Morris's Third and Final Novel: The Chalchiuhite Dragon

Morris's third (and final) novel, was finished in 1935, a few years before its author's death. But it was not published until 1992, when it was hailed (appropriately) as a long-lost masterpiece. At the time of publication, I wrote a short account of  Morris's works for Sunrise magazine. Below is what I said about The Chalchiuhite Dragon.

In The Chalchiuhite Dragon, Morris's final novel (written at the request of Katherine Tingley), he used as his raw materials the legends of the pre-Columbian new world, particularly of the Nahua-speaking native peoples of central and southern Mexico.

Morris found most of the basics for his story in Hubert Howe Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States (5 vols., 1874-5); he recognized that Bancroft's interpretation of history and legend was questionable. As Morris writes in his Preface to the novel, "Bancroft disentangled, or thought he had disentangled, from the masses of legend the story of a Great King: this author tried to disentangle from Bancroft the story of a Great Teacher."

Morris's story concerns itself with the Quetzalcoatl legend, the story of the Prince of Peace, the Plumed Dragon, the god who is periodically reborn among men to teach Peace. As the legend goes, Quetzalcoatl was always born in a year Ce Acatl (Reed One, the fourteenth year in any year-bundle of fifty-two years). The chalchiuhite dragon, a living green jewel no larger than a woman's thumb and shaped like a dragon, would appear whenever Quetzalcoatl was about to reincarnate among men.

More specifically, Morris's novel tells the story of a year leading up to an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl. (Indeed, Morris's alternate title to this novel was The Coming of the God.) It is the time of the dominion of the Toltecs, who have gone conquering far and wide, adding kingdoms to the rule of their leader, the Toltec Topiltzin, whose godname is Camaxth, the Toltec God of War. Finally the Topiltzin hears of idealistic Huitznahuac, in the south beyond the south. He decides he must add this realm to the Toltec League, and he sets forth to subjugate Huitznahuac, where war and killing are unknown. To say more here would, I believe, begin to give away too much of the story, which deserves to be read on its own.

It is one thing to write fiction and another to write philosophy, and here Morris achieves a unique blending of the two mediums with nothing to the detriment of either: The Chalchiuhite Dragon is richly textured and filled with wisdom on many levels. To this writer it is the best of Morris's three novels. And it is one of those rare and precious books we will return to again and again, and savor over a lifetime. And surely, it is one of the most soul-enriching things in literature.

The Chalchiuhite Dragon, in full, can be read online here, courtesy of the copyright owner. This link also has on its front page Morris's own Preface to the book, and my Afterword, putting context to the work with regard to Morris's writing career, together with the Glossary I compiled of the Nahua (or Nahuatl) names found in the book.