White Gods and Feathered Serpents

TL;DR

• Across the Americas you get a surprisingly consistent figure: a travelling civilizer or god who arrives from afar, teaches everything, and then departs over water or into the sky.
• Nahua sources about Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl really do talk about an ascetic priest-king who leaves Tollan and goes east, sometimes “beyond the sea,” and becomes the morning star.
• Early colonial Nahuatl accounts of Moctezuma meeting Cortés show elaborate hospitality and cosmic metaphors, but they’re thinner than the textbook story “the Aztecs thought he was Quetzalcoatl come back.”
• In the Andes, Viracocha is a creator who rises from Titicaca, wanders as a human teacher, and disappears over the Pacific; among the Muisca, Bochica; among the Maya, figures like Itzamna or Kukulkan; each repeats the “visiting civilizer” pattern.
• From the 16th century onward, European and later diffusionist writers progressively upgrade these culture heroes into “white gods” and, eventually, into putative proof for transoceanic missionaries.
• The evidence doesn’t force any single conclusion about ancient contact, but the pattern is real, persistent, and frankly too weird to hand-wave away as “just racism” or “just coincidence.”

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.
— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1941)

The Strange Familiar Visitor#

Suppose you’re a post-conquest friar in Mexico, or a modern anthropologist with a caffeine problem, paging through Nahuatl annals and Andean chronicles.

You keep meeting the same guy.

He appears from over the horizon or out of the water. He is tall, or at least “of good stature.” He is sometimes bearded. He wears a long white garment. He wanders from town to town teaching people how to plant maize or potatoes, weave cloth, smelt metals, perform the correct sacrifices (or stop sacrificing humans), count days, interpret stars. When he’s done, he walks away over the sea, or vanishes into the sky, or promises to return when things get bad again.

To later Europeans, this figure was irresistible. Of course he was St. Thomas, or a lost Israelite, or at least an emissary from a civilized Old World. To later skeptics, this became equally irresistible as a just-so story about colonial projection and racism. To us, safely cushioned in the 21st century, he can be taken on his own terms: a recurring mythic template that keeps reappearing in cultures that never read each other’s books.

What follows is a kind of field guide to that template. First we’ll camp out in the Nahua sources—what the actual Nahuatl texts say about Quetzalcoatl, Tollan, and the long walk east. Then we’ll widen the lens: Viracocha in the Andes, Bochica in Colombia, Itzamna and Kukulkan among the Maya. Only then do we let the Europeans into the room and watch what they do with all this.

Think of it less as a debunking and more as a museum tour: here is what’s in the cases, here is the provenance label, here is where the curators disagree, and here are the questions that remain bothersomely open.

Quetzalcoatl Leaves the Building

The Nahua dossier#

The Quetzalcoatl you meet in pop culture is a feathered serpent god; the Quetzalcoatl we need to talk about is also a person.

Post-conquest Nahua texts talk about Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl (“One Reed, Our Prince Quetzalcoatl”), a priest-king of the Toltecs whose life story reads like a hagiography composed by a severe but affectionate therapist.

The key texts are:

• The Annals of Cuauhtitlan, a Nahuatl chronicle compiled in the 16th century, which gives the fullest narrative of Topiltzin’s life at Tollan and his departure.
• The closely related Leyenda de los Soles, which embeds his story in a larger cycle of world ages (“suns”).
• Sections of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, especially the theological Books 6 and 7 and the conquest narrative in Book 12.
• A scattering of material in Durán, Motolinía, and later Nahua-Spanish chroniclers.

Because copyright isn’t a moral law of the universe, I’ll paraphrase rather than quote at length.

In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl:

• Is born in the calendrical year 1 Reed, under auspicious signs, in the Toltec capital of Tollan.
• Grows up as a priest and eventually becomes ruler. His reign is marked by penitence and austerity: he builds houses for ritual self-mortification, fasts, and does nightly bloodletting with maguey thorns.
• Is associated with the wind and with Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the lord of the dawn star (Venus). When he blows his conch, it sounds more like the rain and wind than like a shell horn.
• Crucially, he is said to forbid human sacrifice, insisting on offerings of birds, butterflies, snakes, and his own blood instead. This detail will later be highlighted by Christian authors because it makes him sound pleasantly Christ-adjacent.

Then the world goes sideways. Enter Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror god, in the role of trickster antagonist. Through a series of pranks involving a magic mirror that shows Quetzalcoatl his aging face and, in some versions, a night of drunkenness and sexual shame, Tezcatlipoca convinces him that his time in Tollan is over. The city is doomed; the king must go.

