Quetzalcoatl · Chapter 1 of 7
The Feathered Serpent
Feather and serpent · Teotihuacan stone · A long argument
The picture is old. The story attached to it is younger.
The name is a compound the sources make no secret of: quetzalli, the green tail-feather of the quetzal bird, and coatl, serpent. A feathered serpent is carved on a pyramid at Teotihuacan in roughly the third century, long before the Mexica of Tenochtitlan existed, and the image recurs at Xochicalco, at Chichen Itza and at Tula. Whether one continuous cult links those places, or a powerful image was reused by unrelated peoples, is an archaeological argument rather than a settled fact. The figure the written accounts describe is the Aztec-period one, and those accounts were written after the conquest.
- Feather and serpent
- A thousand years
- An argument, not a fact
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