Around the same time that
Robert E. Howard was writing his James Allison tales (in which a young, dying
Texan remembers adventures from various past lives), he crafted one of his most
clearly anti-modernist tales, “The Thunder-Rider,” in which his now infamous
tendency toward racism is tempered by a palpable reverence for indigenous
American peoples. Most notable in this rough draft is Howard’s use of
Mesoamerican myth, specifically that of the legendary city of Tollan and the dark sorcerer Tezcatlipoca who
brought about its downfall.
The Story
The Story
Quetz vs. Tezcat |
Published posthumously in Marchers of Valhalla and The Black Stranger, The Thunder-Rider centers on John Garfield, a college-educated Comanche man who works in an early twenty-century office building. Despite having fully assimilated to the mainstream Western European culture of the
The blood rite brings him close
to death, but the young man survives and is able to access memories of his
former selves. One of these is Iron Heart, a Comanche warrior wandering the
Southwest around the year 1575. Garfield
recounts a particularly eldritch adventure of his. Recognized by enemies
through epithets like “the Scalp-Taker, the Vengeance-Maker, the
Thunder-Rider,” Iron Heart takes his mounted war party south toward Mexican
settlements in search of more horses (Howard spends several generally plausible
paragraphs explaining why the tribe has learned to ride more than a hundred
years before history records that innovation).
Lipan Apache Raider |
Then, unexpectedly, they cross
into the Darkening
Land , the silent realm of
spirits. All around them in the mists they see huge tipis fashioned from the
hides of white buffalo. Within these ancient, abandoned homes they find the
undecayed bodies of giants—the Terrible People of legend, a race long dead.
From one of these, Iron Heart takes a massive axe of green jade.
Before he can much delight in
this beautiful weapon, a group of Pawnee surround the Comanche, led by the
pure-blood Spanish woman Conchita, who was stolen as an infant and raised to be
a “war-bird.” Just as the two groups begin to clash, they are incapacitated by
the arrival of another group of
feather-clad people who Iron Heart compares to the Puebloans in appearance and
whose magical gong helps them capture Pawnee and Comanche alike. They are taken
to a sort of ziggurat on a low hill, surrounded by a wall on the gate of which
is carved a feathered serpent. From here rules a tall, cruel man who calls
himself Tezcatlipoca, a name Conchita recognizes and fears—one of the sun’s
incarnations, Howard suggests.
Mountainheart |
As the Pawnee and Comanche are
sacrificed one by one, Xototl sneaks into the Room of Gold to have his way with
Conchita, but she kills him and frees Iron Heart. They start to escape, but
Tezcatlipoca intervenes. He and Iron Heart struggle, but Conchita tricks the
ancient creature by shouting that the long-dead giants have risen to attack the
palace. Taking advantage of the distraction, Iron Heart kills Tezcatlipoca with
the jade axe. Then he subdues the fiery Conchita, beating her until she relents
and promises to accompany him to his people.
Analysis
With some revision and editorial refining, The Thunder-Rider might have been a truly epic tale of conflict among indigenous North Americans whose cultures and religions historically overlapped in ways that encourage creative exploration of shared themes. Using the myth of Tezcatlipoca was particularly inspired, if not fully realized in the extant draft.
Analysis
With some revision and editorial refining, The Thunder-Rider might have been a truly epic tale of conflict among indigenous North Americans whose cultures and religions historically overlapped in ways that encourage creative exploration of shared themes. Using the myth of Tezcatlipoca was particularly inspired, if not fully realized in the extant draft.
For Mesoamerican peoples,
creation had occurred several times (either four or five, depending on the
particular culture). Each age was called a sun,
because a different god served that function from era to era. The principal
creator gods were twin brothers, most commonly known to Nahuatl-speakers as
Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent) and Tezcatlipoca (the Smoking Mirror). Two
halves of a single process, the brothers represented order and chaos,
respectively. Their conflicts were often the cause of cataclysms that brought
one age to end and ushered in another.
Tezcatlipoca |
According to Aztec annals, in
the year 1-Reed, on the day 4-Jaguar, Mountainheart and his army of jaguars
devoured nearly every giant on the face of the earth. Quetzalcoatl wrestled his
brother from the sky, and the First Age came to an end. Three more eras with
three more attendant suns would come and go before our present epoch, the Fifth
Age, illuminated by the son of Quetzalcoatl, Nanoatzin. And it is in the
forgotten history of Mesoamerican of the present age when myths and blend to
create legend.
The Nahua peoples or Chichimeca
were a group of interrelated tribes that immigrated into the high plains of
central Mexico
over several centuries beginning about a millennium ago. Today we call them
“Aztecs,” though that name actually describes their legendary overlords in
their place of origin, Aztlan. They discovered the vast ruinous cities of the
Tolteca, a glorious civilization whose benighted descendants now lived in small
city-states at the edges of the once-mighty empire. The Chichimeca—especially
the Mexica, last tribe to arrive—aped many of the cultural trappings and gods
of the ancients. The term for artistic excellence in Nahuatl, toltecayotl, is a reflection of their
reverence for the past.
