Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent)

How to tell him in a codex

In the codices Quetzalcoatl most often appears as Ehécatl, the wind. H. B. Nicholson’s guide to Aztec deity insignia, abridged by Mexicolore, names his “peculiar red-beaked mask” and his conical, jewel-capped hat of jaguar skin as his signs. Mexicolore adds the cut conch shell he wears on his chest, the ehecacózcatl or wind jewel. The archaeologist Francisco González Rul notes that the beak mask has teeth and fangs, which is why, he argues, Cortés’s men listed one sent to Charles V as a gold “caiman’s head” rather than a bird.

The priest of Tula and his fall

The Anales de Cuauhtitlan, in Miguel León-Portilla’s translation, tell of the priest 1 Reed Quetzalcoatl at Tula. Sorcerers tried many times to make him offer human sacrifice; he refused, “because he loved his people, the Toltecs”, and offered only snakes, birds and butterflies. In the version Miguel Pastrana Flores retells, painted in Book III of the Florentine Codex, Tezcatlipoca took the shape of an old man and gave the secluded priest pulque; Ramírez writes that his drunkenness marked the beginning of the fall of Tula.

Did the Aztecs think Cortés was Quetzalcoatl?

No contemporary document says so. The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes that no account of the time suggests that Moctezuma or any other Indigenous person thought Cortés divine; the claim arose in the 1530s and was tied to Quetzalcoatl in the 1540s. Camilla Townsend, quoted by Mexicolore, traces the story to Sahagún’s Nahua students writing in the 1560s and 1570s, who even gave it to the wrong captain: Juan de Grijalva in 1518, not Cortés in 1519. None of the earliest Nahua histories, she writes, say anything like it.

Older writers took the story as fact. A note in the 1829 edition of Sahagún’s Historia says that Moctezuma sent the god’s regalia to Cortés believing him the god whose coming he awaited, and the archaeologist Francisco González Rul, writing in Arqueología Mexicana, still read the gift of Quetzalcoatl’s regalia as a test that Cortés passed by accepting them.

A white, bearded Quetzalcoatl

The idea of a white, blue-eyed Quetzalcoatl is, in the archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma’s words, “nothing further from the truth”. He traces it to the friars: Bartolomé de las Casas made Quetzalcoatl white, tall and bearded, Juan de Torquemada white, fair and bearded, and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora identified him with the apostle Saint Thomas in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century the historian Manuel Orozco y Berra made him an Icelandic missionary. Matos answers that crosses in Mesoamerica belonged to the old fire god, with a meaning of their own.

The feathered serpent today

The anthropologist Alan Sandstrom, writing for Mexicolore from his fieldwork in Nahua villages, writes that the god still exists in fragments. The wind spirits that Nahuatl speakers call ejecatl carry his wind aspect, and in the Huasteca the maize spirit, Seven-Flower, is in Sandstrom’s words “a modern form of Quetzalcoatl”.