I'm sure someone's already put some research into these Mayan and Aztec gods, so I thought I'd ask what you know? Anyone??

In the Reader's Digest book "Mysteries of the Ancient Americas" it brings up some of the serious problems with placing a white God in Mesoamerica. When talking about Quetzalcoatl as a white God, it says:

There is, however, a serious flaw in the theories of the white-god...It is only after the Spanish Conquest that Quetzalcoatl is depicted as having a white skin, and then only in accounts provided by the Spaniards themselves. In local Aztec art, he is usually depicted as a feathered serpent or as a human wearing a mask or shown to have a black face, sometimes with yellow stripes and a red mouth...Nothing known of Aztec legend, though, implies that he had been a white man...in his human form on earth.

So if we are to believe that Quetzalcoatl was indeed a white God, the only evidence we have to go on is the word of the Spaniards. Quetzalcoatl was never depicted as a white bearded robed man until after the Spaniards came, and only by the Spaniards accounts. All of the local artwork and murals that pre-date Columbus depict him as either a feathered serpent or a dark-skinned man.




Mysteries of the Ancient Americas continues:

Quetzalcoatl...by the lights of native believers, had [not] been expected to "return". These promises were noted, long after the fact, by the Spanish chroniclers with wit enough to see the advantages of being taken as actors in the fulfillment of prophecy...The Spaniards with their cannon and horses and ships...may at first have appeared like supernatural beings...But there is little evidence that the Aztec ruler or anyone else in the land thought that the Spanish invasion was a promised Second Coming of the God Quetzalcoatl.


It appears that all these accounts of a white God promising to return one day were nothing more than Spanish political propaganda. Hernán Cortés was a white bearded man that arrived to the Americas. It was very self-fulfilling for the Spanish chroniclers to portray the Native American deities in a manner that conveniently puts the Spanish in a godlike position over the Native Americans. The only illustrations that depict Quetzalcoatl as a bearded white man are from European documents, like the one to the right taken from a 16th century Spanish manuscript. Notice similar features to Cortés himself.

Chronological Disparity

Another problem when comparing the account of the resurrected Jesus in the Book of Mormon and the legend of Quetzalcoatl is trying to place them on earth during the same time period. The earliest date that Quetzalcoatl could have appeared-as a man- was at least 300 A.D. Biasil C. Hedrick, Director of the University Museum Southern Illinois University said regarding the time period of Quetzalcoatl appearing as a man:

adjusted calendars would suggest a time sometime about 900+ years subsequent to the Crucifixion. It frankly appears to me to be poppycock that the Mormons attempt to tout. They take advantage of similarities and seemingly logical comparisons to support a stand which they wish to take but choose to ignore all types of other information which would lead them to quite the opposite conclusion, if they were totally objective in their approach.


The similarities between Quetzalcoatl and the account of Jesus Christ in America are easily explained as combining early European influence, muddling of the evidence by Spanish chroniclers, coincidence and ignoring the 99% of facts that point in the opposite direction.

Brother Zelph Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
In local Aztec art, he
> is usually depicted as a feathered serpent or as a
> human wearing a mask or shown to have a black
> face, sometimes with yellow stripes and a red
> mouth...

In sum, we are asked to believe by some apologists for TSCC that a band of displaced jungle jews commissioned artists to depict their Saviour as a black snake with feathers.

Fellows from FARMS ARE all at sea chasing tenure and retirement checks.

Thank you!!! I knew someone had to know some answers. I plan on getting some books on the ancient Americas and doing some non LDS studying.

I really liked Reader's Digest book "Mysteries of the Ancient Americas." It was published sometime in the 1980's. You can still buy it on ebay. I got it through ebay and enjoyed it rather well. It is nice to learn a REAL history of ancient America.

Quetzalcoatl as depicted by Native Americans before Spaniards arrived

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YaFmOpBEBtY/RnIwOzUmxCI/AAAAAAAAAMA/EaDZchKOhp4/s320/quetzalcoatl3.jpg

Quetzalcoatl depicted by Spaniards themselves

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YaFmOpBEBtY/RnI4aTUmxNI/AAAAAAAAANY/OtxxHz9c3SY/s200/quetzalcoatlcortez.JPG


Hernan Cortez

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YaFmOpBEBtY/RnI1kTUmxLI/AAAAAAAAANI/7dJ1piR19dY/s200/cortez.jpg

Thanks, I'll try that one first! Any recommendations are appreciated!

No I meant the Mayan god kukulkan. He's the Mayan form of Quetzalcoatl. Thanks for all the suggestions and info!

I'm a mythology nerd and know some about Aztec mythology (my moniker is an Aztec goddess.)

Fun fact about Queztacoatl: He has an ugly, dog-headed twin brother named Xolotl. If any Mormons still claim that Q is the big JC, ask them if that means Xolotl is Lucifer and watch the confusion mount the face. ;)

Here are some books:
http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Gods-Over-Deities-World/dp/0816029091

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Myths-Heroes-Tricksters-Meridian/dp/0452010276/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399673735&sr=1-1&keywords=The+universal+myth

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Dictionary-Mythology-Philip-Wilkinson/dp/078943413X

When you say Kulkulan, do you mean the Irish folk hero, Cuchulain?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BA_Chulainn



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/09/2014 06:19PM by Itzpapalotl.

The trump card to play when any Mormon claims that Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec "White God" is a surviving legend of Jesus's appearance to the Nephites, is the extensively documented research by Brant Gardner, a TBM scholar, author of numerous books.

Gardner (remember: he's a faithful Mormon!) demonstrates that Quetzalcoatl (or any of the other similar figures in pre-Columbian legend) CANNOT be Jesus.

