The Myth of Quetzalcoatl

During his long academic career, the Mexican historian Alfredo López Austin has published numerous books and articles, creating a body of work that has radically transformed our understanding of Mesoamerica. However, only a handful of his works have been translated into English, so the University Press of Colorado's recent publication of The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, López Austin's first masterpiece, meticulously translated by Russ Davidson and Guilhem Olivier, is cause for celebration. Written as the author's master's thesis, the work was published in 1973 by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as Hombre-Dios: Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl. As stated by its original title, the book focused on what López Austin termed the “man-god,” a multifaceted, enigmatic, and pivotal Mesoamerican personage who characteristically straddles the worlds of history and myth and who finds his most illustrious representative in the figure of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, ruler of Tollan. López Austin rightly saw that an exhaustive analysis of Quetzalcoatl would serve as a via regia to understanding the peculiar relationship between politics and religion in the Nahua world. In that sense, his thesis was a work of breathtaking ambition, meant to provide not just an interpretation of the myth of Quetzalcoatl but rather a general paradigm of Mesoamerican history. Here we witness the first example of the interdisciplinary approach that still characterizes the author's methodology: the perceptive analysis of an exhaustive array of historiographical sources, the expedient use of Nahuatl philology to elucidate enigmatic data, and the meaningful recourse to ethnographic data to assist in the interpretation of ancient indigenous religious symbols and myths. A product of its time, the book reflects the influence of Karl Marx's historical materialism and Mircea Eliade's conceptions of the sacred—synthesizing thus two intellectual paradigms that were exerting a great influence in the study of religions during the 1970s. But far from being a dated work, the book represents a breakthrough that still exerts considerable influence among Mesoamericanists. Here the author sketched for the first time his now celebrated concept of cosmovision. Here we find also the first expression of his thesis regarding the decisive influence that indigenous notions of the body had in articulating a specific Mesoamerican cosmovision—an astonishing conceptual breakthrough that López Austin would later develop fully in his landmark Cuerpo humano e ideología (1980).The Myth of Quetzalcoatl can be divided into two parts. The first section contains a sweeping analysis of the considerable historiographical corpus related to Quetzalcoatl. Since the sixteenth century, the question of the historicity of Tollan and its ruler Quetzalcoatl—at once supreme deity and mortal man—has been hotly debated. Gradually, a euhemeristic view prevailed among scholars, and in the twentieth century specialists focused on understanding the patterns of myth that modified the biography of the founder of Tollan. In order to explore this question, López Austin proceeds to examine, in the second part of his thesis, the long evolution of social relations in central Mesoamerica and the parallel emergence of a complex cosmovision, cyclical in nature, in which the sacred saturates the world so radically that animals, people, and natural phenomena are often perceived as manifestations of personified deities. López Austin posits the model of the man-god as a specifically Mesoamerican expression of divine charismatic authority, based on local categories of the sacred and particular modes of divine possession such as the dialogic relationship between a god and its human nahualli. The book traces the history and changing social roles of the men-gods (and women-gods: human apotheosis is gender-neutral in Mesoamerica). It first examines the relatively simple societies of migrating calpullis, led by men-gods who claimed to represent their group's tutelary deity. The text then turns to the rise of the hegemonic city-state, when the charismatic authority of the man-god was subordinated to the interest of the state, institutionalized and dispersed in assorted temple functionaries, diverse ritual impersonators, and the person of the tlatoani, whose supreme political authority was codified in the myth of Ce Acatl Topiltzin, creating thus an effective model of sanctified rulership that spread throughout Mesoamerica in the Post-Classic era. Paradoxically, this model of cyclical authority ended up playing a crucial role in the fall of Mexico, when the invading Spaniards were assimilated to the eschatological destiny of Tollan. Even later on, in the colonial era, spontaneous men-gods would repeatedly rise to contest the imposition of Spanish hegemony. Indeed, the author sees in the man-god a social agent of continuing relevance, able to spontaneously summon the indigenous modes of divine authority to continually threaten the established social order. While López Austin's The Myth of Quetzalcoatl is a masterful synthesis of Mesoamerican scholarship, the scope and complexity of its material will prove perhaps too daunting for the casual reader. For all those truly interested in the intricate enchantments of Mesoamerican history, however, the book remains indispensable

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