The Unknown God of Texcoco

Introduction

A story about him goes round in short form. An Aztec king, alone and fasting in nature, reasoned his way to one hidden God, banned human sacrifice, gave his people eighty laws, hanged three of his own sons to show that no one stood above the law, and made his city the Athens of the Americas.

Some of that is true. Some of it is a later picture, and one part of it has the facts backwards. What survives the checking is still remarkable, and the argument at its centre is one the Qur’an puts in the mouth of Abraham.

The prince in the tree

Nezahualcoyotl was born on 28 April 1402, the son of Ixtlilxochitl, ruler of Texcoco, a city on the eastern shore of the great lake of the Valley of Mexico. His name is usually given in English as “Hungry Coyote”. It means something closer to “Fasting Coyote”: nezahualli is the collar worn by those keeping a fast.

In 1418, when he was sixteen, the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco killed his father while he watched from hiding in a tree. He spent the next years in exile, moving between Tlaxcala and Tenochtitlan and escaping attempts on his life. In 1428 he joined Itzcoatl of Tenochtitlan and Totoquihuaztli of Tlacopan to destroy the Tepanec power. That alliance of three cities is what Europeans later called the Aztec empire. He was crowned ruler of Texcoco in 1431 and reigned until his death in 1472.

He was a soldier as well as a poet. His descendant and chronicler Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl says that when the Tepanec king Maxtla was found hiding in a sweat bath after the defeat, Nezahualcoyotl sacrificed him and took out his heart.

The lawgiver

Ixtlilxochitl credits him with a code of about eighty laws. They covered theft, adultery, drunkenness and conduct in war, and they punished corrupt judges as well as the people who came before them. Penalties were often heavier for nobles than for commoners. Texcoco was governed through councils, among them one that oversaw music, poetry and learning.

He was also a builder. In 1449, after a flood, he directed the construction of a dike across the lake, sixteen kilometres long, to hold the salt water of the eastern lake away from Tenochtitlan. He helped build the aqueduct that brought fresh water from Chapultepec, and at Texcotzinco, above his city, he laid out terraced gardens, baths and channels cut into the hill.

The story of the sons is not what the short version says. The chronicles tell of one son above all, his legitimate heir Tetzauhpiltzintli. A half-brother, Eyahue, the son of a concubine who wanted the throne for her own children, accused him falsely of plotting against his father. Nezahualcoyotl would not judge his own son and sent the case to his allies, the kings Moctezuma I and Totoquihuaztli. They had the young man put to death, and his father grieved for him. Later accounts add other sons executed for adultery with the king’s concubines. What the chronicles describe is a king whose laws did reach his own family, and once destroyed it by mistake.

The title “the Athens of the Western world” is not from Texcoco. It is the phrase of the American historian William Prescott, who wrote in 1843 that in Texcoco “the best histories, the best poems, the best code of laws, the purest dialect” were all to be found.

The fast at Texcotzinco

The story of his God belongs to the middle of his reign. Ixtlilxochitl tells it this way. Texcoco was at war with Chalco, and the king had no heir by his queen. He withdrew to Texcotzinco and fasted for forty days, praying to a god who was not among the gods of his city. In the common English rendering of the chronicle, he said:

Truly the gods which I worship are idols that do not speak nor feel. Some very powerful hidden and unknown God is the Creator of the whole universe. He is the only one that can console me in my affliction and help me in such anguish as my heart feels; I want Him to be my Helper and Protection.

Nezahualcoyotl, as reported by Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl

The war turned in his favour and a son, Nezahualpilli, was born in 1464. In thanks, Ixtlilxochitl says, the king raised a tower of nine storeys to the god he called Tloque Nahuaque, “the Lord of the Near and the Nigh”, and Ipalnemohuani, “He by whom one lives”. It held no image, because the god could not be pictured, and it received no blood: only flowers and incense were offered there.

Those two names were not invented for him. Nahua prayers use them for the highest powers, Tezcatlipoca among them. Miguel León-Portilla read them as names of a supreme principle that philosophers among the Nahua sought behind the many gods (León-Portilla 1963). The poems attributed to Nezahualcoyotl turn on the same question, how anything lasting can be found in a world that passes:

Is it true that one really lives on the earth? Not forever on earth, only a little while here.

attributed to Nezahualcoyotl, tr. León-Portilla

Who told the story

Nearly everything in the picture of the philosopher king comes from two men writing after the Spanish conquest, both descendants of Texcoco’s royal house. Juan Bautista Pomar wrote his account of Texcoco in 1582. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl wrote his histories in the early seventeenth century, in Spanish, for colonial readers.

Jongsoo Lee has argued that the portrait was shaped by that setting (Lee 2008). Spanish friars wanted to find in Mexico a civilisation advanced by European standards and in need only of Christianity. Pomar and Ixtlilxochitl had their own interests to defend, and a royal ancestor who had nearly reached the one God on his own served both. Lee does not say Nezahualcoyotl was not a great king. He says the monarch who devised a rational code, wrote philosophical poetry and abhorred human sacrifice is in large part a colonial creation.

On sacrifice the record is plain. Nezahualcoyotl did not outlaw it. Texcoco took part in the sacrificial religion of the Triple Alliance during his reign and after it, and the same chronicler who tells of the bloodless tower tells of Maxtla’s heart. What the tradition claims is narrower: one temple, to one god, received no blood.

An argument the Qur’an knows

Whatever the share of later colouring, the argument the chronicle gives him is old and exact. Gods that cannot act cannot help the one who prays to them. The Qur’an makes it of the idols of Mecca:

They are not able to help them, nor can they help themselves.

Qur’an 7:192

Three verses later it asks the question Nezahualcoyotl asks of his idols that “do not speak nor feel”:

Have they feet to walk with, or hands to strike with, or eyes to see with, or ears to hear with?

Qur’an 7:195

The closer parallel is Abraham. In the sixth sura he watches a star rise and set, then the moon, then the sun, and turns from each when it disappears: لَا أُحِبُّ الْآفِلِينَ, “I do not love things that set”. He ends: “I have turned my face to the One who brought the heavens and the earth into being, inclining to the truth” (6:79). The word for that inclining is hanif, and it was the name Muslim tradition gave to the few Meccans, Zayd ibn ‘Amr among them, who abandoned the idols before Islam came.

The Qur’an also says that “there is no community but that a warner has passed among it” (35:24), and that every people has been sent a messenger (10:47). It does not name the messengers of the Americas, and this essay does not claim one. But a king who fasted alone on a hill, gave up on gods that could not answer him and built a temple with no image in it is the kind of figure those verses leave room for, whether the man himself or the memory his descendants kept.

His face was on Mexico’s hundred-peso note for years. A city of more than a million people on the dry bed of the old lake bears his name.

Works consulted

• Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de. Historia de la nación chichimeca. Written c. 1625.
• Lee, Jongsoo. The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
• León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.
• Pomar, Juan Bautista. Relación de Texcoco. 1582.
• Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico. 1843.
• The Qur’an, 6:76 to 79, 7:191 to 195, 10:47, 35:24.