Latin-American Mythology (Illustrated Edition). Hartley Burr Alexander
according to Sahagun, the very outlooks who first beheld the ships of the Spaniards had been posted to watch for the coming god. The white men (perhaps the image was aided by their shining armour, their robed priests, their crosses) were inevitably assumed to be the deity, and among the gifts sent to them by Montezuma were the turquoise mask, feather mantle, and other apparel appropriate to the god. It is certain that the belief materially aided the Spaniards in the early stages of their advance, and it is small wonder that the myth which was so helpful to their ambitions should have appealed to their imaginations. The missionary priests, gaining some idea of native traditions and finding among them ideas, emblems, and rites analogous to those of Christendom (the deluge, the cross, baptism, sacraments, confession), not unnaturally saw in the figure of the robed and bearded reformer of religion a Christian teacher, and they were not slow to identify him with St. Thomas, the Apostle. When an almost identical story was found throughout Central America, the Andean region, and, indeed, wide-spread in South America, the same explanation was adopted, and the wanderings of the Saint became vast beyond the dreams of Marco Polo or any other vaunted traveller, while memorials of his miracles are still displayed in regions as remote from Mexico as the basin of La Plata. Naturally, too, the interest of the subject has not waned with time, for whether we view the Quetzalcoatl myth in relation to its association with European ideas or with respect to its aboriginal analogues in the two Americas, it presents a variety of interest scarcely equalled by any other tale of the New World.
The name of the god is formed of quetzal, designating the long, green tail-plumes of Pharomacrus mocinno, and coatl ("serpent"); it means, therefore, "the Green-Feather Snake," and immediately puts Quetzalcoatl into the group of celestial powers of which the plumed serpent is a symbol, among the Hopi and Zuñi to the north as well as among Andean peoples far to the south. Sahagun says that Quetzalcoatl is a wind-god, who "sweeps the roads for the rain-gods, that they may rain." Quetzal-plumes were a symbol of greening vegetation, and it is altogether probable that the Plumed Serpent-God was originally a deity of rain-clouds, the sky-serpent embodiment of the rainbow or the lightning. The turquoise snake-mask or bird-mask, characteristic of the god, is surely an emblem of the skies, and like other sky-gods he carries a serpent-shaped spear-thrower. The beard (which other Mexican deities sometimes wear) is perhaps a symbol of descending rain, perhaps (as on some Navaho figures) of pollen, or fertilization. Curiously enough, Quetzalcoatl is not commonly shown as the white god which the tradition would lead us to expect, but typically with a dark-hued body; it may be that the dark hue and the robe of legend are both emblems of rain-clouds.
The tradition of his whiteness may come from his stellar associations, for though he is sometimes shown with emblems of moon or sun, he is more particularly identified with the morning star. According to the Annals of Quauhtitlan, Quetzalcoatl, when driven from Tollan, immolated himself on the shores of the eastern sea, and from his ashes rose birds with shining feathers (symbols of warrior souls mounting to the sun), while his heart became the Morning Star, wandering for eight days in the underworld before it ascended in splendour. In numerous legends Quetzalcoatl is associated with Tezcatlipoca, commonly as an antagonist; and if we may believe one tale, recounted by Mendieta, Tezcatlipoca, defeating Quetzalcoatl in ball-play (a game directly symbolic of the movements of the heavenly orbs), cast him out of the land into the east, where he encountered the sun and was burned. This story (clearly a variant of the tale of the banishment of Quetzalcoatl told in the Annals of Quauhtitlan and by Sahagun) is interpreted by Seler as a myth of the morning moon, driven back by night (the dark Tezcatlipoca) to be consumed by the rising sun. A reverse story represents Tezcatlipoca, the sun, as stricken down by the club of Quetzalcoatl, transformed into a jaguar, the man-devouring demon of night, while Quetzalcoatl becomes sun in his place. Normally Quetzalcoatl is a god of the eastern heavens, and sometimes he is pictured as the caryatid or upbearer of the sky of that quarter.
