Talking With Coatlicue on the Way to Quetzalcoatl

March 19, 2016

The other morning as I awoke, I felt the urging of my High Self, Samuel, to enter into conversation. He suggested that I do my usual yoga and pranayama exercises in order to warm up and clear my systems, which I did. Then as I entered into my post-pranayama meditation and communication stream, Samuel told me that if I wished to, he would arrange for me to speak with Coatlicue. And, of course, I said, “Yes!”

Some of what we discussed remains a bit blurry at this point, but the gist of her message was that if I chose to do so, I could continue Gloria Anzaldúa’s project beyond the point where she unfortunately left off at the time of her death in 2004. I’ve been getting a similar message from various spirit sources for some time now, but up to this point I was clueless concerning what exactly this might mean. Beyond that, I feel a bit daunted at the prospect of putting myself in her shoes and continuing her journey in this way. I can’t imagine such a process going unchallenged, yet I do feel that the calling is legitimate and important.

What I learned from Coatlicue was that Gloria had gone quite far in overcoming the Shadow-Beast stage of her initial confrontation with Coatlicue when she began work on the project of “putting Coyolxauqui together again.” What this means, in short, is that at a certain point in her liberation project Gloria had begun to identify with Coyolxauqui, the daughter of Coatlicue. As the story goes, while Coatlicue was pregnant with Huitzilopochtli—the Aztec Sun-God of War—Coyolxauqui recognized that her brother-in-utero was destined to bring about the end of the feminine world order up to that point. Huitzilopochtli would bring around a patriarchal military order that would lead to untold death and destruction. And such certainly seems to be the result of Huitzilopochtli’s reign, which is just now at a critical crossroads.

Upon recognizing Coyolxauhqui’s fratricidal (and consequently matricidal) intentions to murder her brother in utero to prevent such a drastic outcome and overthrow of the world order, Huitzilopochtli caused his own premature birth, leaping from the womb of Coatlicue and dismembering and beheading his sister Coyolxauqui, tossing her head into the heavens where it now reigns as our moon. From this tale of cosmic sibling rivalry Anzaldúa put together a restorative project of putting Coyolxauhqui together again and bringing about a new, reborn feminine source of power (the rebirth of the feminine that many see as the primary quality of the shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius).

So far, so good. But what Coatlicue then suggested to me was that this restoration or remembering of Coyolxauqui was a very important but ultimately transitional process of social healing. The “Rebirth of the Feminine” that one might imagine as the consequence of “putting Coyolxauhqui back together” is a restorative moment paving the way for the unification of the masculine and the feminine. This bisexual unification should be the ultimate goal for today’s spiritual activists. And the figure best prepared to stand in as the representative of such a project is not Coyolxauhqui but Quetzalcoatl.

My job, then, is to present Gloria’s Coatlicue-Huitzilopochtli-Coyolxauhqui in as much detail as possible, highlighting the cosmic logic behind this family drama, and then to develop in as much detail and clarity as possible what the new reign of Quetzalcoatl might look like. Quetzalcoatl is the best figure for such a cosmic-social transformation because He/She represents the manifestation of the cosmic unification of the masculine and the feminine as well as all other logics of social polarity. Being the dragon figure, the winged serpent whose home is both the Heavens and the Earth, Quetzalcoatl represents the next stage of healing cosmic consciousness, the Yin-Yang fusion of all oppositional factions into a movement of planetary liberation.

So this is what I plan to do as I move forward in this development of Anzaldúa’s project of healing the cosmic Self. This is the next moment on the path of cosmic bridging that Gloria sought throughout the last decade of her life.