"Mi casa es su casa," said Montezuma to Cortés
Did Quetzalcoatl promise to return?
The Jesus scholar Marcus Borg wrote about two Jesus figures, a historical Jesus and the other, the post-Easter ‘Christ’ Jesus. Similarly, there are two Quetzalcoatls, a historical Quetzalcoatl, born around 947 AD, and the god-figure Quetzalcoatl who shed his blood to create mankind and sacrificed himself, promising to return. Interestingly, there is no historical record of this promised second coming until fifty years after the conquest, and it then appears in the Florentine Codex, a book compiled by Franciscan monk Bernardino de Sahagún. Indeed, the Jesus stories might have influenced the monk to add to the tale. After all, to the mind of a monk, trying to imitate Christ is how Satan, the great deceiver, or the antichrist of the Book of Revelation, would work. Bernardino de Sahagún also called Quetzalcoatl's alter ego Tezcatlipoca 'Satan', a divine being who was cast out of heaven for his transgressions.
The next text to mention Quetzalcoatl's return was the Book of Chilam Balam, or Jaguar Priest, written in the Yucatan in the seventeenth century. Early Spanish translations of the text stressed the point that the arrival of the Spanish and the subsequent conversion of the indigenous peoples to Christianity was 'prophesized' by the Jaguar Priest. Still, Chilam Balam seems to have been an historical figure, and his predictions of bearded strangers coming from the east with a new religion, written after his death in the book that bears his name, may have been influenced by reports brought by canoe of Spaniards in the West Indies (The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Ralph L Roys, Carnegie Institution). Many believe his intent was to predict a return of Quetzalcoatl.
Whether Quetzalcoatl ever promised to return seems to be an open question.
The historical Quetzalcoatl was still in his mother Coatlicue’s womb when his father the Toltec king was murdered in a palace intrigue. His mother fled, and later said her son was the product of a virgin birth, conceived after the virgin mother swallowed a sacred jade stone. As a boy he showed great promise, and the name Quetzalcoatl, a conjunction of two sacred animals, the Quetzal bird and the snake, was given to him by schoolteachers as a badge of honor. He returned home to the Toltec capital and killed the uncle who had overthrown his father king, and Quetzalcoatl became shaman king himself, responsible for the rituals and sacrifices that kept the rain falling, the sun rising and the cosmos turning.
It is said Quetzalcoatl loved his people too much to be parted from one of them. A kind of prince of peace, he banned human sacrifice, and this must have angered the priestly class. Quetzalcoatl sacrificed snakes, birds, butterflies, and large grasshoppers. The high priests plotted against the king, and some say conjured evil sorcerers, devil figures, who got Quetzalcoatl drunk on pulque, and then got his priestess sister drunk and the two slept together. Shamed, his vow of chastity broken and his rituals neglected, the city faced ruin. Quetzalcoatl fled in self-imposed exile, and traveled several years with a group of disciples. Some stories have him sacrificing himself by immolation on a funeral pyre. Others have him sailing east across the sea on a raft made out of interwoven snakes.
The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, called Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, was the creator god who organized the cosmos. This seems a parallel to the Christian deity Jesus of John’s gospel, the ‘Word’ who was present ‘in the beginning,’ and created the universe. Quetzalcoatl gathered bones from the dead of a previous age and, with his own blood, brought them to life. Quetzalcoatl is associated with the wind and rain, forces of nature, the invention of writing and books and calendars, things the defined pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, and learning and knowledge, his gifts to the people he created. Aztec children were dedicated to Quetzalcoatl. He was the patron of Aztec nobility and the highest order of Aztec priests.
It is Quetzalcoatl's identity as a giver of learning and wisdom that leads some to conclude that his 'return' will not be the arrival of a physical being, but of a new way of being, a new awareness, for the rest of us.
Montezuma was known by the title ‘ruler of the world’. His welcome to Cortes, “you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have kept for you,” has been interpreted as acknowledging Cortes as an anticipated second coming of the god-man Quetzalcoatl. His greeting may have been little more than an ancient version of the modern Mexican greeting ‘my house is your house.’ As has been noted elsewhere on this website, ‘mat’ was a reference to a person’s place in space-time, within the woven threads of the past and future. It has been noted that in Aztec culture, politeness was a way of asserting dominance.
It seems clear that Cortes did represent himself as Quetzalcoatl, and wrote letters about the naivety of the Aztecs and his efforts to dupe them. He arrived in Mexico on 1 Reed, the traditional birthday of Quetzalcoatl. Davíd Carrasco, in Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, writes ‘it is clear that Quetzalcoatl never really left Mexico – he was present in the invisible history of Tenochtitlán (Montezuma’s capital). He was lurking in the shadows.’ Montezuma’s half-hearted attempt to confront Cortes and the invaders was, in a way, a reflection of his city’s patron Quetzalcoatl, the king and shaman priest who had failed his own city and sacrificed himself in disgrace.
To read Ronaldo Similox's essay on the 13 Prophecies from the Book of Chilam Balam, go to: The 13 Prophecies