Perhaps it is in this character that he was conceived as a lord of life, a meaning naturally intensified by his association with the rejuvenating rains and with the wind, which is the breath of life. A woman who had become pregnant was praised by the relatives of her husband for her faithfulness in religious devotions. "It is for these," they said, "that our lord Quetzalcoatl, author and creator, has vouchsafed this grace—even as it was decreed in the sky by that one who is man and woman under the names Ometecutli and Omeciuatl." Moreover the new-born was addressed: "Little son and lord, person of high value, of great price and esteem! O precious stone, emerald, topaz, rare plume, fruit of lofty generation! be welcome among us! Thou hast been formed in the highest places, above the ninth heaven, where the two supreme gods dwell. The Divine Majesty hath cast thee in his mould, as one casts a golden bead; thou hast been pierced, like a rich stone artistically wrought, by thy father and mother, the great god and the great goddess, assisted by their son, Quetzalcoatl." The deity also figures as a world creator, as in the Sahagun manuscript in the Academia de la Historia, from which Seler translates:
"And thus said our fathers, our grandfathers,
They said that he made, created, and formed us
Whose creatures we are, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl;
And he made the heavens, the sun, the earth."
It is in another character, however, that Quetzalcoatl is romantically of most interest. His cult was less sanguinary than that of most Aztec divinities, though assuredly not antagonistic to human sacrifice, as some traditions say. He was a penance-inflicting god, perhaps particularly a deity of priests and their lore; yet he was also associated with education and the rearing of the young. He is named as the patron of the arts, the teacher of metallurgy and of letters, and in tradition he is the god of the cultured people of yore from whom the Aztec derived their civilization. A part of the story, as narrated by Sahagun, has been told: how Quetzalcoatl was the aged and wise priest-king of Tollan, driven thence by the magic and guile of Tezcatlipoca and his companions. The tale goes on to tell how Quetzalcoatl, chagrined and ailing, resolved to depart from his kingdom for his ancient home, Tlapallan. He burned his houses built of shell and silver, buried his treasure, changed the cacao-trees into mesquite, and set forth, preceded by servants in the form of birds of rich plumage. Coming to Quauhtitlan, he demanded a mirror and gazing into it, he said, "I am old," wherefore he named the city "the old Quauhtitlan." Seating himself at another place and gazing back upon Tollan, as he wept, his tears pierced the rock, which also bore thenceforth the marks where his hands had rested. He encountered certain magicians, who demanded of him, before they would let him pass, the arts of refining silver, of working in wood, stone, and feathers, and of painting; and as he crossed the sierra, all his companions, who were dwarfs and hump-backs, died of the cold. Many other localities received memorials of his passage: at one place he played a game of ball, at another shot arrows into a tree so that they formed a cross, at another caused underworld houses to be built—all clearly cosmic symbols—and finally coming to the sea, he departed for Tlapallan on his serpent-raft. In Ixtlilxochitl's history, Quetzalcoatl first appeared in the third period of the world, taught the arts, instituted the worship of the cross—"tree of nourishment and of life"—and ended the period with his departure. Tradition names the last king of the Toltec "Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl," and it may be assumed as not improbable that stories of the disasters attending the fall of Tollan, under a king bearing the name of the ancient divinity, represent an historical element, confused with nature elements, in the myths of Quetzalcoatl,—such an assumption accounting for the heroic glamour surrounding the god, who, like King Arthur, is half kingly mortal, half divinity. In Cholula, whither many of the Toltec were said to have fled with the fall of their empire, was the loftiest pyramid in Mexico, dedicated to Quetzalcoatl and even in the eyes of Aztec conquerors a seat of venerable sanctities—the emblem of the culture whose conquest had conquered them.
PLATE IX.
Figures from the Codex Borgia, representing cosmic tutelaries.
The upper figure represents the tree of the Middle Place rising from the body of the Earth Goddess, recumbent upon the spines of the crocodile from which Earth was made. The tree is encircled by the world sea and is surmounted by the Quetzal, whose plumage typifies vegetation; two ears of maize spring up at its roots. The attendant deities are Quetzalcoatl and Macuilxochitl,