Quetzalcoatl

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The quetzal will not live in a cage. The bird of the cloud forest, whose two long tail-coverts of iridescent green were valued in central Mexico above any metal, was taken for its plumes and released, or so the tribute-keepers held, because a captive quetzal sickens and dies. Its feathers were the color of the wet leaf and the standing maize, the green that meant life and the season of rain. To set those feathers on a serpent — a creature of the dust and the dark hollow under the stone, that cannot leave the ground — was to make a thing that should not exist: the earth-bound snake lifted into the high free air, the lowest power of the world wearing the brightest. The Nahuatl word holds the two halves without reconciling them. Quetzalli, the precious plume; coatl, the snake. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent — and the same compound names a being who is at once of the soil and of the sky, and whose work, across the long memory of Mesoamerica, was always the joining of the two.

Quetzalcoatl as painted in the Codex Borbonicus, an early-colonial Mexica screenfold. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The serpent of immense antiquity

Quetzalcoatl is among the oldest gods of Mexico, older by far than the Mexica who ruled Tenochtitlan when the Spanish came, and his genealogy is read less in a line of descent than in stone laid down over more than a thousand years. The crested, feather-bodied serpent appears already in Olmec carving of the first millennium before the common era, the earliest civilization of the Gulf coast. By the height of Teotihuacan, the vast city of the central plateau, the feathered serpent had a temple of his own. At the heart of the walled precinct the Spanish later called the Ciudadela stands a stepped pyramid built between 150 and 200 of the common era, its façade ranked with great tenoned serpent heads — roughly two hundred and sixty of them by the usual count — rising from collars of carved plumes, the snouts thrust out over the stair. Beneath the structure archaeologists found the graves of two hundred and more, men arrayed as warriors with weapons and ornaments of human teeth, laid down when the building was raised: an offering at the founding, the feathered serpent’s temple consecrated in death.

The Temple of the Feathered Serpent in the Ciudadela at Teotihuacan, its façade ranked with plumed serpent heads, built c. 150–200 CE. Photograph by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Whether the people of Teotihuacan called the god by a name the later Nahuatl-speakers would recognize cannot be known; the city left no readable script. But the image traveled. Through the Classic centuries and into the Postclassic the feathered serpent moved along the roads of trade and pilgrimage and war, carved at Tula and at Xochicalco and at Cholula, where the largest pyramid in the Americas by volume rose as the god’s great cult center. To the south, in the Maya country, the same being wore Maya names — Kukulkan among the Yucatec, Q’uq’umatz among the K’iche’, each compound built from the same parts, the quetzal and the snake. The relation among these feathered serpents is one of the long arguments of the field, kinship more than parentage, motifs circulating in every direction at once across Mesoamerica. What the Mexica inherited was not an invention of their own but a god already ancient, whom they fitted into their own account of the world.

By the time of the Mexica empire, that god held several offices at once, and they do not collapse into one another. He is the wind, in the form called Ehecatl: the breath that goes before the rain, sweeping the road clean for the rain-bringers, and his wind-temples were built round, so the moving air would find no corner to catch on. He is the planet the Mexica watched more closely than any star but the sun — Venus, the morning star, whose rising before the dawn and long disappearance and return were bound to the god’s own death and coming-back. He is the patron of the priesthood and of the calendar and the painted books, of the scribes and the readers of days; the high priests of Tenochtitlan bore his name as their title. And he is set, across the whole mythology, against Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, the dark and capricious lord of fate — the two of them at once brothers, rivals, and the paired hands by which the cosmos was made and unmade.

A basalt sculpture of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, the wind, recognizable by the long beaked mouth-mask, from Calixtlahuaca (Late Postclassic). CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The bones gathered out of the dead

The work for which Quetzalcoatl is best remembered begins after a catastrophe. In the cosmology of the Mexica the present world is not the first but the fifth — four ages, four suns, came before it, and each ended in ruin: devoured by jaguars, swept off by wind, burned in a rain of fire, drowned in flood. The fourth age ended in the flood, and its people were gone, the dead drawn down into Mictlan, the land of the dead in the lowest of the underworlds, the realm of Mictlantecuhtli, lord of that place. When the gods agreed to make the present age, the Fifth Sun, there was a world to live in but no one to live in it. The bones of the prior humanity lay in the keeping of death.