And so, in the year 1 Reed again—rounding out his own 52-year cycle—Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl leaves. He sets off eastward, with followers, toward a place called Tlapallan. The text is reasonably explicit that Tlapallan lies beyond a body of water: in some manuscripts he reaches a shore, builds a raft of serpents, and sails away; in others he immolates himself and rises as the morning star.

Sahagún’s Nahuatl informants in the Florentine Codex add theological depth rather than changing the basic trajectory. Quetzalcoatl appears there as:

• A god of wind and breath.
• A patron of priests and penance.
• A figure tightly associated with Venus as the morning star, appearing before dawn and “announcing” the sun.

In other words, the eastern departure and celestial transformation are not random details. They lock into the Mesoamerican obsession with Venus cycles and world ages.

On the strictly evidential level, the story supports:

• A remembered or mythologized ruler-priest of Tollan named Quetzalcoatl, whose reign was idealized as ascetic and relatively non-bloody.
• A journey to an eastern land—Tlapallan—that may or may not be over the sea.
• A fusion of that journey with Venus as morning star, the thing that appears in the east after vanishing for a while and thus is tailor-made for death/resurrection myths.

Everything beyond that—color, height, skin tone, returning on a certain date—is accretion.

Moctezuma’s speech, minus the Netflix script#

Now, jump forward to 1519 and the famous first meeting between Moctezuma and Cortés. In Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún preserves a long Nahuatl speech that Moctezuma is supposed to have given, welcoming Cortés to Tenochtitlan.

In that speech (again paraphrasing):

• Moctezuma calls Cortés “our lord” and “our ruler.”
• He says that earlier rulers told of those who would come from where the sun rises to claim the “seat” and “mat” of power.
• He offers the city, the palaces, the role of tlatoani, as if handing over a pre-reserved throne.

In other words, he frames Cortés’ arrival in cosmic and traditional terms. He does not, in the Nahuatl version, say:

“At last, my long-lost Quetzalcoatl, you have come back to reclaim your rightful place, and that is why I will not resist you militarily.”

That specific line lives in later Spanish and mestizo accounts, and in the wider colonial imagination. The Nahuatl text is clearly deferential; it is not a simple transcript of delusion.

This distinction matters because a huge chunk of the “white gods” mythology hangs on the idea that the Aztecs themselves confused Cortés with Quetzalcoatl and therefore behaved irrationally. Modern ethnohistorians like Camilla Townsend and Matthew Restall have made careers out of arguing that this is, at best, an over-interpretation and, at worst, a fully fledged colonial myth that shifts agency and blame in convenient directions.

You don’t have to pick a side to see the structure:

• On one side you have a documented Quetzalcoatl-goes-east tradition.
• On the other you have an actual set of weird strangers arriving from the east by sea.
• In between you have multilingual elites, traumatized by conquest, trying to jam the two together into a story that explains how this could possibly have happened.

The “Cortés was Quetzalcoatl” line is not conjured from thin air; but it is also not as ancient, unambiguous, or universal as conquest-era propaganda makes it sound.

Viracocha, Bochica, Kukulkan: The Traveling Civilizers#

Quetzalcoatl is not alone. If this were just one myth in one city, you could shrug and move on. The reason people keep coming back to this material is that analogous figures crop up all over the Americas.

Here’s a summary table to keep the dramatis personae straight:

Table 1 – “White Gods” and Culture Heroes at a Glance#

The table is doing some violence to local complexity; but it’s the same kind of violence in each row, which is the interesting part.

Let’s zoom into a couple of these.

Viracocha: creator with a walking stick#

In Andean lore, Viracocha is both the high creator god and a wandering teacher. In the most widely cited composite version (assembled from 16th-century chroniclers):

• The world begins in darkness. Viracocha emerges from Lake Titicaca, creates the sun, moon, and stars.
• He fashions a race of giants out of stone; when they behave badly, he drowns them in a flood and turns them back to stone. Then he creates ordinary humans.
• Disguised as a man, wearing a long tunic and carrying a staff (and sometimes a book), he wanders from village to village teaching agriculture, crafts, and religion.
• Finally, he reaches the Pacific coast and walks westward over the sea, vanishing but not dying. Some versions explicitly say he will return in times of trouble.

Spanish authors can’t resist describing Viracocha in terms that make him sound suspiciously like a Christian saint: bearded, robe-wearing, gentle, weeping at human suffering. There is ongoing argument about whether any of that reflects pre-conquest indigenous imagery, or whether it’s all Christian retrofit.

Even if you shave off the beard and the whiteness, the pattern remains: a high god who incarnates as a human teacher, walks through the land organizing it, and departs over the ocean. If Quetzalcoatl is Venus in Nahua drag, Viracocha is a kind of Andean demiurge with a backpack.

