Quetzalcoatl—the alien music of the name, in itself, can lead the modern mind along strange and disparate pathways, into vaudevillian fantasies and historical pageant-pomps, if we allow it to do so. Something in the sound of it ineffably suggests a kind of trickster, a magician-jester whose pantalooned goofs conceal dead-serious intent, conjuring shaman of tin-plate vintage, wounded fisher-king or Zarathustra-like pretender, serpentine guardian and gnarled avenger, winged stalker between realms of gravity and light, always playful yet playing for keeps. To continue the riff, in imaginative forays one can sense some Quetzalcoatlian essence among ink-stained instigators, plotting revolution in the back rooms of Parisian cafes in the last days of the ancien régime; one hears in the odd syllables an atonal strain of sexual anarchism, peacock strut of the zoot-suited pimp; steely-eyed homicide detective from Fritz Lang film noir investigating the murder of reality; hint of futurist philosopher DJ sampling old memes into new epistemes; or one catches faint glimpses of the great beast flaring fantastical plumage as Dionysian Pope presiding over pre-Raphaelite fairy kingdoms. On the other extreme, when studying Quetzalcoatl’s mythological place, one senses an inner connection to the Gnostic Christ, whose secret countenance, so dignified and grave, is still obscured from us by centuries of religious propaganda and the shrill pronouncements of moralizing zealots. Not to forget those human incarnations of Quetzalcoatl, wizard-kings of jungle palaces sporting serpentine headdresses—the last one enshrined in legend: tenth-century ruler of the land of Tullan. Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl forbade human sacrifice and instigated a brief “Golden Age†before he was defeated by Tezcatlipoca’s cynical sorcerers. Afterward, as myth has it, he wandered across Mexico as a brooding exile before unifying Mayan and Toltec cosmology in the magnificent temple complex of Chichen Itza, and finally disappeared to the West on a raft of serpents, vowing his eventual return. (From 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl)
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night