In 1957 Miguel Covarrubias published a now-famous diagram illustrating the evolution of Mesoamerican rain gods. Drawings of 20 faces from Pre-Columbian iconography were arranged in 4 columns and connected with arrows. Teotihuacano murals, Yucatec Maya stonework, and Aztec ceramics were all traced back to a carved Olmec celt. The three thousand years between the earliest and latest objects in this chart were unified by visual similarity, namely, downturned lips, accented eyes.
A similar genealogy—focused on a different deity and drawing on textual sources as well as iconographic ones—is pursued in The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. As with Covarrubias’s chart, Florescano’s study encompasses three thousand years of history and numerous cultural traditions: Olmec to Aztec, formative to colonial. But where Covarrubias’s visual chart is based on assumptions of (visual and conceptual) continuity, and on a single origin point (ursprung), Florescano’s discussion of “Quetzalcoatl” argues that this figure is “reborn...