Bochica: bearded hydrological engineer#

Among the Muisca of the Colombian highlands, we meet Bochica, a culture hero and lawgiver.

The rough narrative:

• The people have fallen into moral disorder. A rival deity (often a female figure associated with floods) drowns the Bogotá plateau.
• Enter Bochica, an old, often explicitly bearded man who arrives from the east. He teaches the people how to cultivate, weave, and work gold, and scolds them about their ethics.
• To fix the flood, he strikes the rock at Tequendama, creating the Tequendama Falls and draining the plateau.
• After organizing religion and government, he withdraws—sometimes to a hermitage, sometimes back toward the east—leaving priests to maintain his cult.

Again: arrival from elsewhere, teaching of practical and moral arts, dramatic piece of world-fixing infrastructure, and departure.

Whatever you think about beards in pre-Columbian Colombia, the story is not subtle about “we used to be worse at this until someone came and showed us how.”

Itzamna, Zamná, Kukulkan: priests from the east#

The Maya material is scrappier, partly because the Spanish destroyed more and recorded less, and partly because Maya polities were never as centralized as Tenochtitlan or Cuzco.

Even so, a couple of motifs show up:

• Itzamna / Zamná appears in colonial Yucatec sources as a priestly figure who came from the east and founded cities, taught writing and calendrics, and instituted healing practices. Later Yucatec tradition remembers Zamná as a sage who led settlers to Chichén Itzá.
• Kukulkan, the feathered serpent in Yucatán, is both a deity and, in some Postclassic contexts, a human or title linked to particular lineages. At Chichén Itzá, Kukulkan is a central cult figure; later traditions sometimes cast him as a foreign or eastern origin hero arriving by sea.

Because Kukulkan and Quetzalcoatl are both feathered serpents and both linked to long-distance trade and political alliances, they get fused in a lot of 19th- and 20th-century imagination into a single “white god” archetype with multiple regional costumes.

None of these stories on their own is proof of anything beyond the human capacity for myth. Together, they’re a suspiciously rhyming set of stories about civilization arriving as a person, from elsewhere, and then leaving again.

How the West Discovered the White Gods#

So far we’ve kept the Europeans mostly offstage. Now we let them in and watch what they do to the material.

Stage 1: The missionaries and the providential script#

The first wave of interpreters are the 16th-century missionaries and chroniclers. Their worldview is saturated in typology: the idea that Old Testament stories prefigure Christ, and that pagan myths might dimly prefigure the Gospel.

Faced with:

• Nahua stories about a morally strict Quetzalcoatl who disliked human sacrifice and left toward the east,
• Andean stories about a gentle creator who walked the land in human form,
• Muisca stories about a bearded lawgiver who scolded people for vice and fixed a flood,

they naturally concluded that these were partial, corrupted memories of the true God.

Sahagún, Motolinía, Durán, Acosta, Garcilaso de la Vega, and their peers consistently do two things:

1. They elevate these figures from local heroes to quasi-universal deities, making them smell more like Christian God or Christ.
2. They moralize their stories: Quetzalcoatl is remembered as being especially offended by bloodshed; Viracocha is moved to tears at human sin.

They don’t yet need white skin or explicit identifications with Spaniards. That bit comes more from the logic of conquest.

Stage 2: Cortés as Quetzalcoatl, or the myth of the cooperative victims#

By the later 16th and 17th centuries, New Spain and Peru are settled colonial societies with an emerging creole intelligentsia—American-born Spaniards and Christianized indigenous elites who have to explain the conquest to themselves.

One convenient explanation is: it was fated and foretold.

In that context, the template “return of the civilizing god from the east” gets mapped directly onto the Spaniards:

• In Mexico, the Spaniards come from the east, by sea, in the year of a certain calendrical significance. Therefore they must be the returning lord about whom the old poems and annals spoke.
• The story that Moctezuma believed Cortés to be Quetzalcoatl becomes a way of explaining why the Mexica did not annihilate the tiny Spanish contingent at the beach and call it a day.

From a narrative engineering standpoint, this does several useful things:

• It absolves Spaniards of straightforward aggression: they are instruments of providence, not just guys with guns and smallpox.
• It blames indigenous elites for their own downfall: they misread the signs, they clung to fatalistic myths, they invited the wolf into the palace.
• It flattens many-sided political maneuvering (alliances with Tlaxcala, internal Aztec factionalism, etc.) into a simple morality play.