Quetzalcoatl went down to fetch them. He descended through the levels of Mictlan to the lord of the dead and asked for the precious bones, that humankind might live again. Mictlantecuhtli, who does not give up what is his, set him a trial — to sound a conch-shell trumpet and circle the underworld with it — and the conch he was given had no holes bored in it for the sound to come out. The feathered serpent had the worms hollow it and the bees go inside to make it roar, and so he met the condition and was grudgingly granted the bones. But the lord of the dead does not let the living leave easily. As Quetzalcoatl carried the bones up, a pit was opened in his path, or a flock of quail startled him; he stumbled and fell, the bones spilled and broke, and that — the account holds — is why people are not all of one height, why the bones come in their unequal sizes. He gathered up the broken pieces, bundled them, and carried them out of the dead.

What he did with them is the heart of the matter. The bones were brought to the old goddess Cihuacoatl, the woman-serpent, who ground them like maize on the grinding-stone. And over the ground bone Quetzalcoatl drew his own blood — from the ear, from the tongue, from the soft places of the body, the blood let in the manner of the priests’ penance — and the moistened meal quickened, and the people of the Fifth Sun stood up alive. They were made from the dead of an earlier world, reground and rejoined, and they were made living by a god’s blood spent for them. This is the root of an obligation that runs through the whole religion: humankind exists because the gods bled and broke themselves to make it — Quetzalcoatl in Mictlan, and the gods at large who, in the parallel account, cast themselves into the fire at Teotihuacan to set the new sun moving in the sky. The world is a gift already paid for in divine blood, and it stands forever in debt. The blood that the people of the Aztec religion returned in their own rites — the heart lifted to the sun, the penitential bloodletting of the priests — answered a debt the gods had opened first. Within the frame the logic is exact and not cruel: the sun and the rain and the maize are not owed to the living for nothing, and the Fifth Sun, like the four before it, can end. What keeps it moving is the repayment of what was spent to begin it.

The priest-king who would not bleed the people

Beside the maker-god there is a man, and the two are braided so tightly in the record that they cannot be wholly pulled apart. The Mexica and their neighbors remembered a ruler of the golden age of Tula — the Toltec capital they regarded as the fount of all art and learning, of toltecayotl, the quality of being civilized — who bore the god’s name as his own: Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, “Our Prince One-Reed Quetzalcoatl,” a priest-king of immense holiness. Where the dates are given at all they fall in the tenth century, and they belong to legend more than to a verifiable reign. In the accounts gathered after the conquest he is the model of the good ruler and the devout priest: he fasts and lets his own blood in penance, he builds the temples, and — the detail that the colonial sources press hardest — he refuses to offer human lives, accepting only butterflies and snakes and the bloodletting of his own body, and forbidding the killing of people on his altars.

For this he was undone, and his undoing was the work of his rival. Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, came against him by sorcery. In the best-known telling, recorded from Nahua informants in the sixteenth century, the dark god came disguised as an old man bearing a medicine that would restore the aging king’s vigor — and the medicine was pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, the drink that a priest must not touch. Quetzalcoatl drank, and grew light, and called for more, and called his sister to drink with him, and in their drunkenness the two forgot their austerities and fell into shame. Waking to what he had done, the priest-king could not stay. He left Tula and went east, toward the dawn, toward the edge of the sea — to the place called Tlapallan, the red land, on the Gulf coast. There, in the version most often told, he laid himself on a pyre and burned, and his heart rose into the sky and became the morning star: the planet Venus, the god’s own celestial face, returning to its source. In another strand he sets out over the water on a raft of serpents, eastward, with a vow that he would come again in his year. The fall of the priest pulls the city down with him — Tula, in the memory, is ruined behind him by the same sorcery that exiled him.

