[Footnote 1: Torquemada, _Monarquía Indiana_, Lib. XIV, cap. XXII.]


§2. _Quetzalcoatl the God._

In the ancient and purely mythical narrative, Quetzalcoatl is one of four
divine brothers, gods like himself, born in the uttermost or thirteenth
heaven to the infinite and uncreated deity, which, in its male
manifestations, was known as _Tonaca tecutli_, Lord of our Existence, and
_Tzin teotl_, God of the Beginning, and in its female expressions as
_Tonaca cihuatl_, Queen of our Existence, _Xochiquetzal_, Beautiful Rose,
_Citlallicue_, the Star-skirted or the Milky Way, _Citlalatonac_, the Star
that warms, or The Morning, and _Chicome coatl_, the Seven Serpents.[1]

[Footnote 1: The chief authorities on the birth of the god Quetzalcoatl,
are Ramirez de Fuen-leal _Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas_,
Cap. i, printed in the _Anales del Museo Nacional_; the _Codex
Telleriano-Remensis_, and the _Codex Vaticanus_, both of which are in
Kingsborough's _Mexican Antiquities_.

The usual translation of _Tonaca tecutli_ is "God of our Subsistence,"
_to_, our, _naca_, flesh, _tecutli_, chief or lord. It really has a more
subtle meaning. _Naca_ is not applied to edible flesh--that is expressed
by the word _nonoac_--but is the flesh of our own bodies, our life,
existence. See _Anales de Cuauhtitlan_, p. 18, note.]

Of these four brothers, two were the black and the red Tezcatlipoca, and
the fourth was Huitzilopochtli, the Left handed, the deity adored beyond
all others in the city of Mexico. Tezcatlipoca--for the two of the name