The Poet King and the Unknown God

The tradition that reaches us says Nezahualcóyotl raised a tower of nine levels at Texcoco to Tloque Nahuaque, the lord of the near and the nigh, and left the sanctuary at the top empty because no image could stand for him. It says he composed songs on the brevity of life and the unknowability of the giver of life, and that he was reluctant about human sacrifice. Every element of that reaches us through writers of the century after his death. His descendant Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl is the fullest source. The songs survive in two alphabetic manuscripts, the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, both compiled decades after the conquest, and neither carries attributions that can be checked.

Scholars are genuinely divided. Some read a real strand of Nahua philosophical speculation, of a kind attested elsewhere among the tlamatinime, that a Christian frame later distorted but did not invent. Others read a colonial fiction built to give a converted Mexico an acceptable pagan ancestor. The atlas records the claim as contested rather than choosing between them, because the choice cannot honestly be made from the surviving texts. His portrait has appeared on the Mexican hundred peso note, which is a reminder that the argument is not only academic, because a modern nation has a stake in how it comes out.