Modern historians working closely with the Nahuatl and early Spanish texts argue that the fully formed “Moctezuma thought Cortés was Quetzalcoatl” myth is later than the conquest itself and thinner in the earliest sources. But by the time you get to the 18th century, it’s canon.

Once you have that, you essentially have the first “white god”: a figure interpreted by indigenous people themselves as a returning deity, rather than by Europeans as a flattering analogy.

Stage 3: Diffusionism, Atlanteans, and ancient astronauts without the spaceships#

Skip forward again, to the 19th and early 20th centuries, where real archaeology coexists with extremely caffeinated speculation.

Three intellectual currents collide:

1. Biblical diffusionism: the idea that all real civilization ultimately derives from the Near East (Eden, Babel, Egypt, etc.) and spreads outward.
2. Race science: the tendency to read “light-skinned and bearded” as a meaningful biological clue rather than an aesthetic trope.
3. Romantic fascination with ruins: pyramids in the jungle, cyclopean stones in the Andes, all begging for a heroic origin story.

Writers like Daniel G. Brinton, and later fringe figures like Thor Heyerdahl, rummage through the missionary chronicles, extract every reference to beards and white garments, and construct a grand narrative:

• Once upon a time, a group of Caucasoid seafarers (Phoenicians, Celts, Egyptians, Israelites, Vikings, Atlanteans, etc.) crossed the Atlantic or Pacific.
• They taught the benighted Americans how to pyramid properly, set up calendars, and stop being so embarrassingly Stone Age.
• After doing their good work, they left or were massacred, but their memory persisted as Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, etc.

On the farthest edge of this spectrum are the ancient-astronaut people, who keep the “visiting civilizer from the sky/sea, teaches everything, leaves” pattern but swap in extraterrestrials. The epistemology is the same, just with more tinfoil.

By mid-century, “white gods of the Indians” is a staple of popular archaeology: a motif you can plug into almost any ruin, any legend, and any sense of civilizational inferiority you want to project.

What the Evidence Can Actually Bear#

At this point it’s worth putting down the mythologies—both indigenous and European—and asking a boring, grown-up question:

What does this stuff actually prove, and what does it merely suggest?

Strong points of the “visiting civilizer” complex#

There really is a shared pattern across independent American traditions:

• A stranger or high god in human form appears from a particular direction, usually east or from a major body of water.
• He teaches concrete techniques: farming, weaving, metalwork, calendrics, writing, ritual norms.
• He often acts as a moderating force on sacrifice and bloodshed.
• He then departs, usually back across the water or into the sky, and is sometimes expected to return.

That is not trivial. It is not “any story about a god, ever.” These motifs stick close to technology and social order, not just thunderbolts and fertility. They feel like mythicized cultural memory rather than pure cosmology.

You can also say with some confidence that these traditions are not invented wholesale by Spaniards. They’re attested independently in multiple indigenous languages, with internal logic tailored to local cosmology (Venus cycles, specific rivers and waterfalls, particular mountain ranges).

So, if your priors allow for occasional transoceanic contact, these stories are exactly the sort of thing you’d be tempted to put on the evidence board. They would be compatible with:

• A handful of Old World sailors washing up and being folded into myth.
• Internal culture heroes whose stories later attract Old World analogies.
• Some messy blend where an existing myth gets updated with a real event.

Weak points, or why this is not an episode of CSI: Tiahuanaco#

On the other hand, the hard evidence for sustained Old World–New World contact before the Norse in Newfoundland is thin to non-existent.

• We have unambiguous Norse remains at L’Anse aux Meadows and now a couple of other spots in northeastern North America.
• We do not have unambiguous Phoenician temples in Veracruz, or Egyptian hieroglyphs at Teotihuacan, or Roman amphorae in Lake Titicaca.
• Pyramids, flood myths, bearded gods, and white garments are easy to reinvent. Humans are hair-bearing primates who like symmetry and are terrified of drowning.

The “white” in “white gods” is doing suspiciously heavy work here. Colonial authors were not neutral anthropologists; they were steeped in an iconographic language where holiness is pale and bearded. If you hand a 16th-century Spaniard a story about a wise, wandering, robe-wearing teacher, he will imagine Christ, not a sunburnt seafarer from Cádiz.

The “god” in “white gods” is equally problematic. Many of these figures are not straightforward deities; they are closer to culture heroes or deified ancestors—the American cousins of Prometheus, Osiris, or Oannes. Translating them as “gods” at all is already a European move.

Finally, the texts in which all this is preserved are post-contact products. Even when the material is genuinely pre-conquest in origin, it has been filtered through a couple of decades of cultural collision before anyone wrote it down. That’s more than enough time for mythic contamination in both directions.

