Heresy of the Feathered Serpent

Utter blackness. This is the primordial void before the dawn of creation. There are, however, voices in the dark, a male and a female. They chat with ease and familiarity, like an old couple who’ve been together seemingly forever. In this case, that’s because they have been. Unlike the three-in-one God of the Christian Trinity, the Source of creation according to the Aztecs is a two-in-one divinity, the original husband and wife, known as Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl. And, unseen in this endless night, the Old Ones excitedly discuss a child that’s about to be born. Any moment now… any moment… An infant starts to wail. A point of blue-white light winks on, the morning star. It brightens, illuminating an old man and woman who sit cross-legged opposite each other on a rectangular mat. (Classic representation from an Aztec text.) And, between them… "Isn’t she beautiful! A new universe!" In the middle of the mat, the form of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. (Statue in National Museum, Mexico City.) She stands on immense clawed feet. She’s decked in a skirt of writhing snakes, and a necklace of severed hands, hearts and skulls. Her arms end not in hands, but in monstrous fanged heads. From the stump of her neck, no head, but two giant serpents undulate. This is the cosmos as conceived by the Aztecs. A cosmos that feeds on blood. "I think she’s hungry…"

The ancestors of the Aztecs entered the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City stands today, in the early thirteenth century A.D. Quickly they became the dominant people there, subjugating the other cultures of the region and absorbing their knowledge and beliefs. By the arrival of the conquistadores in 1519, the Aztecs ruled an empire radiating across central Mexico from their capital in the Valley, the fabled city of Tenochtitlan. The core of the city was a pair of pyramids, one dedicated to Tlaloc, god of water, the other sacred to Huitzilopochtli, deity of war. It was a common sight to see lines of captives being led up the steep steps to the temples atop these towers of stone. One by one the captives were stretched on an altar. A priest would plunge a knife of sharpened volcanic glass into the chest, deftly pluck out the still beating heart, and raise it to the sky. For the gods, those children of gory Coatlicue, demanded it. But there were those who disagreed.

The ancient ceremonial city of Tula lies in ruins today northeast of Mexico City. The roof of the Temple of the Morning Star fell in a long time ago. But rows of columns still finger skyward, each carved in the likeness of a feathered snake. At the top of the broken stairs is a reclining stone figure with a basin in his belly. This was a receptacle of hearts. But now something else glitters there as we peer in the basin – a single emerald. Legend has it that this is the form the divine Word took to impregnate the Tulan princess Chimalma back in the city’s eleventh century heyday. She accidentally swallowed the gem, and in time gave birth to a son named Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl ("Our Young Prince the Feathered Serpent").

From the start people must have sensed something special about him. Quetzalcoatl endured a childhood of rigourous spiritual training, including long periods of lonely meditation in mountain caves. As an adult he was supernaturally good at everything he did, from the rough art of war to the delicate breath of flute-playing. Tula was the capital of the Toltecs, a pre-Aztec people. Quetzalcoatl became its king, and led them to their pinnacle. Tula under the Feathered Serpent’s banner was revered later by the Aztecs as the high tide line of human history.

Having mastered the outer world, Quetzalcoatl’s emerald nature called him to probe the transcendent realms. He threw himself into fierce spiritual disciplines, offering up his own comfort as a sacrifice to the gods – fasting, bathing in icy water, scaling holy mountains where he would mutilate his flesh with cactus thorns and meditate. Eventually he pushed himself to the edge of death. We see him shivering, bleeding, alone on some wild peak. In the sky, the morning star. At this moment he broke through the shell of appearances to the sacred world beyond, all the way to that place past time and space where Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl sit on their mat, forever watching the careers of their offspring. And they told the Feathered Serpent a secret.

The news was shocking. Quetzalcoatl had banned human sacrifices in Tula! But wouldn’t the gods be furious, and avenge the insult by destroying the earth? No, said the king. You see, we’ve had it all wrong. When the gods ask us to offer our hearts, they don’t mean we have to tear organs out of bodies. They want us to offer what is born from our hearts. Everything we conceive in beauty – the songs, the poems, the dances, the paintings – these are what they desire! As they created us, we’re asked to repay them likewise, through our own creations in their honour. It’s really very simple.

