Quetzalcoatl vs Viracocha

The Feathered Serpent, a creator deity who contributed to the creation of mankind. Patron of priests and inventor of books and the calendar.

One of the four sons of the creator couple Ometeotl. He journeyed to Mictlan to retrieve the bones of the ancestors to create the current race of humans.

Quetzalcoatl stands as one of the most complex and revered deities in Mesoamerican religion, his worship spanning multiple civilizations over thousands of years. His name combines **quetzal** (the resplendent bird with iridescent green feathers) and **coatl** (serpent), embodying the union of earth and sky, matter and spirit.

The creator of the Inca state cult, who in Betanzos's account rises from Lake Titicaca, makes the sun, moon, and stars at Tiwanaku, shapes each nation from stone, and finally walks away across the western sea.

Viracocha is uncreated in the chronicles: he emerges from Lake Titicaca before there is light, and everything else, including the sun and moon, is his work.

The fullest early account is Juan de Betanzos's *Suma y narración de los Incas* (1551), which opens with Con Tici Viracocha emerging from Lake Titicaca into a world without light. He makes a first people who displease him and turns them to stone; he then goes to Tiwanaku, makes the sun, moon, and stars, and shapes the nations of the Andes in stone, painting on each its dress and giving it a language, before sending them underground to emerge from their own springs, caves, and hills. Cristóbal de Molina (c. 1575) and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572) tell related versions; Sarmiento adds that the Creator destroyed an earlier world by a flood.