The historical Tula is real enough — a Toltec city north of the basin of Mexico, with its colonnades and its great stone warrior-columns — and a real ruler, or several, may stand somewhere behind the legend. But the Topiltzin of the texts is a figure of memory looking back through the conquest, and the morality of the story, the priest-king who would shed no human blood and was destroyed for his virtue, carries a weight that the colonial setting makes hard to read cleanly. He is the god as the principle of order and learning and self-restraint, set against the dark unaccountable power that breaks him — and whether that contrast was always so sharp before the friars came, or was sharpened in the telling, is among the things the record will not settle.

Mistaken for no god

The afterlife of Quetzalcoatl is dominated by a single famous story, and the story is largely not true in the form it is told. It is held, in countless retellings, that when Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast in 1519 — from the east, over the sea, in the direction the priest-king had departed and vowed to return — the Mexica and their lord Moctezuma took him for the returning Quetzalcoatl, and that this is why the empire faltered before a few hundred Spaniards: its ruler paralyzed by the conviction that a god had come back in his year.

The trouble is the date of the story. It cannot be shown to exist before the conquest. The earliest full versions appear in the 1550s and after — more than thirty years on — in the work of a Spanish historian who never crossed the ocean and in the great Nahua-informant compilation assembled under the Franciscans, where the prophecy of a returning lord serves to make sense of a catastrophe after it has happened. Cortés himself, in the letters he wrote to his king at the time, never claims to have been mistaken for a god. The form of the returning-deity tale fits a Christian shape — the awaited messiah, the prophecy fulfilled — laid over the older Mexican figure by missionaries with reason to read the conquest as foretold and willed. The weight of recent scholarship treats it as a post-conquest construction rather than sober pre-Hispanic fact; as one survey of the question puts it plainly, the Mexica did not believe the conquistadors were gods, and the companion claim that Moctezuma froze before a divine Cortés belongs with it among the myths of that encounter. The historian Camilla Townsend, in her account of the conquest, ranks the god-mistake among the legends the disaster grew in its own aftermath. The empire fell to smallpox, to steel and horses and ships, and above all to the alliance the Spanish made with the Tlaxcalans and the other peoples who had reason to break the Mexica yoke — not to a theological error. The returning-god story is a thing the conquest made about itself, and it should be marked as such wherever it is met.

Quetzalcoatl in the early-colonial Codex Telleriano-Remensis, drawn under Spanish supervision in the conquest’s aftermath. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

That the story can be examined so closely is owed to a body of sources that must be handled with care, because almost everything written down about the god was set down after the world that held him had been broken. A few pre-conquest screenfold books survive; the bulk of the record is the great colonial ethnographies — above all the compilation made by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún from Nahua elders and painted by Nahua hands, and the parallel work of the Dominican Diego Durán — written under the Church, for the Church, partly to equip the friars to root out the old religion they were recording. The Nahua informants spoke through the screen of conversion; the friars wrote with their own ends. What survives of Quetzalcoatl comes filtered through the institution that set out to replace him, and the line between the god as he was held before 1519 and the god as he was remembered and reshaped under the cross is, in many places, no longer findable. The clean morality of the priest-king who shed no blood may belong to that filtering as much as to the older faith.

The feathered serpent outlived the conquest in more than the libraries. His sign endures across Mesoamerica in his Maya kin, Kukulkan of the Yucatec and Q’uq’umatz of the K’iche’, the same green-feathered snake carved on temples a thousand kilometers and several languages apart. The Nahua who held him are a living people: well over a million speakers of Nahuatl in Mexico today, the language of the codices still spoken in the towns. And of all the gods of Mexico, Quetzalcoatl has been the most studied and the most borrowed — taken up by poets and nationalists and seekers of every kind, made to carry meanings he never had, a bearded culture-bringer in one century and a peaceful redeemer in the next. The borrowings say more about the borrowers than about the god. What stands under them is older and stranger: a serpent wearing the feathers of a bird that will not live caged, who went down into the dead to bring up the bones of a ruined world and spent his own blood to make them live, so that the people of the Fifth Sun stand upright on the earth in a debt that was opened before they drew breath.

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