My Personal, Peculiar History with Quetzalcoatl.
I have a peculiar history with this Aztec deity.
In grade school, my pop was helping me with research for a school report about “The Conqistadors.” You know, those guys who stopped imperialism and human sacrifice among the Aztecs by presenting their own brand of imperialism and human sacrifice rituals? Ah, but that was called “conversion by the sword.” I digress.
The history book tailored for grade schoolers about Hernán Cortez said that he was mistaken for a god by the Aztecs. The details are a little hazy, but it had something to do with their ships, their armor, their boom-sticks, smallpox… okay, I’m going off track again. My point is, my pop and I started investigating the names of gods that the Aztecs actually worshipped. The most prominent name was Quetzalcoatl. My pop mispronounced it KWETZ-uh-COT-ul. The proper pronunciation is KETZ-al-co-AH-tul. At least, I think that’s right.
Anyway, Quetzalcoatl is Nahuatl (the Aztec language) for “feathered serpent.” He was the god of wind, rain, and agriculture. He was signified in the heavens by what we now call the planet Venus. He was also known as The Wise Old Man by the Aztecs. Given all his responsibilities and contributions to not only Aztec culture but to neighboring cultures, he was pretty popular. So popular in fact, he has had an influence on our own modern pop culture.
My next encounter with Quetzalcoatl was when I watched a horror film directed by Larry Cohen called Q: The Winged Serpent. Q, obviously, was the abbreviation of Quetzalcoatl. Far from the radiant Feathered Serpent of Aztec times, Q looked like some crude rendering of a pterodactyl with leathery skin and a butt ugly T-Rex face. In an interview for the compilation Incredibly Strange Films by REsearch, Cohen saw Q as a stand in for our own sky god. The wrathful god you find in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation.
By http://www.impawards.com/1982/q.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9765862
Don’t be up on the roof when Quetzalcoatl’s flying by! That’s the whole thing. People go to church and they’re making a mistake. They say, “Hey God! Look at me! Hey, it’s me here, Sam, I’m praying!” And God says, “Oh… Sam, I’d forgotten about him… no plague on him lately? Well, let’s do something about it! Give me a report on him. Children: how many? Too many children! Burn his house down!”… It’s not so much “God help me,” but “God leave me alone!” Q was just like all the other gods — indiscriminate and brutal!
- Larry Cohen, in an interview with Andrea Juno and Vale.
But as far as Quetzalcoatl was concerned, I was always on the roof in my imagination. I would look skyward to see if this magnificent, menacing creature was winding its way through the heavens. Would he make the rain fall? Would he send a calming gust of wind? Or would he do what any raptor would do and snatch me up in his talons for a snack?
Researching ancient gods and goddesses is a hobby of mine. If you’ve seen this blog’s sister series “The Inanna-verse,” you’ve probably read (and hopefully enjoyed) the comic antics and escapades of this Queen of Heaven. If you read deeper into her lore, Inanna could be a fearsome bitch. She once leveled a mountain like Gojira stomping through Tokyo. Why? Because it would not bow before her. Some stories said she was jealous of its beauty.
And look what I just did? I got sidetracked again! Back to Quetzalcoatl.
As a child, I read a lot of superhero comics. I would revel in the titanic stories of sentinels in radiant multicolored costumes clashing against equally colorful villains and monsters in a battle beyond the sky. In more noir-ish stories like Batman, the aerial vigilante would swoop down like a preying animal and pin the crooks and psychos to the wall or to the floor. Whether cosmic or terrestrial, I felt all these characters traced their heritage back to mythic beings like Quetzalcoatl.
I thought, Quetzalcoatl would be a great superhero - or supervillain - if his name wasn’t so hard to pronounce. You could call him “Q,” but there is currently a mischievous, godlike being using the title in Star Trek - The Next Generation. You could call him “Quetz,” but that sounds like a nickname you’d give to a weird member of your cadre of preadolescent buddies: “Belch,” or “Chunk,” or “John John Leprechaun.”
That last one was mine.
On a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, I was introduced to a painted rendering of a Late Cretaceous period pterosaur whose fossil is the largest on record in paleontology. Because its remains were found in modern Mesoamerica, the home of The Wise Old Feathered Serpent, it was named Queztalcoatlus Northropi.
By Yinan Chen - www.goodfreephotos.com (gallery, image), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33632957
Is it some wild co-incidence that such a large winged reptile was found in the land whose later human inhabitants would worship a feathered serpent god that is its namesake? Is it possible that Mesoamerican spelunkers from the Pre-Columbian era found the fossilized remains of this ancient creature and imagined a chimerical being that soared through the heavens, leaving brisk winds and life giving precipitation in its wake?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
In fact, the name Quetzalcoatl itself is a fusion of the names quetzal, which is the Nahuatl name of a species of tropical bird with radiant red and green plumage…
By Flickr user chdwckvnstrsslhm . Photo uploaded to commons by user ltshears - Flickr here, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1833937
…and coatl, which is Nahuatl for “serpent” or “twin.”
Perhaps Q is an amalgam of bird, snake, and a giant, ancient saurian?
Perhaps I’m reading too much into this subject?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Recently, I started playing a mobile phone game produced in Japan titled Fate / Grand Order. I written about its anime counterpart in recent posts. Back to the point, there is the playable character of Quetzalcoatl. For some capricious reason I haven’t quite figured out, Quetzalcoatl was gender swapped!
Illustrator: Hiroe Rei
Genderswapping is not uncommon in F/GO, but wow, did they go to town with Quetzalcoatl! Not only is her sex switched around, but her cultural background is a soup of Mesoamerican and Hispanic tropes as well. Ms. Quetzalcoatl speaks in a pidgin tongue I can only call, “Jaspanishese, “ meaning she speaks Japanese, but it is peppered with Spanish phrases like “¡Que linda!” “¡Mi amor!” and “¡Lucha Libre!” Quetzalcoatl is particularly fond of the last phrase, as her character’s attack technique in the game involves the wrestling techniques found in Mexican lucha libre. ‘Cos Quetzalcoatl and lucha libre both come from MEXICO, get it?
Yeah, it’s a stretch.
So all this Quetzalcoatl-ing research and recreation led me to a source text which is a Columbian era catalog of the Aztec pantheon known as the Maya Codex Telleriano Remensis. On the page below, we see Quetzalcoatl devouring the body of a presumably live, writhing human being.
Hey, a god’s gotta eat. It’s good for the plumage!
So my ongoing curiosity with this Feathered Serpent, this Wise Old Man, this Terror from the Skies continues. I just marvel at how it began with a father and son researching the exploits of an exploiter and discovering a treasure more precious than gold…
Wisdom from a Wise Old Man.
- JJB
That is a fascinating research project.
ReplyDeleteAfter writing this article, I decided to search for Larry Cohen's movie "Q: The Winged Serpent" on any available streaming services. One of the results of my search was the HBO documentary "Q: Into the Abyss." That's when it occurred to me: At no point did I consider making mention of the QAnon movement or its prophet Q, as the only Q I was concerned about was the Aztec deity. In fact, the only reference I made about a Q other than the Q in the blog was the Q from Star Trek: TNG.
DeleteI further realized that up until that moment, my brain succeeded in consigning any thought about QAnon to the same fate as Bing Bong from Inside Out. Specifically, that crevasse of dim and forgotten memories from which he and Joy were trying to escape.
As The Critical Drinker would say, "Anyway, That's all I've got for today. GO AWAY, NOW!"
Erratum: The title of the HBO documentary is "Q : Into the Storm."
DeleteExactly. Our memory holes keep doing that to us so that even if we saw the title yesterday, one word gets blocked out! It’s trauma, I tell you.
Delete