a thing and its opposite.