Mesoamerican PantheonCity
Tollan (Tula)
The legendary Toltec capital associated with Quetzalcoatl as priest-king. A place of artistic and cultural perfection where corn grew in brilliant colors and cotton grew already dyed. Quetzalcoatl was tricked into disgrace here by Tezcatlipoca.
About Tollan (Tula)
Quetzalcoatl's Toltec capital
Tollan (Tula) is the Toltec city of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan and Sahagun: crafts, colored maize, cotton already dyed, then disgrace when Tezcatlipoca tricks the priest-king into drunkenness and incest. He leaves for the east. Archaeology at Tula, Hidalgo, is a real Early Postclassic capital; the myth is a golden-age charter the Mexica later claimed. Do not confuse it with Teotihuacan, though sources sometimes blur "Tollan" as any great city.
On the map
Tollan (Tula) among other places of the Mesoamerican Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Anales de Cuauhtitlan / Florentine Codex Book 3
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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