[Footnote 1:  Designated in the Aztec original by the name Teoapan Ilhuicaatenco, from teotl, divine, atl, water, pan, in or near, ilhuicac, heaven, atenco, the waterside:  “Near the divine water, where the sky meets the strand.”]

[Footnote 2:  The whole of this account is from the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, pp. 16-22.]

That there is a profound moral significance in this fiction all will see; but I am of opinion that it is accidental and adventitious.  The means that Tezcatlipoca employs to remove Quetzalcoatl refer to the two events that mark the decline of day.  The sun is reflected by a long lane of beams in the surface waters of lake or sea; it loses the strength of its rays and fails in vigor; while the evening mists, the dampness of approaching dewfall, and the gathering clouds obscure its power and foretell the extinction which will soon engulf the bright luminary.  As Quetzalcoatl cast his shining gold and precious stones into the water where he took his nightly bath, or buried them in underground hiding places, so the sun conceals his glories under the waters, or in the distant hills, into which he seems to sink.  As he disappears at certain seasons, the Star of Evening shines brightly forth amid the lingering and fading rays, rising, as it were, from the dying fires of the sunset.

To this it may be objected that the legend makes Quetzalcoatl journey toward the East, and not toward the sunset.  The explanation of this apparent contradiction is easy.  The Aztec sages had at some time propounded to themselves the question of how the sun, which seems to set in the West, can rise the next morning in the East?  Mungo Parke tells us that when he asked the desert Arabs this conundrum, they replied that the inquiry was frivolous and childish, as being wholly beyond the capacities of the human mind.  The Aztecs did not think so, and had framed a definite theory which overcame the difficulty.  It was that, in fact, the sun only advances to the zenith, and then returns to the East, from whence it started.  What we seem to see as the sun between the zenith and the western horizon is, in reality, not the orb itself, but only its brightness, one of its accidents, not its substance, to use the terms of metaphysics.  Hence to the Aztec astronomer and sage, the house of the sun is always toward the East.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ramirez de Fuen-leal, Historia, cap. xx, p. 102.]

We need not have recourse even to this explanation.  The sun, indeed, disappears in the West; but his journey must necessarily be to the East, for it is from that point that he always comes forth each morning.  The Light-God must necessarily daily return to the place whence he started.

The symbols of the mirror and the mystic drink are perfectly familiar in Aryan sun-myths.  The best known of the stories referring to the former is the transparent tale of Narcissus forced by Nemesis to fall in love with his own image reflected in the waters, and to pine away through unsatisfied longing; or, as Pausanias tells the story, having lost his twin sister (the morning twilight), he wasted his life in noting the likeness of his own features to those of his beloved who had passed away.  “The sun, as he looks down upon his own face reflected in a lake or sea, sinks or dies at last, still gazing on it."[1]