Quetzalcoatl

The wind came first. Before the rains that fed the maize, a cold breath moved through the valley and swept the road clean, and the people said the god was clearing the way. They built him a temple that was round instead of square so the wind would not snag on any corner, and they gave his image a red bird’s beak, a duck-billed mask through which the breath of the world was said to pass. This was Ehecatl, the wind, and Ehecatl was one face of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, whose name joins the quetzal’s green tail plumes to the coatl, the snake.

He is easy to picture and hard to hold still. In the codices he coils as a rattlesnake sheathed in iridescent feathers, green and gold, the plumes lying flat along a body built to move on its belly and yet lifted, impossibly, on color. Elsewhere he stands upright as a man in a conical ocelot-skin cap, a curved shell ornament at his chest cut from a conch and called the wind jewel, a whorl of pale shell against dark skin. The serpent and the priest are the same being seen from two distances. One is the god as the cosmos knows him; the other is the god as he walked among people.

Where he came from depends on who is telling it. The oldest ordering makes him a son of the dual creator, the two-in-one who is both mother and father, and sets him among four brothers who divided the work of making a world. Other accounts give him a human-scaled birth, son of the hunter Mixcoatl and the earth-woman Chimalman, which folds the god into the lineage of the Toltec kings. The stories do not trouble themselves to agree. This is a figure who is at once a wind, a planet, a priest, and a principle, and the myths let him be all of them.

His greatest act is a theft from the dead. After an earlier world had ended and its people were only bones scattered in the underworld, Quetzalcoatl went down into Mictlan to bring them back. Mictlantecuhtli, the skeletal lord of that place, agreed to surrender the bones only if the visitor could sound a conch trumpet that had no holes bored in it. Quetzalcoatl called worms to tunnel through the shell and bees to fly inside and give it a voice, and the dead thing sang. The lord of the underworld let him go and then changed his mind, and as Quetzalcoatl fled, startled birds sent him stumbling into a pit. The bones broke and scattered under him. He gathered what he could, carried the fragments to the old goddess Cihuacoatl, and let his own blood fall over them, and from that bloodied, uneven mixture the people of the present age were shaped. The Aztecs explained the different heights of men and women by the shuffling of those broken bones. It is a creation story with a limp built into it.

He fed what he had made. Maize was hidden inside a mountain, and the great gods could not move it, so Quetzalcoatl turned himself into a black ant and followed a red ant along its path through the stone, and carried the first grains out on his back. There is something plain and domestic in that image, a god shrunk to the size of the thing he is stealing, hauling a single kernel home.

The most human of his stories is his fall. In the golden city of Tula, a priest-king named Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl ruled without human sacrifice, and the accounts blur him and the god together until they cannot be pulled apart. His rival was Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, lord of sorcery and night, and Tezcatlipoca wanted him broken. He came with a mirror that showed the king his own aging face, and with pulque, the milky agave beer, and the king drank until he was drunk and lay with his celibate sister. He woke into a shame that no washing could reach. He burned his houses of gold and shell, buried his treasures, and walked east to the coast. There the tellings part. In one he built a pyre on the shore and threw himself into it, and his heart rose burning into the sky and became the morning star. In another he sailed away on a raft of woven serpents, promising to return in a year that bore his name, One Reed.

That promise became the most consequential sentence never actually spoken. The story that Moctezuma mistook Hernán Cortés for the returning Quetzalcoatl, arriving at the coast in a One Reed year, is very likely a thing assembled after the conquest rather than before it. It surfaces in Spanish and colonial-era sources written decades later, first in print in 1552 by a chronicler who had never crossed the Atlantic, and it is missing from the earliest indigenous accounts. Scholars including Matthew Restall, Camilla Townsend, and Susan Gillespie read it as a myth of the conquest, built backward to make the defeat look foreordained. The god did not hand Mexico to Spain. People did that, and then told a story about a god.

His powers run along the grain of who he is. He is breath and therefore weather, the wind that clears the sky for rain, and he is Venus, the star that dies in the west and is reborn in the east, which is why the dead-and-returning shape fits him so well. He is the patron of priests and scribes and the count of days, of the arts that make a city, the one credited with teaching the working of jade and feathers and the growing of food. His weakness is the one he shares with the people he made. He can be shamed. Drink and desire and a mirror were enough to bring down a god-king, and the strong drink and the reflected face were not weapons so much as invitations he could have refused and did not. For all his light, he was answerable to appetite, and that is exactly why the Aztecs could recognize themselves in him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Quetzalcoatl?

Quetzalcoatl is the Feathered Serpent god of the Aztecs, a creator and culture-hero linked to wind, the planet Venus, priesthood, and knowledge. His name combines the Nahuatl words for the quetzal bird’s plumes and the snake. He is shown either as a plumed rattlesnake or as a human priest wearing a conch-shell ornament at his chest.

How did Quetzalcoatl create humanity?

Quetzalcoatl descended into the underworld, Mictlan, and recovered the bones of people from a previous age. After escaping a trap set by Mictlantecuhtli, he ground the bones, let his own blood fall over them, and shaped the humans of the present age. The Aztecs said people vary in height because the bones broke and shuffled when he stumbled into a pit during his escape.

What is the difference between Quetzalcoatl and Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl?

Quetzalcoatl is the god, while Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl was a legendary Toltec priest-king of Tula who bore the god’s name. The two figures blur together in the sources, so that the king’s story of shame, exile, and departure to the east is often told as though it were the god’s own myth.

Did the Aztecs believe Cortés was Quetzalcoatl?

Probably not. The story that Moctezuma mistook Hernán Cortés for a returning Quetzalcoatl first appears in Spanish and colonial sources written decades after the conquest and is absent from the earliest indigenous accounts. Many scholars now regard it as a myth constructed after the fact rather than a genuine pre-conquest belief.

What are Quetzalcoatl’s powers?

As the wind god Ehecatl, Quetzalcoatl commands the breezes that clear the sky before rain, and as the morning star he embodies Venus, dying in the west and returning in the east. He is also the giver of maize and the patron of the arts of civilization, including writing, the calendar, and craftsmanship.

Related Entries

Tezcatlipoca, Xolotl, Cipactli, Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Xochiquetzal, Coyolxauhqui, Xipe Totec, Tlazolteotl, Ahuizotl, Nagual, Feathered Serpent, Kukulkan