wisdom, and came to be looked upon as the magician or sage par excellence , the patron of education, the rain-maker who knew precisely when the blood shed in penance should be spent in order that it might return to the soil of Anahuac in an abundant rainfall.
(d) Quetzalcoatl as the god of wind was also regarded as the breath of life, a phenomenon encountered in many mythologies, and therefore came to be conceived as the agency by which souls were originally placed in human bodies. From this, too, we may argue his appearance as a creator, or cosmic deity, although it may have been in his character as fertilizer that he came to be regarded in this light.
(e) Quetzalcoatl is the great penitent, the supreme protagonist of the penitential system, because without the blood spent in penitential exercise no rain might fall. The secondary character of this conception is probable.
(f) Quetzalcoatl seems at a later date to have been regarded as the god of the four quarters of the compass, a conception of him indubitably evolved from his status as a wind-god. I think I also perceive signs that from this latter idea was further evolved a conception of him as god of the four elements—fire, air, earth, and water. He is the fire and the flint, because of the lightning which in Mexico accompanies the fall of the trade-wind rain. He is the air in his rôle of Wind-god, and as such is symbolized by the bird, the natural inhabitant of the air, the beak of which he uses as a funnel from which to expel the wind. He is earth, and, his myth says, a builder of subterranean houses, and sometimes bears the earth-staff of agriculture.94 He is water, or rain, in which guise he is typified