"...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."
(Campbell) |