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Legends of the Plumed Serpent
Neil Baldwin
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, is one of the most resonant and slippery figures in Mesoamerican myth—god, priest-king, culture hero, and, after the conquest, a symbol claimed by everyone from Spanish friars to Mexican nationalists to twentieth-century artists. In this 1998 cultural history, Neil Baldwin follows the plumed serpent across three thousand years, tracing how the image kept being reinvented to serve new needs. It's less an archaeology of the deity than a biography of an idea, moving from Teotihuacán and the Aztecs through Cortés and on to Lawrence, Diego Rivera, and beyond. Baldwin, a biographer by trade, writes for the general reader with a storyteller's eye. For anyone curious about how myths survive by mutating, it's an absorbing and unexpectedly wide-ranging journey.
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The author
Neil Baldwin is an American biographer and cultural historian whose books range across Thomas Edison, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams. He came to Quetzalcoatl not as an archaeologist but as a writer fascinated by how a single symbol accumulates meaning, and the book reflects that outsider's curiosity.
The book
Legends of the Plumed Serpent, published by PublicAffairs in 1998, tracks the feathered serpent from its ancient Mesoamerican origins through the Spanish conquest and into modern Mexican identity, art, and literature. Baldwin treats the figure as a lens on how successive cultures reimagined the sacred to suit their own moment.
How it reads
Specialists may find the pre-Columbian material broad rather than deep, but that breadth is the point: Baldwin's strength is narrative sweep and the long afterlife of the myth. As accessible cultural history it remains engaging and well told.
For more context
The Quetzalcoatl-Cortés legend—the idea that the Aztecs took Cortés for the returning god—is itself now heavily debated, making the book's theme of myth-making doubly apt.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Neil Baldwin
- Publisher
- PublicAffairs
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1998
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine