The Priest-King of Tula, and a Contested Prophecy

Bound up with the god is the figure of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, a legendary priest-king of the Toltecs and their city of Tula, who took the god's name, a ruler remembered as wise and holy, who forbade human sacrifice and taught the arts, and who was in the end driven from his city through the schemes of a rival divine power, Tezcatlipoca.

Departing toward the east, he is said in one famous strand of the tradition to have promised to return, sailing back across the eastern sea in a future year of his sign. It has often been claimed that this expectation led the Aztec ruler Moctezuma to take the arriving Spaniard Cortes for the returning Quetzalcoatl; this story is widely repeated, but modern scholars treat it with real caution, noting that much of it appears in sources written after the conquest and may owe as much to later reworking, Spanish and Nahua alike, as to any belief actually held in 1519. What is certain is that Quetzalcoatl was, long before the Spaniards came, among the most important and most humane of the Mesoamerican gods: the feathered serpent who joined earth and sky, the wind that cleared the way for the rain, and the creator who gave his own blood to make and to feed humankind.