Who Is Quetzalcoatl? The Feathered Serpent of Mesoamerica

The feathered serpent appears first among the Olmecs around 900 BC and is fully formed at Teotihuacan, the vast city north of modern Mexico City, where a temple faced with hundreds of serpent heads was built around 200 AD. The image joined the two halves of the Mesoamerican world: the snake, which belongs to the earth and water, and the bird, which belongs to the sky, so that the creature was a bridge between them, as wind and rain are. When Teotihuacan fell, the god passed to the Toltecs of Tula, and from them to the Maya of Yucatan and to the Aztecs, who arrived in the valley of Mexico in the fourteenth century and adopted the gods they found there.

By the time the Spanish arrived, Quetzalcoatl was a god with many jobs. He was the wind, Ehecatl, whose temples were round so that the air could flow around them; the morning star, which dies in the sun's light and returns; the patron of the priesthood, of learning, of the calendar and of the craft of writing; and, with his brother and rival Tezcatlipoca, the god of the smoking mirror, one of the creators of the world.

The Aztec creation myth has the world made and destroyed four times before ours, each age presided over by a god and ended by a catastrophe, and Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca alternately making and wrecking. In the present age the two of them tore the earth monster in half to make the sky and the land. Quetzalcoatl then went down to the underworld to fetch the bones of the people of the last age, tricked the lord of the dead into giving them up, ground them and bled on them from his own body to make the humans of this world. He stole maize from inside a mountain by turning into an ant and following the ants that carried it, and gave it to people. His acts as the Aztecs told them:

• •Made the sky and earth from the body of the earth monster, with Tezcatlipoca
• •Recovered the bones of past humanity from the underworld and made new people from them with his blood
• •Discovered maize and gave it to humans, along with the calendar, writing and the crafts
• •Invented the pulque drink, or was undone by it, depending on the story
• •Taught that the gods should be given butterflies and snakes rather than human hearts

Tangled with the god is a man. Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, One Reed Our Lord Feathered Serpent, was a ruler of the Toltecs of Tula in the tenth century who took the god's name as his title and was remembered as a kind of saint: a priest who forbade human sacrifice, ruled over a golden age of craft and plenty, and was driven out. In the story, Tezcatlipoca's sorcerers tricked him into drunkenness and disgrace, and he left Tula in shame, travelling east to the coast, where he either burned himself on a pyre and rose as the morning star, or sailed away east on a raft of serpents, promising to return. Some of this may be memory of a real king expelled in a religious quarrel; the Maya records speak of a Kukulkan arriving in Yucatan from the west at about the right time.

The most famous thing said about Quetzalcoatl is that the Aztec emperor Moctezuma believed Hernan Cortes, landing on the east coast in 1519, in a year One Reed, bearded and pale, was the god returning, and surrendered his empire to him. The story was told by the Spanish and by Aztec informants writing decades later under Spanish priests, and most historians now doubt it. Moctezuma's behaviour, sending gifts, delaying, admitting the Spaniards to his city and then being taken hostage, can be explained by ordinary politics and by the fact that nobody knew what these people were, and the legend of the returning god served the conquerors, who could claim that the conquest had been foretold, and the Franciscans, who could claim that Quetzalcoatl had been a Christian saint in disguise, perhaps Saint Thomas. Whether Moctezuma ever believed it is unknown. The story's power is that it explained, to both sides, how a few hundred men took an empire, and the real explanation, disease, alliances and steel, was less satisfying.

The god outlived his worshippers. The equinox serpent at Chichen Itza draws tens of thousands of visitors each March; the feathered serpent is a national symbol in Mexico, painted by Diego Rivera and carved on the presidential seal's precursors; and the name has been given to a pterosaur with a ten-metre wingspan, Quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying animal that ever lived, because a feathered serpent was the only thing that seemed the right size. He also survives in ordinary Mexican speech, in the word for the quetzal bird, in place names and in the calendar, which was his gift.

Almost everything written about Quetzalcoatl comes through a narrow and complicated set of sources, and knowing them helps you read the myths carefully. The Aztecs kept painted books, but Spanish priests and officials destroyed most of them after the conquest. A handful of pre-conquest painted books survive from central Mexico, such as the Codex Borgia, and in them Quetzalcoatl appears as the wind god Ehecatl, wearing a red mask shaped like a bird's beak through which he blew the wind. These pictures were read aloud by trained specialists, so without the spoken commentary much of their meaning is lost.

Most of the stories themselves were written down after 1521, often by Spanish friars working with Nahua informants. The largest of these works, the Florentine Codex compiled under Bernardino de Sahagun, preserves an enormous amount of Aztec knowledge in the Nahuatl language, but it was shaped by the questions a Christian missionary chose to ask and by informants remembering a world that had just been destroyed. Archaeology provides an independent check, since excavations at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City and at earlier sites show how the feathered serpent was actually depicted and worshipped, without passing through colonial hands.

Quetzalcoatl's link with Venus rested on careful astronomy. Venus appears as the evening star, vanishes into the glare of the Sun, and returns as the morning star, completing its cycle of appearances in about 584 days. Mesoamerican astronomers tracked this closely, and the Dresden Codex, one of the few Maya books to survive, contains a Venus table predicting the planet's appearances over many years. They also noticed a useful coincidence: five cycles of Venus take almost exactly as long as eight years of 365 days, 2,920 days in both cases, so the pattern of the morning star repeats on the calendar every eight years.

In central Mexico the morning star had its own fearsome form, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Lord of the House of Dawn, regarded as an aspect of Quetzalcoatl. Its first reappearance before sunrise after a spell of invisibility was thought dangerous, because the god was believed to strike particular kinds of people or things with his darts depending on the day on which he rose, one time the old, another the young, another rulers. A Spanish-era account says people stopped up their smoke holes to keep its light out, and pages in the Codex Borgia and related books show the god spearing his different victims in turn.

In 1975 palaeontologists named a newly described giant pterosaur from Texas Quetzalcoatlus, after the feathered serpent god. It is among the largest flying animals known, with a wingspan usually estimated at around ten to eleven metres, comparable to a small aircraft, and it lived at the very end of the age of dinosaurs.

How such an enormous animal took off has been debated. Many researchers now think it launched by vaulting on its folded wings, using its powerful arms, rather than running and flapping like a bird. On the ground it probably walked on all fours and may have stalked small animals like a giant stork. The name links an ancient Mesoamerican deity of wind and sky with one of the most impressive fliers in the history of life.

Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was worshipped across Mesoamerica from the Olmecs to the Aztecs as the god of wind, the morning star, priests, learning and the calendar, who made humans from the bones of the dead and gave them maize, and who alone among the gods was said to reject human sacrifice. A Toltec priest-king bore his name and was remembered as leaving eastward with a promise to return, and the later story that Moctezuma took Cortes for the returning god is now thought to be largely a legend of the conquest.