Nezahualcóyotl, poet, philosopher, engineer, was king of the pre-conquest Mexican city state of Texcoco, a lesser state than the dominant Aztec MexicoTenochtitlan (now Mexico City). At the age of 16, he had to hide in a tree while he saw his father murdered by a rival claimant to the throne. (That was about 65 years from the date when the Princes in the Tower were murdered in England.) Young Prince Nezahualcóyotl was exiled for seventeen years and had to fight to regain his kingdom. Finally in 1431, he was crowned king of Texcoco by the senior king of Tenochtitlan. He made gardens and a zoological garden, in which he gathered all the region’s fauna and flora; he built splendid palaces and courts, which he filled with poets,. He became a famous law-giver. He constructed an aqueduct to bring water down from the mountain and a dike to separate the salt from the sweet water in the Great Lake, on which Tenochtitlan was built.
The name he adopted as a poet was Yoyontzin, –tzin being a Nahuatl diminutive rather like our –kin. So we could call him Yoyonkin. The Nahuatl word for poetry is in xóchitl in cúicatl: ‘flower and song’ and his ‘flowersongs’ celebrate the LifeGiver, the beauty and brevity of life on Earth and the joys of friendship. Together with the other poets at court, he delighted to take part in festivals and ceremonies with poetry, music and dancing. He had 119 children but only one legitimate heir, from his queen, when he finally got married. Around 1464, this son was found guilty of treason and his father, King Nezahualcóyotl, had to agree to his execution. The priests followed the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice to feed the Sun God, Huitzilopochtli, with blood so that it would continue to rise. To placate the God and seek a new heir to the kingdom they performed a great sacrificial ceremony.
But Nezahualcóyotl rejected this God..
His name means ‘Hungry Coyote’ and he hungered for the Unknown God. The chronicler Ixtilxóchitl says: ‘He left the city and went off to his forest of Tetcotzinco, where he fasted for forty days, praying to the Unknown God, creator and principle of all things.’ Like the God of Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent), ruler of the Toltecs, an earlier, famously high civilisation in the region, this Unknown God forbade human sacrifice.
Directly opposite the temple of the Sun God, Nezahualcóyotl built a temple to the Unknown God, which had no images in it at all and where human sacrifice was forbidden.. He was unable to rid his kingdom of human sacrifice altogether, as the powerful priestly class had too much invested in it. Like us, he had to work in a complex and recalcitrant political context.
But when there was a dedication ceremony of the Sun God’s temple in the year ce ácatl: ‘1-Reed’, he wrote a poem (correctly) prophesying the temple’s downfall when the year 1-Reed returned after the calendar’s 52-year cycle.
That was 1519, when the Spaniards arrived in Mexico and Hernán Cortés began his conquest. The Sun-God’s temple was indeed destroyed.
The Unknown God had no image. Thus Nezahualcóyotl reached him by a sort of via negativa. He calls the Unknown God the ‘LifeGiver’ and in his poems this Life-Giver sounds rather like Life itself. Honouring the LifeGiver means honouring life and giving up human sacrifice; his via negativa, a way of seeing, has ethical consequences.
I present here translations of three of his poems.