Exonerating Tōpīltzin Cē Ācatl Quetzalcōātl
I think Tōpīltzin Cē Ācatl Quetzalcōātl often gets conflated with God, and so I just want to talk about this person in a historical sense, because there really was a historical figure in Mesoamerica.
The character is an androgenous figure, so just for my own sake I’m using the feminine word because based on Gnostic writings I’ve been reading, the female body holds male and female energy really well. Basically it’s a two spirited figure, and so just to honour the female side that was lost in translation I’m going to use female pronouns. Whew, what a disclaimer!
Okay, so this woman was an important leader, she brought peace and a renaissance and diverted certain needs of the psyche of her people into more enlightened and peaceful forms. Then something happened, she was overthrown by a sect which gave her a neurotoxin and then suggested she go find her afterlife because she was going to die soon. Did she die? I assume so. She got on a boat and headed east in a total daze, but aware she would return because she knew how to consciously reincarnate in the same way Buddha’s been reincarnating over and over (and he has been and is on the planet today). But before she left she’d given the people a vision she had of Cortes. She described who he was and probably tried to describe what he would do, but people didn’t know how to pay attention at the time or how to properly interpret a vision. They were really convinced they knew how to govern without her.
The fact was, they soon realized they had no idea of the concept of governance, their community started to fall apart and a peaceful era came to an end.
But her vision isn’t what caused them to welcome Cortes, it was bad leadership that did that.
Montezuma, from what I can gather, was leading a bit of a police state, he didn’t know how to use power properly and it started to show when a series of supernatural events began occuring just before the arrival of Cortes. Historical records state there was a comet in the sky, and they knew it meant something but they didn’t know what. It got worse. A giant stone head started talking all on it’s own and they tried unsucessfully to move it to Teotihuacán to get it away from them. What that head was saying, I’m not sure, but it was probably criticising Montezuma’s leadership capabilities and talking about Cortes. They could hear female spirits screaming in the night about death. Montezuma freaked and required EVERYONE to tell him their dreams and visions, because he didn’t know how to interpret anything. But dreams and visions don’t make sense to the people who don’t have them, so I’m sure he got all kinds of strange imagery from the people’s subconscious that made even less sense than what he was dealing with already. And at this point he wanted Quetzalcoatl to return, because they needed that kind of insight. So Cortes comes along, the one who those people were warned about, but because of various confusions he wasn’t just killed on the spot. Because he could be Quetzalcoatl. He fit the historical description of that person, sort of. He came from the east. All kinds of stuff fit. And I think when Cortes realized that there was that figure they were waiting for, he used it to his advantage.
He was the Anti-Quetzalcoatl, to borrow a biblical idea.
I don’t know that Montezuma really believed it was Quetzalcoatl, but times were really unsure, and in a way I think he just hoped it was true. But obviously Cortes went on a rampage and started hacking off people’s limbs if they didn’t give him enough gold and most pronounced was when he didn’t understand the use of Jadeite. Because Montezuma gave him four jadeite beads, knowing Quetzalcoatl would understand what they were for, and Cortes failed that test completely. I think by then he knew it was too late.
But Cortes was still just a guy who wanted gold, and so he completely missed various things about that culture that were important. They were brown people, so the fact that they had advanced knowledge was overlooked. They were brown people with vast gold reserves, which blinded Cortes to other possibilities. Two bad leaders, really bad leaders, had the misfortune of coming together in history to create the current situation we see in the New World. And basically since then it’s been a constant struggle between a leadership displayed by Cortes and a leadership displayed by Montezuma, both of whom were stupid leaders. And in the end the person who unfortunately takes the blame for it was Quetzalcoatl, because she had a vision no one understood and it was misread as a type of revenge on her people. I don’t think she ever wanted revenge, she just wanted to say “Look out for this guy, because you could be really hurt by him.”
I mean honestly, ignoring a frickin’ stone head telling you that a destructive guy was coming, come on! I don’t see how any of those signs could be misinterpreted, it was all “Look out!” Which makes one wonder if it was guilt driving the people to accept Cortes, they knew they fucked up with Quetzalcoatl before, and they assumed naturally that because they were the kinds of people who wanted revenge, Quetzalcoatl was the same. Which wasn’t true. Likewise I think people mistakenly assume if Jesus returns he’s going to be out for vengence, like some action flick sequel. And I don’t think Jesus would do that, I think he’d just avoid the people who he could recognize from his last life. I think at a certain point enlightened beings have given up on particular souls that seem for some reason to be beyond salvation, and it’s not because they hate those people, it’s because they’re just totally impossible to teach. You can’t expect a professor in a Doctorate program to go teach a kindergarden class, that’s just dummying down it too damn much. I think some teachers figured out how to teach a kindergarden class, but it’s definitely not me! I gave up on the kindergardeners when I was in kindergarden.