[Aztlan] Teotihuacan and Pánuco

[Hoopes, John W]

The pecked circle research is fascinating, but I don't think the majority of these are relevant to the Teo-Panuco "connection."
 
I just think it's intriguing that a straight line drawn from 19° 7'16.68"N  99° 0'34.55"W (Volcan Tlaloc) north through 19°45'14.97"N 98°49'41.83"W (Cerro Gordo) not only runs straight down the Street of the Dead at Teo, but also takes one directly north to the center of Panuco.  (I just traced this out in Google Earth.  Try it!)
 
Panuco was in the heart of the Huaxteca region and has been associated by Torquemada with some infamous stories about Quetzalcoatl.  In one account, he identifies Panuco as the place where Quetzalcoatl landed with a contingent of men before heading inland to Tula.  I haven't been able to consult an edition of Torquemada myself, but Bancroft (1866) summarized a portion of the passage as:  "Certain people came from the north by way of Panuco.  These were men of good carriage, well dressed in long robes of black linen, open in front, and without caps, cut low at the neck, with short sleeves that did not come to the elbow; the same, in fact, as the natives use to this day in their dances.  From Panuco they passed on very peaceably by degrees to Tulla, where they were well received by the inhabitants.  The country there, however, was already too thickly populated to sustain the new-comers, so they passed on to Cholula where they had an excellent reception.  They brought with them as their chief and had a personage called Quetzalcoatl, a fair and ruddy complexioned man, with a long beard."
 
This passage was apparently the origin of the notorious myth of Quetzalcoatl as a white guy with a beard, and the Panuco association with Quetzalcoatl has been frrequently repeated by many writers who focus on that physical description.  I suppose it's entirely possible that the Spanish invented this story in order to confuse and convert the natives, but it does make one wonder whether there was something about Quetzalcoatl and Panuco that made the story credible to some.  Given the prevalence of feathered serpent imagery with Teotihuacan, the possible connection with the Street of the Dead is thought-provoking.
 
Panuco apparently first became a Spanish settlement in 1520, but it was abandoned and then reoccupied by Cortes in 1522.  Its location on the Teotihuacan "axis" may be fortuitous, but alternate hypotheses might be, 1) that a town in Panuco had a Teotihuacan-era association with Quetzalcoatl (who I doubt was either white or bearded), or 2) that the Spanish used knowledge of Teo's axis to invent a story about a white and bearded "Quetzalcoatl" to associate with their settlement at Panuco.  Its location on the Teo "axis" and association with Quetzalcoatl may be totally coincidental and/or fortuitous, but I was curious to know whether the possibility that it might be something more than that had been explored.
 
Gordon Eckholm, who thought Quetzalcoatl may have been a deity from the Huaxteca, did some research in the Panuco:
 
http://anthro.amnh.org/anthropology/research/ekholm.htm
 
It's just one of those things that makes you go, "Hmmm..."
 
John Hoopes