Simple, yes. But rank heresy to the priests of the deity Tezcatlipoca, an especially dangerous god of sorcery. To save the universe from this god’s wrath, the priests hatched a plot. Quetzalcoatl was too popular to challenge directly. Somehow he must be brought into disgrace, and then the people would drive him out and the blades would flash from the pyramids once more. The Feathered Serpent had led such a strict life that he was innocent of the delights and dangers of alcohol. Here was the blind spot where they chose to attack.

A wily servant of Tezcatlipoca persuaded the king that a powerful brew called pulque (the fermented juice of the maguey plant) was a sacramental drink, and furthermore that he should ritually quaff five cups, because five was the sacred number of the morning star. Quetzalcoatl was besotted – so much so that he didn’t recognize his sister when she was brought in drugged and laid beside him in bed…

The next day the king and his sister awoke in shame at what they had done. His ideal of himself shattered, he felt he had to renounce his rulership. First he lay in a coffin for four days. Then, bidding goodbye to his beloved Tula, he set forth to the east. Accounts differ about what happened when he reached the Gulf of Mexico. Some said that he built a fire and jumped in. His body became a flock of birds, and his essence rose to join the morning star that gleamed over the waters. Another version has it that he made a raft and sailed into the sunrise. Many expected him to return from the eastern sea one day. Time for the pre-Columbian Mexicans moved in circles; so it was thought that Quetzalcoatl would return in a year with the same name in the calendar cycle as the one in which he left. This name recurred every fifty-second year.

The priests of Tezcatlipoca were triumphant. But mysteriously, with the exit of the Feathered Serpent fate turned against the Toltecs. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear their empire collapsed, Tula was abandoned, and their glory days were a dim memory by the time the Aztecs came to the region. Quetzalcoatl was renowned throughout Mexico, his life becoming so caked with legends that it was impossible to disentangle the man and the myth.

There were those among the Aztecs that thought deeply about Quetzalcoatl. They discerned that his apparent defeat was actually an important step in his spiritual development. His drunkenness and incest forced him to admit that he had a dark side, that his public image as a perfect king was not who he really was. By recognizing both light and shadow within himself he became whole, just as the two Old Ones create everything through their embrace. The tale of his life, both victories and failures, could be interpreted as a guide to the spiritual path.

These students of the Serpent tried the meditations he had used to contact the Old Ones, and came to the same conclusions he had – that human sacrifice was wrong, that pouring out our creative hearts, not our blood, was what the divine calls us to do. Inspired by him they became artists and arranged festivals of flowers and song to contrast with the violent rites of the pyramids. They were known as the tlamatinime – the "ones who know". (Interestingly, the words "gnostics" and "shamans" mean exactly this also.) Among them were the geniuses of Aztec art. This Aztec heresy was never persecuted, as far as we know – an irony in a society devoted to sacred murder.

It was one of the rare years – one in fifty-two – when Quetzalcoatl might return. The natives of the Gulf Coast would have paid extra attention to the eastern horizon, above which the Morning Star kept watch. One day a ship appeared, a very strange vessel. And from it came a very strange man from across the ocean – Hernan Cortes, who would conquer the Aztecs. Many, including the Aztec ruler Motecuhzoma, thought the Spaniard was the Feathered Serpent himself. They soon learned their error. With the Europeans came the Holy Inquisition. Unlike the Aztec means of dispatching their sacrificial victims – terrifying but quick – the God of the Spaniards apparently relished human suffering. His servants, the inquisitors, would torture their victims, then burn them alive in the town squares. The Aztecs recoiled in horror.

The deserted, windswept top of the Temple of the Morning Star in Tula. Church bells ring in the distance. Faint voices on the breeze, a male and a female. Drifting down from the heavens, tumbling down the stairs, a long emerald-green feather.

The next year in which Quetzalcoatl might return: 2039 A.D.