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VENUS-QUETZACOATL

Quetzalcoatl, one of the original shaman-priests, brought his message of peace, love and compassion and the immortality of the soul to a land mired in the darkness of violence and materialistic power and greed. He taught the people that all life was precious and not to be harmed. And humans were never to be sacrificed as “food for the gods,” only the fruits and the flowers of the season were to be offered in the feeding of the spirits and the ancestors.

Quetzalcoatl was the god-king of Teotihuacan—the place where men and women become gods and goddesses, a city and people shrouded in mist and mystery: ‘we still don’t know what language the Teotihuacanos spoke, where they came from, or what happened to them.’ (National Geographic, December 1995, 7.) Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed-Serpent, brought to the people the knowledge of the ‘light body’ and the process of symbolic death and re-birth through ritualistic water immersions and was seen as the ‘once and future king’ destined to return when the world was at it's darkest.

The Quetzalcoatl star is the Morning Star:

"...he stopped, cried, seized his garments, and put on his insignia of feathers…Then when he was adorned he set fire to himself and burned…It is said that when burned his ashes were at once raised up and that all the rare birds appeared when Quetzalcoatl died…for which reason in eight days there appeared the great star called Quetzalcoatl." (The Maya, Michael D. Coe, 1987, 173.)

“But of all the gods there stands out most appealing and most controversial figure in Mesoamerican myth and religion—Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. However vehemently it may be asserted or denied that he was an historical fact, he looms up in the New World as a psychical symbol with the universal stature of the Buddha and the Christ.

It is enough to know that this City of the Gods (Teotihuacan) was the birthplace of the myth and religion of Quetzalcoatl, the birthplace of the Nahuatl culture; and to call its people by their time-honored and indisputable name of Toltecs.
The importance of Venus to pre-Columbia Mesoamerica is not too strange. In that latitude it looms up in the dawn sky big as a snowball, shining with inexpressible brilliance. The ancient Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Greeks regarded it with the same veneration as the Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs. To the Babylonians the planet was personified by the goddess Ishtar; to the Egyptians by Isis; the Greeks Aphrodite; the Romans, Venus. It was hailed as Hesperus when it appeared in the evening sky, and as Phosporos when it later appeared in the morning sky. Venus was not only as a beneficent female body in the heavens. It was also considered male and malefic, personified by Ahriman, Seth, Lucifer, and Satan. Little wonder that Mesoamerican myth assigned to Venus, personified by Quetzalcoatl, the role of mediator between night and day, between good and evil, with the power of transcending these opposites within man himself.” (Mexico Mystique, Frank Waters)