Quetzalcoatl. (From the Sahagun MS.)
Pottery figure of Quetzalcoatl from Tezcuco.
FORMS OF QUETZALCOATL.
Sahagun MS. (Biblioteca del Palacio).—In the illustration which accompanies his description in this MS. he wears a pointed cap of jaguar-skin, surmounted by quetzal-plumes. The face and body are painted black with soot, and a curved band falls from beneath the hat to the neck. He wears the golden “water-snake” collar, and on his back the wing of the red guacamayo. Over the hips is slung a cloth with a red border. He wears white sandals, and pieces of jaguar-skin are fastened over the foot. On his shield he has the shell which is typical of him, and in his hand a staff with a motif like that of the nose of the Maya God B. Sahagun says of him: “His image was always in a recumbent position and covered with blankets. The face of it was very ugly, the head large and furnished with a long beard.”[70]
Torquemada states that Quetzalcoatl was a white man, large-bodied, broad-browed, great-eyed, with long black hair and a beard heavy and rounded.[71]
Acosta says of Quetzalcoatl’s image at Cholula: “They called it Quetzallcoalt. This idoll was in a great place in a temple very high. It had about it gold, silver, jewels, very rich feathers, and habits of divers colours. It had the forme of a man, but the visage of a little bird with a red bill, and above a combe full of warts, having ranks of teeth and the tongue hanging out. It carried upon the head a pointed myter of painted paper, a sithe in the hand, and many toyes of gold on the legs, with a thousand other foolish inventions, whereof all had their significations.”[72] [[121]]
Elsewhere Acosta says: “The greatest idoll of all their gods was called Quezcalcovately.… He never ware but one garment of cotton, which was white, narrow and long, and upon that a mantle beset with certain red crosses. They have certain green stones which were his, and those they keep for relickes. One of them is like an ape’s head.”
Anales de Quauhtitlan.—In this work Quetzalcoatl is described as wearing the turquoise snake-mask and the quetzal-feather ornament—that is, the decorations of the Fire-god: “Lastly in the year one reed they say, when he had arrived on the shore of the sea, then he began to weep and put off the garb with which he was arrayed, his quetzal-feather ornament, his turquoise mask.”
