Another myth of the Aztecs gave these four brothers or primitive heroes, as:—­

Huitzilopochtli. 
Huitznahua. 
Itztlacoliuhqui. 
Pantecatl.

Of these Dr. Schultz-Sellack advances plausible reasons for believing that Itztlacoliuhqui, which was the name of a certain form of head-dress, was another title of Quetzalcoatl; and that Pantecatl was one of the names of Tezcatlipoca.[1] If this is the case we have here another version of the same myth.

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Schultz Sellack, Die Amerikanischen Goetter der Vier Weltgegenden und ihre Tempel in Palenque, in the Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, Bd. xi, (1879).]

Sec.3. Quetzalcoatl, the Hero of Tula.

But it was not Quetzalcoatl the god, the mysterious creator of the visible world, on whom the thoughts of the Aztec race delighted to dwell, but on Quetzalcoatl, high priest in the glorious city of Tollan (Tula), the teacher of the arts, the wise lawgiver, the virtuous prince, the master builder and the merciful judge.

Here, again, though the scene is transferred from heaven to earth and from the cycles of other worlds to a date not extremely remote, the story continues to be of his contest with Tezcatlipoca, and of the wiles of this enemy, now diminished to a potent magician and jealous rival, to dispossess and drive him from famous Tollan.

No one versed in the metaphors of mythology can be deceived by the thin veil of local color which surrounds the myth in this its terrestrial and historic form.  Apart from its being but a repetition or continuation of the genuine ancient account of the conflict of day and night, light and darkness, which I have already given, the name Tollan is enough to point out the place and the powers with which the story deals.  For this Tollan, where Quetzalcoatl reigned, is not by any means, as some have supposed, the little town of Tula, still alive, a dozen leagues or so northwest from the city of Mexico; nor was it, as the legend usually stated, in some undefined locality from six hundred to a thousand leagues northwest of that city; nor yet in Asia, as some antiquaries have maintained; nor, indeed, anywhere upon this weary world; but it was, as the name denotes, and as the native historian Tezozomoc long since translated it, where the bright sun lives, and where the god of light forever rules so long as that orb is in the sky.  Tollan is but a syncopated form of Tonatlan, the Place of the Sun.[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Tonalan, o lugar del sol,” says Tezozomoc (Cronica Mexicana, chap. i).  The full form is Tonatlan, from tona, “hacer sol,” and the place ending tlan.  The derivation from tollin, a rush, is of no value, and it is nothing to the point that in the picture writing Tollan was represented by a bundle of rushes (Kingsborough, vol. vi, p. 177, note), as that was merely in accordance with the rules of the picture writing, which represented names by rebuses.  Still more worthless is the derivation given by Herrera (Historia de las Indias Occidentals, Dec. iii, Lib. i, cap. xi), that it means “Lugar de Tuna” or the place where the tuna (the fruit of the Opuntia) is found; inasmuch as the word tuna is not from the Aztec at all, but belongs to that dialect of the Arawack spoken by the natives of Cuba and Haiti.]