The Priest-King Devoted to a God's Name

Nahua tradition, recorded in colonial-era sources including the Codex Chimalpopoca and Sahagun's informants, remembered Topiltzin as the ruler of Tula who took the name and priestly devotion of the god Quetzalcoatl so completely that later memory frequently blurs king and deity together. He was credited with a restrained style of religious practice, favoring the sacrifice of snakes, birds and butterflies over human victims, and with fostering the Toltecs' reputation as accomplished builders, artisans and scholars, a golden age Aztec tradition looked back on as a model of civilized order.

That order was said to end through the sorcery of priests loyal to the rival god Tezcatlipoca, who in different tellings tricked Topiltzin into drunkenness with pulque, showed him his own aged and disfigured reflection in an obsidian mirror to shame him, or implicated him in a scandal with his own sister, breaking his authority and driving him from Tula in humiliation. He is said to have traveled east toward the coast, in some versions immolating himself and rising as the morning star, in others departing by raft across the sea, with an explicit promise to return.