Start here: http://rationalfaiths.com/quetzalcoatl-white-god-and-the-book-of-mormon-part-i/

"The Great White God of Ancient America still lives!"

"Christ In America"(1970)
http://ldspamphlets.org/Christ_in_America.htm

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "The Great White God of Ancient America still
> lives!"
>
> "Christ In America"(1970)
> http://ldspamphlets.org/Christ_in_America.htm

Amazing what the Mormons would say and even publish back in the
pre-Google days.

Once again, thank you so much, Richard. This is such an interesting link.

How I wish that I were still in contact with some of my Mormon relatives, who used the Jesus-Quetzalcoatl link as *their* trump card when discussing how obviously true it must be that Jesus visited America right after he was through in the Middle East.

And the time discrepancy is just frosting on the cake. What a rich feast Mormon tradition is!

Decades ago I was a freshman at a corridor university. I was
a believing Mormon with an "every member a missionary"
attitude. It was my first time living away from home in a
large city.

I struck up a conversation with a graduate student. She
turned out to be working on her masters in meso-American
anthropology. "Gee," I thought to myself, "a golden
contact." She had enough of a background to know all
those "proofs" that I heard over and over in Church about the
Aztecs and the Mayans and Quetzalcoatl etc.

So I brought up Quetzalcoatl and how he may have been Jesus
visiting the ancient Americans. She calmly told me how that
wouldn't work because Quetzalcoatl was about 1000 years
later. I was dumfounded. I'd heard Quetzalcoatl mentioned
dozens of times in Church, in Church magazines and books. Not
one of them mentioned that he was a millennium too late to
have been Jesus. That was my first introduction to the
dishonesty that pervades Mormon apologetics.

baura Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
She calmly told
> me how that
> wouldn't work because Quetzalcoatl was about 1000
> years
> later.

Imagine if a future history book indicated that Christopher Columbus flew to the Americas by a modern cabin-pressurized jet airplane. As absurd as that sounds, that's only about half the time frame we are talking about here.

I had no idea about the time frame being so off. That explains so much. Thanks for the information everyone!

hmm, so this is proof that jesus was either black or dressed up as a feathered serpent. we know that jesus wasn't black because he's a white anglosaxon middle eastern jew. or maybe he was albino.

and if jesus likes to dress up as serpents... and we know that the garden of eden was perfect, so could not have included an imperfect being such as the devil, i conclude that jesus was in fact the serpent that tempted eve. And since we know that the devil tempted eve, as a serpent, i conclude that jesus is in fact the devil.

so all those suckers worshipping jesus are actually on their way to hell!

I have information on Kukulkan

they are really jesus. *LOL*

I would be surprised if some TBM doesn't try to claim that Quetzalcoatl is one of the Three Nephites--with a rich suntan!

Milton R. Hunter, Conference Report, April 1961, p. 53:

"Certainly the only person who has ever lived in this world who could have crystallized the social and religious views which dominated ancient America for over fifteen hundred years prior to the Spanish conquest, that primordial figure who lived and did his unique work in the New World about the time that Christ established the Christian era in the Old World, that religious genius who is supreme over all other religious teachers known, could have been none other than Jesus the Christ, the resurrected Savior who did such a phenomenal work among the Nephites. Thus the resurrected Savior and Quetzalcoatl and the other 'Fair Gods' of ancient America are identical."


Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, p. 614, QUETZALCOATL:

"It is well known that one of the chief reasons for the relatively easy conquest of Mexico by Cortez was the belief, almost universal among the Aztecs, that he was the great white God returning as he had promised. (William H. Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico.) Almost without exception Latter-day Saints have associated these traditions with the ministry of the resurrected Christ among the Nephites. President John Taylor, for instance, has written: 'The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being. But the history of the former has been handed down to us through an impure Lamanitish source, which has sadly disfigured and perverted the original incidents and teachings of the Savior's life and ministry.' (Mediation and Atonement, p. 194.)"

From Wikipedia:

"Latter-day Saint scholar Brant Gardner, after investigating the
link between Quetzalcoatl and Jesus, concluded that the
association amounts to nothing more than folklore. In a 1986
paper for Sunstone, he noted that during the Spanish Conquest,
the Native Americans and the Catholic priests who sympathized
with them felt pressure to link Native American beliefs with
Christianity, thus making the Native Americans seem more human
and less savage. Over time, Quetzalcoatl's appearance, clothing,
malevolent nature, and status among the gods were reshaped to fit
a more Christian framework."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatl

First off the responses above are by people who appear to not be Mexicans and don't seem to be well associated with the time place or culture. It's kind of like asking an Indian about Louis XVI...

But I can tell you what a relative told me who grew up in Mexico and what the Mextica's believed. Back in 1955 in the public schools the story goes like this: The people were living their lives and one day a Man descended from the sky who looked different. He had blue eyes and brown hair and a beard. He taught them many things, at that time the corn mysteriously grew to be one meter long, and he got really mad when he saw the human alters and the abortion of children. When he left a fire ball came down and he went up into the sky and said he'd come back someday.

Did JS know any Mexicans? Because the story seems eerily close to the BOM?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2017 06:29AM by poopstone.

Well gosh, poopstone, if it was one of your relatives living in Mexico in 1955, it's damn near gospel, if not at least Encyclopedic. We'll all rush to change encyclopedia entries for Quetzalcoatl to the meandering nonsense you wrote.

This is coming from the poster that didn't even know what "marty gras" is nor that it's a celebration all around the world and as usual, impressing his ethnocentrism on the celebration.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1700949,1702185

Colonialism likes to remake indigenous people's myths to suit their purposes if not steal them out right.

Some interesting information on google---kukulkan