[Footnote 3:  “La barba longa entre cana y roja; el cabello largo, muy llano.”  Diego Duran, Historia, in Kingsborough, Vol. viii, p. 260.]

His name is symbolic, and is capable of several equally fair renderings.  The first part of it, quetzalli, means literally a large, handsome green feather, such as were very highly prized by the natives.  Hence it came to mean, in an adjective sense, precious, beautiful, beloved, admirable.  The bird from which these feathers were obtained was the quetzal-tototl (tototl, bird) and is called by ornithologists Trogon splendens.

The latter part of the name, coatl, has in Aztec three entirely different meanings.  It means a guest, also twins, and lastly, as a syncopated form of cohuatl, a serpent.  Metaphorically, cohuatl meant something mysterious, and hence a supernatural being, a god.  Thus Montezuma, when he built a temple in the city of Mexico dedicated to the whole body of divinities, a regular Pantheon, named it Coatecalli, the House of the Serpent.[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Coatecalli, que quiere decir el templo de la culebra, que sin metafora quiere decir templo de diversos dioses.”  Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana, cap.  LVIII.]

Through these various meanings a good defence can be made of several different translations of the name, and probably it bore even to the natives different meanings at different times.  I am inclined to believe that the original sense was that advocated by Becerra in the seventeenth century, and adopted by Veitia in the eighteenth, both competent Aztec scholars.[1] They translate Quetzalcoatl as “the admirable twin,” and though their notion that this refers to Thomas Didymus, the Apostle, does not meet my views, I believe they were right in their etymology.  The reference is to the duplicate nature of the Light-God as seen in the setting and rising sun, the sun of to-day and yesterday, the same yet different.  This has its parallels in many other mythologies.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Becerra, Felicidad de Mejico, 1685, quoted in Veitia, Historia del Origen de las Gentes que poblaron la America Septentrional, cap.  XIX.]

[Footnote 2:  In the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” Ra, the Sun-God, says, “I am a soul and its twins,” or, “My soul is becoming two twins.”  “This means that the soul of the sun-god is one, but, now that it is born again, it divides into two principal forms.  Ra was worshipped at An, under his two prominent manifestations, as Tum the primal god, or more definitely, god of the sun at evening, and as Harmachis, god of the new sun, the sun at dawn.”  Tiele, History of the Egyptian Religion, p. 80.]