30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreWho was Huemac?
Possible image of Huemac by Diego Duran
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Chengwen: Who is Huemac? I read a story in my paper about this King of Tollan competing with Tlaloc, and I am very interested in his story and ending. At the same time, I heard a friend say that he or Topiltzin captured the Quetzalcoatl with a net. I don’t know if this is true. Can you help me? (Answer compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
As the great Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla wrote: ‘When talking about the Toltecs, both history and myth become one’. There are several (early colonial) Nahua accounts that touch on the story of the downfall of Tollan (the Toltec capital, usually now known as Tula), in which Huemac plays a part. But nothing is certain, not even the dates involved, and the chronicles don’t ‘match’, which doesn’t help!
Some say Tula’s end came about due to rivalry between (followers of) Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, others to the appearance of a violent monster, others to the result of a ritual ballgame played between the last ruler of Tula, Huemac, and the rain gods led by Tlaloc.
Huemac and Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl were semi-divine priest-kings who ruled Tollan in its last days. They came from and represented different dynastic traditions: Huemac linked to the Toltec-Chichimec population, prioritising Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl the Nonoalca population, followers of the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc. One ‘take’ on the factional rivalry suggests that whereas Huemac represented the common people, Quetzalcoatl represented the hereditary nobility and the priesthood.
H. B. Nicholson elaborates on the ballgame legend: ‘Although Huemac is victorious, the game results in a great four-year drought due to his refusal to accept the prize offered him, the chalchihuitl(s) (young green maize ears) and quetzal feathers (the green leaves sheltering the ear) of the Tlaloque’ - Huemac insists on receiving literal jade and quetzal feathers from the Tlaloque, failing to grasp the symbolic meaning of these precious resources, that is, rain and good maize crops. So the Tlaloque give him the precious items but withhold life-giving rain and sustenance.
According to one account, Quetzalcoatl urges his followers to leave Tollan, to the fury of Huemac, who goes after him to bring them back, but he fails, and ends up committing suicide in the cave of Cincalco.
NOTE on the images: no known depictions of Huemac exist. However the Franciscan Diego Durán merges Huemac with Quetzalcoatl, in his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y islas de Tierra Firme (main picture), writing of ‘a great lord who lived in this land, called Topiltzin and, by another name Father, who the Mexicans called Hueymac. He lived in Tula’. Rudolph van Zantwijk interprets the figure shown top left at the coronation of the first Mexica ruler Acamapichtli in the Codex Azcatitlan as Huemac, depicted as a god-bearer of Tezcatlipoca.
Sources:-
• Nicholson, H. B. (2001) Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs, University Press of Colorado
• van Zantwijk, Rudolph (1985) The Aztec Arrangement, University of Oklahoma Press.
Picture sources:-
• Main: image scanned from Códice Durán - Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, Arrendedora Internacional, Mexico City, 1990
• Codex Azcatitlan image scanned from our own copy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (where the original is held) facsimile edition, Paris 1995.
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Possible image of Huemac by Diego Duran
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