Aztec Mythology Quetzalcoatl is a word from the Nehuatl language compounded from quetzal, a Mesoamerican bird with long plumage and coatl is a serpent with the suffix atl meaning water. Some will take issue with Tonatiuh of the Aztec Calendar disk being an aspect of the Plumed Serpent. But one just needs to compare the features. To the lower right is another aspect of Tonatiuh, or Nahui Ollin as also known, meaning 4-Movement. The symbols represent the movement or increase of days in the year. That is the movement from 360 days to 364 days and the causes were Jaguar, Wind, Rain and Water, or aspects of the Plumed Serpent also known as Quetzalcoat by the Aztecs and Seven Macaws, by the Quiche Maya.
http://fuliginouspalaver.tripod.com/comingtolight/id2.html
The Streaming Serpent(from Theolog vol. 1 [new series], No. 4)
It begins in a dark room, lit under the supple glow of a sole candle. Before the candlelight a standing stick of incense burns slowly. At times, the incense fumes lift rapidly, fanning into the air into wide plumes, coiling into helices, or waving in undulatory patterns. But it is always the same flowing stream of incense. Thirteen centuries ago, a Maya priestess would have gazed into such a stream of rising incense and, through deeper and deeper trance, would have seen the serpent rising within the smoke. The priestess could then communicate with this Vision Serpent, this sacred vehicle carrying the soul of an ancestral king. I have begun with this lesson from libanomantic lore because, during this past vacation, I had put a lot of thought on the symbolism of the serpent in Mesoamerican thought. And I have found it everywhere.
As water, the serpent cleanses. In the sacred calendar, the day-sign of the serpent occurs under the presence of Chal****itlicue, the goddess of living waters. She was present in running streams, standing lakes, and any water that sustained life, from fish to crop. She was invoked in baptismal rites and healing waters, for her water had the power to wash away various negative influences. This was the water that streamed over the earth like a winding serpent, coursing over the land and suffusing it with life, just as the streams of blood course through one's vessels. The serpent was here, too.
As blood, the serpent sustains. In carvings such as those at Chichen Itza, the blood of sacrifices often spurted out into streams ending in snake heads. The blood that once nourished a human flowed over the earth and nourished the latter in turn. Upon death, one's vital energy was not dissipated as much as it was dislocated. The Mesoamerican lived in a world in which every constituent of the human being—be it matter, energy, or spirit—continued to exist after death, with new forms and functions to maintain the cosmic order.
As wind, the serpent inspires. One of the most ancient of the Mesoamerican deities was the Feathered Serpent, best known as Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind. Life cannot exist without breath, and breath cannot exist without wind. These were the winds blown by the Feathered Serpent as Ehecatl, the sacred, life-giving Wind. The swift, whipping winds of the highlands were the invisible Wind Serpents, the Ehecacoatls as they are still called today. The association between the wind and the serpent is perhaps the oldest and most widespread in Mesoamerican history, in contrast to the other three elements. And unlike other deities who operated in relation to the four cardinal directions, the wind moved in every direction. The wind god's temple could not fit the pattern of the four-sided pyramid, therefore; only a circular shape captured the wind's motion through infinite vectors.
As earth, the serpent nourishes. The cihuacoatl priest, bearing the title of the "Snake Woman," was primarily concerned with the material side of divine Providence. He ensured that people were fed and finances were secure. His affairs were as tied to the earth as the reptiles spread across it. The Aztecs perceived the earth goddess as Coatlicue, a monstrous being saturated with serpentine features, forming her skirt, her hands, and even her head. Beneath that skirt of writhing rattlesnakes, her womb bore all life. Caverns were artistically depicted as wombs in the earth, and Nahua children were often delivered in a sweathouse built as an artificial cave. Children were thus born from both the mother and the earth.
As fire, the serpent renews. What magnificent creatures the Xiuhcoatls must have been! One can only imagine such enormous beings, their backs ablaze with the dying embers of an old age and the rising flames of the new. Without the sacred fire to usher in a new cycle of time, creation would collapse. As metaphysical concepts, fire and time were interdependent; many cultures believed in a single deity who represented both concepts, such as Huehueteotl. Likewise, while the Xiuhcoatl was conceived of as a great fire beast, it was also literally the Year Serpent. On the perimeter of the Sun Stone, two great Xiuhcoatls pressed their faces against each other, reflecting the perpetual shift between day and night, the one never overpowering the other. The Xiuhcoatl was also a celestial being, whose nasal crest represented the Pleiades and whose underside was dotted with the very stars of the Milky Way. With the year it embodied time, and with the stars it embodied space. Braided strands of time, momentary divisions of day and night—these are just words. A howling Year Serpent searing through four-dimensional space—it it just a symbol.
As mind, the serpent molts. It is the promise of new life. It is the reassurance that, while I cannot yet escape the consequences of my former karma, I can at least begin to shed away the mental habits which brought them into being. I can cast them all into the outermost cuticle of my skin. And then, with the vow to never repeat those habits, I tear them off my body. Rrrip! Rrrip! So what is left? - the luster of iridescent scales, the rich shimmer of the pure mind beneath the layer of old, dead skin.
Serpents were everywhere. A double-headed serpent upheld the Mayan sky. Serpents flashed as streaks of lightning from the Zapotec clouds. They carried the Olmec shaman's consciousness. They channeled down the Huichols' rain. For eight days, they swallowed the Toltecs' planet Venus. How they ruled the sky! How they ruled time! The Mesoamerican cosmology was one whose very patterns of energy and fabric of matter were personified by or pervaded with animate beings. It is a concept that still leaves me stultified. But it is nonetheless an extremely interesting paradigm, I find. I believe that the serpent offers its own paradigm: that one kind of animal can conceptually represent so many different principles of nature.
The Mesoamerican's world was an extraordinarily complex web of intersecting and even interchangeable symbols. Recently I had tried reading Nahua prayers from the seventeenth century; I couldn't get past the first verses without necessitating a total immersion into the Nahua cosmology. I would imagine that it must have been fantastic: a universe populated with divine forces, natural spirits, living waters, and the literal "Soul of the World." It was a spatio-temporal world in continuous motion and flux, whose energies were sometimes explicable through reference to animals. Even serpents.
Edgar Martin del Campo
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