... 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.) |