The Myth of Quetzalcoatl (review)

The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. By ENRIQUE FLORESCANO. Translated by LYSA HOCHROTH. Illustrated by raúl velázquez. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Plates. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 287 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

In 1957 Miguel Covarrubias published a now-famous diagram illustrating the evolution of Mesoamerican rain gods. Drawings of 20 faces from Pre-Columbian iconography were arranged in 4 columns and connected with arrows. Teotihuacano murals, Yucatec Maya stonework, and Aztec ceramics were all traced back to a carved Olmec celt. The three thousand years between the earliest and latest objects in this chart were unified by visual similarity, namely, downturned lips, accented eyes.

A similar genealogy--focused on a different deity and drawing on textual sources as well as iconographic ones--is pursued in The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. As with Covarrubias's chart, Florescano's study encompasses three thousand years of history and numerous cultural traditions: Olmec to Aztec, formative to colonial. But where Covarrubias's visual chart is based on assumptions of (visual and conceptual) continuity, and on a single origin point (ursprung), Florescano's discussion of "Quetzalcoatl" argues that this figure is "reborn during each period of history. . . with a different face each time around" (p. 1). Florescano pursues the multiple ancestries (herkunft) he claims contributed to the figure of Quetzalcoatl described in sixteenth-century Aztec documents.

Florescano's first two chapters focus on Classic and Postclassic sources, and discuss four influences he argues shaped the sixteenth-century Quetzalcoatl: the Plumed Serpent, Venus, Nine Wind, and Tula's Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. Chapters 3 and 4 present interpretations of this protean figure and related narratives. Discussion ranges from beliefs about the underworld and creation, to stories recorded on Classic Maya ceramics and in the Popol Vuh, to Olmec agricultural imagery, to transformations of political organization and ideology that followed the collapse of Classic polities. The end of chapters 4 and 5, and the epilogue address even broader themes. Florescano asks how we can account for the striking similarities in the structures and events of creation narratives in agricultural societies, not merely across time and space in Mesoamerica, but--as shown in chapter 5--across time and space in the Old World as well.

The sweep of Florescano's argumentation raises a number of important issues about cultural change and continuity. I will focus on two. First, to use Marshall Sahlins's phrasing, how can one explain the persistence of cultural "structures of the long-term"? Second, how does one construct a genealogy for a single concept, faced with the reality of radical historical change?

Florescano's answer to the first question is ingenious. He suggests that the events in, and overall structures of, Mesoamerican creation narratives reflect the life cycle of the maize plant. As the central staple in Mesoamerican diets, the maize plant provided a continually observable model for the narrative progress in myths--myths that Florescano argues are often about maize as well. His comparative analyses of the adventures of the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh (who resurrect their father, the maize god) with the underworld tasks of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl (the "Precious Twin" who brings maize out from mountain confinement) are compelling. Furthermore, the basic similarities in the life cycle of cereal plants generally may explain the parallels between Mesoamerican creation narratives and their Old World counterparts. As noted at the beginning of chapter 5, a similar biological-botanical argument was made for the parallels found in Old World materials by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. And Florescano's biologically-based argument of persistence-because-of-social-centrality finds intriguing parallels to Marshall Sahlins' discussion of "The Sadness of Sweetness," a Western structure of the long-term whose persistence-despite-transformations may be explained by the centrality of Christianity (and its textual supports) as the staple in a vast architecture of Western intellectual and moral existence.

On one level, then, Florescano's arguments seem to parallel Covarrubias's chart after all: The Myth of...