... the great high priest and monarch of the Golden Age in the Toltec city of Tula, the City of the Sun, in ancient Mexico, whose name, Quetzalcoatl, has been read to mean both 'the Feathered Serpent' and 'the Admirable Twin', and who was fair of face and white of beard, was the teacher of the arts to the people of pre-Columbian America, originator of the calendar, and their giver of maize.

His virgin mother, Chimalman - the legend tells - had been one of the three sisters to whom God, the All-Father, had appeared one day under his form of Citlallatonac, 'the morning'. The other two had been struck by fright, but upon Chimalman God breathed and she conceived. She died, however, giving birth, and is now in heaven, where she is revered under the honourable name of 'the Precious Stone of Sacrifice', Chalchihuitzli.

Quetzalcoatl, her child, who is known both as the Son of the Lord of the High Heavens and as the Son of the Lord of the Seven Caves, was endowed at birth with speech, all knowledge, and all wisdom, and in later life, as priest-king, was of such purity of character that his realm flourished gloriously throughout the period of his reign.

His temple-palace was composed of four radiant apartments: one toward the east, yellow with gold; one towards the west, blue with turquoise and jade; one toward the south, white with pearls and shells; one towards the north, red with bloodstones - symbolizing the cardinal quarters of the world over which the light of the sun holds sway. And it was set wonderfully above a mighty river that passed through the midst of the city of Tula; so that every night, precisely at midnight, the king descended into the river to bathe; and the place of his bath was called 'In the Painted Vase', or 'In the Precious Waters'.

But the time of his predestined defeat by the dark brother, Tezcatlipoca, was ever approaching, and, knowing perfectly the rhythm of his own destiny, Quetzalcoatl would make no move to stay it. Tezcatlipoca, therefore, said to his attendants, 'We shall give him a drink to dull his reason and show him his own face in a mirror; then, surely, he will be lost'. And he said to the servants of the good king, 'Go tell your master that I have come to show him his own flesh!' But when the message was brought to Quetzalcoatl, the aging monarch said, 'What does he call my own flesh? Go and ask!'

And when the other was admitted to his presence: 'What is this, my flesh, that you would show me?' Tezcatlipoca answered, 'My Lord and Priest, look now at your flesh; know yourself; see yourself as you are seen by others!' And he presented the mirror. Whereupon, seeing his own face in that mirror, Quetzalcoatl immediately cried out, 'How is it possible that my subjects should look upon me without fright? Well might they flee from before me. For how can a man remain among them when he is filled as I am with foul sores, his old face wrinkled and of an aspect so loathsome? I shall be seen no more, I shall no longer terrify my people'.

Presented the drink to quaff, he refused it, saying that he was ill; but urged to taste it from the tip of his finger, he did so and was immediately overpowered by its magic. He lifted the bowl and was drunk. He sent for Quetzalpetlatl, his sister, who dwelt on the Mountain Nonoalco. She came, and her brother gave her the bowl, so that she too was drunk. And with all reason forgotten, the two that night neither said prayers nor went to the bath, but sank asleep together on the floor.

And in the morning Quetzalcoatl said, in shame, 'I have sinned; the stain of my name cannot be erased. I am not fit to rule this people. Let them build a habitation for me deep under the ground; let them bury my bright treasures in the earth; let them throw the glowing gold and shining stones into the Precious Waters where I take my nightly bath. And all this was done. The king remained four days in his underground tomb, and when he came forth he wept and told his people that the time had come for his departure to the Red Land, the Dark Land, the Land of Fire.

Having burned his dwellings behind him, buried his treasures in the mountains, transformed his chocolate trees into mesquite, and commanded his multicolored birds to fly before him, Quetzalcoatl, in great sorrow, departed. Resting at a certain place along the way and looking back in the direction of Tula, his City of the Sun, he wept, and his tears went through a rock; he left in that place the mark of his sitting and the impress of his palms.

Farther along, he was met and challenged by a company of necromancers, who prevented him from proceeding until he had left with them the arts of working silver, wood, and feathers, and the art of painting. As he crossed the mountains, many of his attendants, who were dwarfs and humpbacks, died of the cold. At another place he met his dark antagonist, Tezcatlipoca, who defeated him at a game of ball.

At still another he aimed with an arrow at a large pochotl tree; and the arrow too was a pochotl tree, so that when he shot it through the first they formed a cross. And so he passed along, leaving many signs and place-names behind him, until, coming at last to where the sky, land, and water come together, he departed.

He sailed away on a raft of serpents, according to one version, but another has it that his remaining attendants built a funeral pyre, into which he threw himself, and while the body burned, his heart departed and after four days appeared as the rising planet Venus. All agree, however, that he will presently return. He will arrive with a fair-faced retinue from the east and resume sway over his people; for although Tezcatlipoca had conquered, those immutable laws that had determined the destruction of Tula assigned likewise its restoration.

Quetzalcoatl was not dead. In one of his statues he was shown reclining, covered with wrappings, signifying that he was absent or 'as one who lays him down to sleep, and that when he should wake from that dream of absence, would rise to rule again the land'.

He had built mansions underground to the Lord of Mictlan, the lord of the dead, but did not occupy these himself, dwelling, rather, in that land of gold where the sun abides at night. This too, however, is underground. Certain caverns lead to it, one of which, called Cincalco, 'To the Abode of Abundance', is south of Chapultepec; and through its gloomy corridors men can reach that happy land, the habitation of the sun, which is still ruled by Quetzalcoatl. Moreover, that land is the land from which he came in the beginning...

All this, which in so many ways parallels the normal imagery of the Old World culture-hero myths, telling of the one who is gone, dwells underground in a happy, timeless land, as lord of the realm of the happy dead, like Osiris, but will rise again, we can read without surprise. But what is surprising indeed was the manner of Quetzalcoatl's actual return. The priests and astrologers did not know in what cycle he was to reappear; however, the name of the year within the cycle had been predicted, of old, by Quetzalcoatl himself. Its sign was 'One Reed' (Ce Acatl), which, in the Mexican calendar, is a year that occurs only once in every cycle of fifty-two. But the year when Cortes arrived, with his company of fair-faced companions and his standard, the cross, was precisely the year 'One Reed'. The myth of the dead and resurrected god had circumnavigated the globe. (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology.)