Quetzalcoatl and the irony of empire: Myths and prophecies in the Aztec tradition

by Davíd Carrasco

Davíd Carrasco draws from the perspectives of the history of religions, anthropology, and urban ecology to explore the nature of the complex symbolic form of Quetzalcoatl in the organization, legitimation, and subversion of a large segment of the Mexican urban tradition. His new Preface addresses this tradition in the light of the Columbian quincentennial.

"This book, rich in ideas, constituting a novel approach . . . represents a stimulating and provocative contribution to Mesoamerican studies. . . . Recommended to all serious students of the New World's most advanced indigenous civilization."â H. B. Nicholson, Man

Genres: Religion, History, Mythology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Davíd L. Carrasco is currently Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin America Studies at Harvard. He is a Mexican-American academic historian of religion, anthropologist, and a Mesoamericanist scholar who has published widely on the Aztecs.

Reviews

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Places Quetzalcoatl (The Plumed Serpent, deity and political ruler) as key figure in his historical and political context from the period of Teotihuacan to the meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma. Carrasco argues that Mesoamerican civilizations had their centers in cities that established their rule over smaller, less nucleated centers of population on the peripheries of their empires. The book specifically aims to understand the role that Quetzalcoatl "played in the organization, legitimation, and subversion of a larger segment of the urban tradition," and how urban elites used symbols like the Plumed Serpent to direct agriculture, trade, and military conquest. The "irony of empire" in this case is that the stabilizing force of the religious symbol / urban center of Tenochtitlan carried within its own mythology contradictions and internal strains, reflected in the city and political elites, that posed as significant a threat to order and continued primacy as that of the arrival of the conquistadores. Fantastic book!

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book will no doubt be most enjoyable for anthropologists, archeologists, and/or religious scholars who work in this field. For them, the first chapter, which I found particularly tedious and technical as a historian, will be quite useful. The rest of the book was much more engaging, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.

[Javier Girona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by David Carrasco is a fascinating anthropological study of the nahuatl world, from its origins to the world of the Aztecs and of native Mesoamerica during colonial times, taking as a reference the god Quetzalcoatl for the study of their cosmology, their understanding of time and space and the transformations that society, economics, politics and religion experienced.

Analysing the origins of the god Quetzalcoatl and its position within the divine and within society, the author describes its transformation through important towns such as Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza or Tenochtitlan. Taking this god as a reference is a really clever way to explain how space was organised, the importance of the sacred into the structuring of their society, of their towns and ceremonial centres.

The book discusses Nahuatl cosmological views, their myths and the reflection on their understanding of the divine, the underworld and the cosmos. The town understood as an axis mundi, a reflection of the macrocosmos, it had an essential role as the organiser of society and as the sustenance of order in the present world.

The writer goes through the transformation of this divinity, who started as a symbol of the highest hierarchical structure of society, becoming patron of the priestly, then of trade and the military, and finally into a symbol of the populace.

The characteristics of this god were a contradiction, a symbol of creativity, sanctity, order and of creation, but also of chaos, and failure. A deity who the Aztecs wanted to identify with because of its Toltec origin. A divinity connected to humans more than any other deity, creator of them. A divine being that committed adultery, who was defeated, who left but promised to return. These essential characteristics of god and god-man are reflected on the Aztec world, a community that made big efforts to identify themselves with the Toltecs and with Quetzalcoatl, matter that brought legitimacy to their rule. This though brought also instability, fear and concern over the return of the god-man, who left but promised to return to govern again. Some scholars believe that the arrival of Cortes and of the spaniards was understood by some of the local natives, including Moctezuma, as the return of Quetzalcoatl.

Here comes the title of the book, the Aztecs made all efforts to identify themselves with the town of Tollan, symbol of the Toltec culture, a culture which existed in Mesoamerica since the times of Teotihuacan, a culture which brought much prosperity, creativity, a whole cosmology that explained the world around them. The Aztecs saw in the Toltecs their ancestral family line. Taking the Toltecs as their own ancestors intended to legitimate their government by connecting themselves to a royal lineage which had governed in Mesoamerica historically. The Aztecs would have inhabited an area in which they struggled, first to survive, then to impose their order and after to expand within the region. The irony of the empire is that this same ancestral origin which brought success, it also brought their perdition, when the arrival of the European foreigners was understood as the Toltec myth of the return of the king, the god-man Quetzalcoatl.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested, not just in Mesoamerican culture, but in the history of human behaviour and human thought. I am discussing this and other books on similar subjects in my website: panacas.com.

[Abe]

A solid review on several Mesoamerican cities such as Teotihuacán, Tenochtitlán and others. Carrasco uses evidence from several fields, specifically historical and archaeological sources. The weakest part is the last chapter that links the arrival of Cortés and Quetzalcoatl. In any case, well worth the read for a student of Mesoamerica.