Quetzalpetlatl |
The resulting legend—told in
one fashion or another from the highlands all the way to modern El Salvador—depicts
the incarnation of the creator god, born to a woman who swallowed a piece of
jade and was thereby impregnated. This child, Ce Acatl, would grow to be a
pious, good-hearted man who was selected to rule Tollan. Accompanied by his
equally virtuous sister Quetzalpetlatl, Ce Acatl abolished human sacrifice,
ushering in a time of prosperity and cultural revival. His people hailed him as
Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.
The story further recounts that
the priests of the old order were incensed at the changes to the state
religion. Chief among them was Tezcatlipoca, a dark mage whom the Nahua peoples
conflated with the god of chaos, Quetzalcoatl’s brother. Setting out to destroy
the righteousness of the ruler, Tezcatlipoca insinuated himself into the royal
palace in a disguise and used his wiles to trick Quetzalcoatl into getting so
drunk that he forgot his ritual duties (and, in some versions, had sex with his
sister). Disgraced, the ruler of Tollan abandoned the city with a small
retinue, traveled for several years through what is now southern Mexico doing
penance, and then immolated himself on the Gulf shore, vowing to return.
As for Tezcatlipoca’s fate, the
annals are less clear. The final ruler of Tollan, Huemac, continued to contend
with the dark priest, who brought down one magical disaster after another until
the city itself fell. Howard clearly means for the antagonist of The Thunder-Rider to be this same
Tezcatlipoca, as he “came from the south more than a thousand years before,”
fitting with the 10th century setting of the original legend.
Tula |
A few final notes. Upon
arriving in the mist-shrouded kingdom of Tezcatlipoca, Iron Heart calls it the
“Darkening Land,” which itself is a Cherokee concept—the realm to which all
dead spirits are bound. It is not clear why Howard would not have used the
similar Nahua term Mictlan, the Land of the Dead sometimes located in the
North, or the Mayan Xibalba, Place of Fear. Perhaps further revisions would
have prompted the use of such a Mesoamerican or Southwestern equivalent.
The name of the gong-ringer and
would-be-rapist, Xototl, is not a true Nahua name. Instead, Howard has probably
mis-transcribed or distorted “Xolotl,” the nahualli
or animal twin of Quetzalcoatl. God of lightning, Xolotl would accompany the
sun each night as it traversed the Underworld.
A revamped version of the tale correcting the spelling of this name would
have added more poignancy to Tezcatlipoca’s usurpation of Quetzalcoatl’s power
and his eventual destruction at the hands of mere mortal warriors.
In the final analysis, The Thunder-Rider represents a heartening respect for and interest in the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of what is nowMexico
and the US Southwest. It is a real shame that Robert E. Howard was unable
during his lifetime to return to this story and give it the final polish it
needed, but we can nonetheless enjoy its flawed extension of a vital Toltec
tradition.
Xolotl |
In the final analysis, The Thunder-Rider represents a heartening respect for and interest in the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of what is now
For
further reading, I recommend several
colonial-era documents translating Aztec codices: Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas, Libro de oro y tesoro
indico, Histoire du Mechique, Leyenda de los soles, Historia general de las
cosas de Nueva España. Modern works with English versions of these
documents and other pertinent pre-Colombian codices include Bierhorst’s History and Mythology of the Aztecs, Markman
and Markman’s The Flayed God, and Carrasco’s Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition.
About David Bowles
About David Bowles
A product of an ethnically diverse family with Latino roots,
David Bowles has lived most of his life in the Río
Grande Valley of
south Texas , where he teaches at the University of Texas . Recipient of awards from the
Texas Institute of Letters and Texas Associated Press, he has written several
books, among them Flower, Song, Dance:
Aztec and Mayan Poetry and Border Lore.
Additionally, his work has been published or is forthcoming
in venues such as Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Metamorphoses, Rattle, Translation Review, Concho River Review, Red
River Review, Huizache, The Thing Itself, Eye to the Telescope and James
Gunn’s Ad Astra.
3 comments:
Great essay David. Howard used the Toltecs in several stories and he equated them with Lemurians that migrated to North America.
Just to add, you mihgt to check out a couple of Howard's likely sources for his knowledge of MesoAmerica. One of his main references for the Toltecs in general is E. A. Allen's PRehistoric World (1885). In scanning it briefly, it looks like that's where he got the jade axe from. His other source was the Central and South America volume of the multi-volume Grolier History of the World edited by Bryce et al. THis one has Tezcatlipoca, Xolotl, Tollan, etc. Both are available on line.
Prehistoric World:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2873/2873-h/2873-h.htm
History of the World v. 14:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t8ff3ns95;view=1up;seq=7
Jeffrey,
Very nice! I'm familiar with Grolier (my dad had a set when I was a kid), but Prehistoric World is new to me. Great to know what REH's likely sources were (I'm sure closer examination of them could lead to more clues about the curious adaptations of the Tollan myth).
Cheers!
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