Legends Of The Plumed Serpent: Biography Of A Mexican God

“The Plumed Serpent is the most pervasive and protean archetype in Mesoamerican and Mexican history. Setting myself to track its life cycle from pre-Columbian agricultural deity, to legendary ruler, to messiah, to symbol of native identity, to standard-bearer for the revolution, to modernist icon, I have tried to come closer to our complex, exotic, and conflicted southern neighbor.”

Neil Baldwin is the executive director of the National Book Foundation and the author of three critically acclaimed biographies: Edison: Inventing the Century, Man Ray: American Artist, and To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, the Doctor-Poet.

From Chapter 13: The omens began a decade before the Spanish soldiers arrived, and were recalled during the 1550’s in the vivid Cantares Mexicanos and other history-songs and performances by the surviving Aztec peoples.

First, a comet shaped like a giant ear of corn began burning in the eastern sky at midnight; it sparked and smoldered until daybreak. When the people saw it, they wept. The temple of Huitzilopochtli burst spontaneously into flame; the fire was so tall it touched the clouds and could not be put out. Wind-whipped Lake Texcoco surged over its shores and flooded the city of Tenochtitln, ruining half the houses. In the depth of night, through the streets of the city, were heard the forlorn lamentations of a woman for her lost children. A long-legged, long-beaked, dark-feathered bird was snared in the rushes by the lake. On its crest was a circular mirror. When King Moctezuma II looked into this mirror, he saw a vast army in many ranks approaching over the mountains. But by the time he gathered his wise men to share the vision, the army had disappeared.

Moctezuma II heard the wailing of the people outside the palace walls and was-literally-petrified, immobilized in the face of such harbingers. “What shall I do? Where shall I hide? If only I could turn to stone, wood, or some other earthly matter, rather than suffer that which I so dread!” The magicians’ chilling reply did not provide relief: “A great mystery, which must come to pass in this land, now comes swiftly.”

The prophesied day came toward the end of April, when the dozen ships of Hernn Cortes with his five hundred men dropped anchor off the island of San Juan di Ulua, less than a mile from shore, near where they would establish La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (the True Cross) as the first town in “New Spain.” Word of their arrival came from a crippled beggar who lived by the sea, coming breathlessly to the court of Moctezuma, reporting that he had spotted “towers and mountains moving on the water” from the direction of the House of Dawn. Light-skinned, bearded creatures “with hair coming only to their ears” inhabiting these white, billowy “mountains,” had left them in small boats, and were fishing off shore.

Who were these newcomers? Were they hostile invaders like the Chichimecs of old? Were they emissaries from a foreign country who desired to initiate commerce with the Aztec? Or were they long-lost gods of an ancient era deciding to walk the earth, and who, even as the dream-haunted Moctezuma pondered the possibilities, would gather their power on the beaches?

In Book XII of the Florentine Codex, it was written, “For thus [Moctezuma] thought, and it was so regarded, that this was Topiltzin [Our Dear Prince] Quetzalcoatl who had arrived. For it was held in their hearts that indeed he would come-that he would come to land upon and visit his domain. For in truth he had traveled to the east when he first departed.”

“He has appeared! He has come back!” thought Moctezuma. “He will come here, to the place of his throne and canopy, for that is what he promised when he departed!” In his current state of trepidation and remorse, he was by no means ready to march forth out of the safety of his city to confront “Plumed Serpent.” Indeed, six more months would pass before the Aztec king and the Spanish conquistador came face to face. For now, there was only one thing to do: send Jaguar Knights bearing gifts to his Lord, ordering them to seek some reply.