Three intellectually respectable positions#

If you’re trying not to be dumb on purpose, there are at least three positions you can hold without embarrassment:

1. Skeptical structuralist
   The recurring pattern is real, but it’s overdetermined: humans everywhere tell stories about strangers bringing culture. The American cluster is interesting but not, on its own, evidence for visitors from Phoenicia or Polaris. The “white gods” language is mainly a colonial projection.

2. Cautious diffusionist
   Independent invention is real, but so are boats and currents. It would be surprising if there were no accidental or exploratory crossings, even if most left minimal archaeological trace. The visiting-civilizer myths might retain distorted memories of a few such contacts, now heavily mythologized.

3. Pluralist agnostic
   Different traditions in the cluster may have different origins. Quetzalcoatl might be mostly endogenous Venus theology; Viracocha perhaps encodes real memory of earlier highland coastal interactions; Bochica folds local hydrological engineering into a moral drama. The right unit of analysis is each myth in its full ecosystem, not the whole bundle.

The cheap positions—“it’s all racist nonsense” vs. “it’s all a suppressed history of white missionaries”—are also available, but they get boring quickly.

FAQ #

Q 1. Did the Aztecs literally think Cortés was Quetzalcoatl?
A. Some post-conquest sources say so, but our best early Nahuatl accounts only show Moctezuma using cosmic, traditional language to frame Cortés’ arrival; the clean identification “this man is Quetzalcoatl returned” looks more like a later colonial synthesis than a unanimous pre-conquest belief.

Q 2. Were Viracocha and Bochica actually described as white and bearded before the Spaniards?
A. Beards and light skin appear mainly in Spanish-language chronicles written by Christian authors; it’s hard to tell how much reflects indigenous description and how much is Christianization. The core “wandering teacher who departs over the sea” pattern is more solid than any specific racial adjective.

Q 3. Is there any hard archaeological evidence for Old World civilizers in Mesoamerica or the Andes?
A. Not really. Apart from the Norse in the far north, claims about Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, or Israelites in the New World are based on ambiguous artifacts and controversial readings, not on widely accepted excavations or inscriptions.

Q 4. Why do so many of these myths point to the east?
A. The east is where the sun—and in Mesoamerican thinking, Venus as morning star—rises, so it’s a natural origin point for order and time. In places like the Andes and Colombia, the relevant bodies of water and trade routes also lie east or west, so cosmology and geography reinforce each other.

Footnotes#

Sources#

These are starting points rather than an exhaustive bibliography; they’re weighted toward primary or near-primary material and sober secondary syntheses.

1. Bernardino de Sahagún et al., Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), esp. Book 6 (rhetoric and theology) and Book 12 (the conquest narrative). Bilingual Nahuatl–Spanish, various modern editions and facsimiles.
2. Anales de Cuauhtitlan and Leyenda de los Soles, in Códice Chimalpopoca. Critical editions and Spanish translations via UNAM. Core narrative of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s life and departure to Tlapallan.
3. H. B. Nicholson, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs. University Press of Colorado. Still the standard scholarly monograph on the Quetzalcoatl-as-ruler tradition.
4. Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme. 16th-century Dominican chronicle with extensive material on central Mexican religion and Quetzalcoatl, written with strong Christian interpretive lenses.
5. Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), Historia de los indios de la Nueva España. Early Franciscan account emphasizing providential interpretations of conquest and indigenous religion.
6. Juan de Betanzos, Suma y narración de los Incas; Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú; Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Historia índica. Together they give the main early accounts of Viracocha and Andean cosmogony.
7. Daniel G. Brinton, American Hero-Myths: A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent (1882). Early comparative study pulling together Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, Itzamna, and others; dated but still useful for seeing how the pattern was noticed.
8. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas. Mestizo chronicler whose elegant Latinized Spanish gives a creole perspective on Viracocha and Inca religion.
9. Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico.” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 659–687. Argues against the classic Cortés-as-Quetzalcoatl narrative and unpacks its colonial uses.
10. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford University Press, 2003. Especially “Myth of Miscommunication” for a critique of the idea that Indians took Spaniards for gods.
11. Thor Heyerdahl, essays collected in Caucasian Elements in Pre-Inca Peru and The Kon-Tiki Expedition. Highly speculative diffusionist takes on Viracocha as memory of Old World mariners; more valuable as intellectual history than as established fact.
12. Specialist articles on Bochica and Muisca religion in Colombian ethnohistory (e.g., work by Javier Ocampo López), and on Itzamna/Zamná and Kukulkan in Maya studies, for readers who want to drill into particular cases.