It is the year 1519 by our reckoning, the year 13 Rabbit in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, where an uneasy quiet has descended upon the populace.  A feeling of impending doom. Instead of the usual noisy activity and bargaining in the great market place, people are huddled in murmuring groups.  From everywhere menacing omens have been reported.  Evil comets have appeared in the sky while the sun was shining, temples burst into flames; a weeping woman was heard night after night crying “Oh my sons, we are lost!” or “Oh my sons, where can I hide you?”  Monstrous men with two heads and a single body were seen.  The sacred lake of Texacoco (upon which this unusual city of half a million people was built) frothed up over its banks when there was no wind.

     And now the messengers that the great Motecuhzoma had sent to the Eastern shores had returned, and the chiefs of all the tribes had been summoned to the palace, and with them the seers, magicians, the priests and the wise men.  Reports of what they had seen were already circulating throughout the city: stories of strange animals and terrible weapons that split mountains and shattered trees into splinters.

     Now it had come to pass which the wise seers had prophesied and which was written in the sacred books for all to read:  far in the east the light god Quetzalcoatl, born of a virgin, arose and set about recovering and making his own again the land of which the gods of the Aztecs had dispossessed him.  And with him, the white god of light and of the clear bright air, there approached a host of radiant celestial beings mounted upon four-footed dragon gods from whose nostrils the breath came forth like steam, who sped through the air like a hurricane, and whose manes and tails waved like plumes of smoke that issued from the ice-clad fire mountain Popocatepetl.  Thunder and lightning these white gods bore in their hands.  Men died before the thunder shot by the enraged white gods out of long tubes.  There was no remedy against them, if their friendship could not be won.

     A presentiment of approaching downfall ran through the land.  The poets sang:

How sad! How heavy!

I know that our kingdom is sinking,

the stars are smoking,

the city of books, of flowers

will soon be no more!

     On the coast of Mexico at this same time an Indian princess who history will record as Dona Marina is relating a story to the captain of a band of four hundred odd Spaniards.  The story she tells is the “Wotan” legend of the Maya.

     Long, long ago many foreign ships appeared off the coast of Yucatan, and from these ships stepped tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed men.  The gunwales of these ships glistened like the scales of a snake, and it looked as though giant shimmering serpents were creeping slowly over the sea towards the shore.  These unknown men wore strange clothes, and round their brows an ornament that manifestly represented the image of a coiled snake.  When those fair-skinned, serpent-crowned beings arrived in their scaly, gliding snake-ships, people believed these strangers to be sons of the sacred serpent, to be sons of God.

     These fair-haired, blue-eyed strangers settled in Yucatan and lived among the Mayans and became their teachers and guides.  Finally the strange radiations from this landing passed over to Mexico.  For one day there appeared in Mexico an old man whom nobody knew.  These unknown from the far east began forthwith to teach a new religion and a new code of ethics.  He was clear-thinking and wise, kindhearted and of a great gentleness.  Deeds of blood and violence he fervently abhorred, and he stopped his ears when men spoke of war.  His skin was white and he had a long beard and he was called Quetzalcoatl after the resplendent Quetzal bird.  The forefathers were for a long time obedient to him.  Then they arose in revolt against him, so that he had to flee the country and return to his home far away in the east beyond the great sea.  Before he disappeared, however, he prophesied that one day his white brothers would come to Mexico and conquer the country.

     The captain to whom Dona Marina is telling her story is, of course, Hernando Cortes, Conqueror of Mexico.  The Indian princess became his mistress and was probably the only real love is his tempestuous life.  She was known to the natives thereafter as La Malinche.  She accompanied Cortes during the conquest of Mexico and acted as his interpreter.  Actually she translated the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs to Mayan and another interpreter, a Spaniard, who had lived among the Mayans, then translated the Mayan to Spanish for Cortes.

     It was this prevailing belief among the Aztecs that Cortes and his small army was Quetzalcoatl and his brother gods from the east come back to reclaim their lands…that was substantially the reason a small handful of men was able to conquer a nation of millions of Indians.  Naturally in the final battles he still could not have prevailed if it had not been for hundreds of thousands of Indian allies who were enemies of the Aztecs—who were, in fact, relative newcomers to Mexico.  But it was because of this belief, by the allies of Cortes, that he was the white god of the east, that they allied themselves with him against their hated brothers, the Aztecs.

     But who was Quetzalcoatl?  Who was this white-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, tall, bearded man?  There were no such people among the native tribes of America.  The Indians were not of large stature; there were no blue-eyed ones among them; their hair was dark as was their skin; very little hair grew on their faces.  How could they have described such a being if they had not seen such an one?  And if they had, from whence did he come?

     Who were these white gods of the “Wotan” legend, who came in snake ships to the coast of Yucatan?  Obviously they were not Indians, and only the Indian was native to America.  Delving deeper into the legends and the stories of Quetzalcoatl, we find detailed descriptions of clothing and armor and headdresses that were not common in Europe at the time of the conquest, but were quite common around the ninth and tenth centuries, particularly among the Norsemen.  What of these serpent ships?  Is not this a perfect description of a Viking longship?   Their “dragon ships”, so called because of the beautifully carved, artistic fore and aft posts, generally carved in the shape of a serpentine head.

     What about the timing?  At the time of Dona Marina the “Wotan” legend lay but a few hundred years in the past.  About 1000 A.D. the Mayans had moved from the primeval forests of Guatemala, where they had originally gone when pushed out of Mexico by the Toltecs, the predecessors of the Aztecs, and had located on the Yucatan peninsula.  And this is also the identical time of the great voyages of the Norsemen to Finland.  We know that they explored Greenland and the northeast coast of the United States.  Did they go further down the coast?  Did they land at Yucatan?  Was Quetzalcoatl a Norwegian?

     Or was he an Irishman?  What of the Icelandic chronicles written at a time prior to the Norse explorations, which refer to a Hvitramonna land—“Land of the Palefaces”?  This Hvitramonna land is also referred to as Greater Ireland and allegedly was west of Finland, by which the Icelanders also knew the coast of North America.  How did this place get its name, “Paleface Land”?  Would white discoverers of a country peopled primarily by dark-skinned natives give the discovered land such a name?  Or was it a name given to a white settlement by the Indians?  And does this not fit in with the Irish, Celtic and Welsh legends of a great land to the west beyond the seas and of voyages to such a place?  What of the expedition of King Madoc of North Wales in 1170 around the south coast of Ireland to a land beyond the western sea?

     What of the white Indians of the Great Lakes region, the Mandan?  Fair-haired, blue-eyed.  Were they originally of European extraction, this tribe which had all shades of skin coloring and hair colors, whose religion closely parallels the Christian beliefs?  Were they descendents of an intermingling of King Madoc's colonists and Indians?  Was Quetzalcoatl a Welshman?

     As yet we don't really know who Quetzalcoatl was.  We are sure he existed and that he probably was of European origin.  We know that, because of his existence, Mexico was easily conquered by Cortes.  And we know that, in spite of the predominantly Catholic faith of present-day Mexico, Quetzalcoatl still lives in their ceremonies and beliefs, right beside the Apostles, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Triune God of Christianity.

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