Quetzalcoatl
The Feathered Serpent
Quetzalcōātl (Nahuatl 'feathered serpent') is the Mesoamerican god worshipped continuously from the late first century BCE at Teotihuacan to the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521. The name compounds 'quetzalli' (the iridescent tail-feather of the resplendent quetzal of the Central American cloud forest) and 'cōātl' (serpent), and the deity is rendered as a great serpent sheathed in those green-gold feathers. He governs Venus as the morning star, and in his wind-god aspect Ehēcatl summons rain. Among the Toltecs he was identified with the priest-king Topiltzin-Quetzalcōātl who ruled Tollan (modern Tula) around 935-947 CE; in Aztec myth he was tricked by the dark god Tezcatlipoca, fled Tollan eastward across the sea, and promised to return in a 'One Reed' year. Hernán Cortés's landing on the Gulf coast in 1519 — a One Reed year — led the emperor Moctezuma II (1466-1520) to read the Spaniard as the returning god, an episode preserved in Bernardino de Sahagún's 'Florentine Codex' (1545-1590) and Diego Durán's 'Historia' (1581). The earliest surviving image is the carved facade of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan, dated to about 200 CE.
