Word: quetzalcoatl
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Thus, from Aztec hearsay, a 16th-century Franciscan friar described the legendary city of Tulsa, capital of Mexico's ancient Toltec empire and once ruled by the bearded emperor Quetzalcoatl...
...fuzzy topknot, yard-long tail feathers. Quetzal is also the name of the Guatemalan money unit, and the bird's graven image appears on the national seal, coins, stamps. The quetzal was venerated by the ancient Aztecs, Toltecs and Mayas as a colleague of the plumed serpent god, Quetzalcoatl (rhymes with pretzelcowatle), god of metallurgy, agriculture, wisdom, health. Only priests and nobles could wear quetzal plumes in their headdress...
Cortes tricked the Aztec Montezuma by posing as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, and then methodically subdued the Indians with blunderbuss and broadsword. For the next 200-odd years New Spain, ruled from Mexico City but extending for a time as far as South Carolina, experienced what some historians have called a Golden Age. The Spaniards brought with them horses (but used the Indians as men of burden), wheat (the Indians still eat maize tortillas), such things as woolen blankets, armchairs, caps (for which the Indians exchanged jewels, silver, gold). The only things the Spaniards gave the Indians were smallpox...
...rooftop studio, last week went to work on sketches for his big fresco (22 ft. ½ in. by 44 ft. 3 in.) at the north end of the Fine Arts Palace. Commissioned for the new San Francisco Junior College library, the fresco counterposes the old Mexican Indian God Quetzalcoatl against a steel stamping machine (with the same outline, even to breastlike appendage), Mexican pyramids and tropical scenery against U. S. skyscrapers, traditional Mexican serpent against conveyor belt...
...divinity who was the patron of college students, with side glances of horror possibly at Huitzilopochtli, the war god . . . is probably one of the most amazing if not amusing spectacles ever presented to American college life. . . But all this is a thing apart from the main satire in which Quetzalcoatl's divine attributes by contrast are used to bolster up a crude pictorial misrepresentation of academic education in America as 'a sterile ritual of dead things giving birth to dead things...