Topic: Latin American Mythology (new ocr old one too many errors)

[Prometheus]

https://archive.org/details/mythologyofallra111gray/page/n10


 THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES

Volume XI

LATIN-AMERICAN

 PLATE I

Top face of the monolith known as the “ Dragon ”
or the “ Great Turtle ” of Quirigua. This is one of
the group of stelae and “ altars ” which mark the
ceremonial courts of this vanished Maya city (see
Plate XXIII); and is perhaps the master-work
not only of Mayan, but of aboriginal American art.
The top of the stone here figured shows a highly
conventionalized daemon or dragon mask, sur-
rounded by a complication of ornament. The
north and south (here lower and upper) faces of the
monument contain representations of divinities; on
the south face is a mask of the “ god with the orna-
mented nose ” (possibly Ahpuch, the death god),
and on the north, seated within the open mouth
of the Dragon, the teeth of whose upper jaw appear
on the top face of the monument, is carved a serene,
Buddha-like divinity shown in Plate XXV. The
Maya date corresponding, probably, to 525 A. D.
appears in a glyphic inscription on the shoulder of
the Dragon. The monument is fully described by
W. H. Holmes, Art and Archaeology, Vol. IV, No. 6.
 
 THE MYTHOLOGY
OF ALL RACES

IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES
LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., PH.D., Editor

GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Consulting Editor

latin-american

BY

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA

VOLUME XI

BOSTON

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

M DCCCC XX
 

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Copyright, 1920
By Marshall Jones Company

Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London
All rights reserved

First printing, April, 1920

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS   '

BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY
 TO

ALICE CUNNINGHAM FLETCHER

IN APPRECIATION OF HER INTERPRETATIONS OF
AMERICAN INDIAN LIFE AND LORE

/

Jl. O' Ks O
 
 AUTHOR’S PREFACE

IN aim and plan the present volume is made to accord as
nearly as may be with the earlier-written volume on the
mythology of the North American Indians. Owing to diver-
gence of the materials, some deviations of method have been
necessary, but in their main lines the two books correspond
in form as they are continuous in matter. In each case the
author has aimed primarily at a descriptive treatment, follow-
ing regional divisions, and directed to essential conceptions
rather than to exhaustive classification; and in each case it
has been, not the specialist in the field, but the scholar with kin-
dred interests and the reader of broadly humane tastes whom
the author has had before him.

The difficulties besetting the composition of both books have
been analogous, growing chiefly from the vast diversities of the
sources of material; but these difficulties are decidedly greater
for the Latin-American field. The matter of spelling is one of
the more immediate. In general, the author has endeavoured
to adhere to such of the rules given in Note i of Mythology of
All Races, Vol. X (pp. 267-68), as may be applicable, seeking
the simplest plausible English forms and continuing literary
usage wherever it is well established, both for native and for
Spanish names (as Montezuma, Cortez). Consistency is prag-
matically impossible in such a matter; but it is hoped that the
foundational need, that of identification, is not evaded.

The problem of an appropriate bibliography has proven to
be of the hardest. To the best of the author’s belief, there
exists, aside from that here given, no bibliography aiming at a
systematic classification of the sources and discussions of the
mythology of the Latin-American Indians, as a whole. There

15389
 Vlll

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

are, indeed, a considerable number of special bibliographies,
regional in character, for which every student must be grate-
ful; and it is hoped that not many of the more important of
these have failed of inclusion in the bibliographical division
devoted to “Guides”; but for the whole field, the appended
bibliography is pioneer work, and subject to the weaknesses
of all such attempts. The principles of inclusion are: (i) All
works upon which the text of the volume directly rests. These
will be found cited in the Notes, where are also a few references
to works cited for points of an adventitious character, and
therefore not included in the general bibliography. (2) A
more liberal inclusion of English and Spanish than of works in
other languages, the one for accessibility, the other for source
importance. (3) An effort to select only such works as have
material directly pertinent to the mythology, not such as deal
with the general culture, of the peoples under consideration, —
a line most difficult to draw. In respect to bibliography, it
should be further stated that it is the intent to enter the names
of Spanish authors in the forms approved by the rules of the
Real Academia, while it has not seemed important to follow
other than the English custom in either text or notes. It is
certainly the author’s hope that the labour devoted to the
assembling of the bibliography will prove helpful to students
generally, and it is his belief that those wishing an introduction
to the more important sources for the various regions will find
of immediate help the select bibliographies given in the Notes,
for each region and chapter.

The illustrations should speak for themselves. Care has been
taken to reproduce works which are characteristic of the art
as well as of the mythic conceptions of the several peoples;
and since, in the more civilized localities, architecture also is
significantly associated with mythic elements, a certain num-
ber of pictures are of architectural subjects.

It remains to express the numerous forms of indebtedness
which pertain to a work of the present character. Where they
 AUTHOR’S PREFACE

IX

are a matter of authority, it is believed that the references to
the Notes will be found fully to cover them; and where illus-
trations are the subject, the derivation is indicated on the
tissues. In the way of courtesies extended, the author owes
recognition to staff-members of the libraries of Harvard
and Northwestern Universities, to the Peabody Museum,
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the American Museum
of Natural History, and the Museum of the University of
Nebraska. His personal obligations are due to Professor
Frank S. Philbrick, of the Northwestern University Law
School, and to the Assistant Curator of the Academy of
Pacific Coast History, Dr. Herbert I. Priestley, for valuable
suggestions anent the bibliography, and to Dr. Hiram Bing-
ham, of the Yale Peruvian Expedition, for his courtesy in
furnishing for reproduction the photographs represented by
Plates XXX and XXXVIII. His obligations to the editor
of the series are, it is trusted, understood.

The manuscript of the present volume was prepared for the
printer by November of 1916. The ensuing outbreak of war
delayed publication until the present hour. In the intervening
period a number of works of some importance appeared, and
the author has endeavoured to incorporate as much as was
essential of this later criticism into the body of his work, a
matter difficult to make sure. The war also has been respon-
sible for the editor’s absence in Europe during the period in
which the book has been put through the press, and the duty
of oversight has fallen upon the author who is, therefore,
responsible for such editorial delinquencies as may be found.

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER.

Lincoln, Nebraska,

November 17, 1919.
 
 CONTENTS

PAGE

Author’s Preface.........................................  vii

Introduction................................................ i

Chapter I. The Antilles.................................... 15

I   The Islanders................................. 15

II   The First Encounters.............................. 18

III   Zemiism.......................................... 21

IV   Taino Myths...................................... 28

V   The Areitos....................................... 32

VI   Carib Lore........................................ 36

Chapter II. Mexico......................................... 41

I   Middle America.................................... 41

II   Conquistadores.................................... 44

III   The Aztec Pantheon............................... 49

IV   The Great Gods................................... 57

1   Huitzilopochtli............................... 58

2   Tezcatlipoca................................. 61

3   Quetzalcoatl................................. 66

4   Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue................... 71

V   The Powers of Life................................ 74

VI   The Powers of Death.............................. 79

Chapter III. Mexico (continued)............................ 85

I   Cosmogony......................................... 85

II   The Four Suns.................................... 91

III   The Calendar and its   Cycles...................... 96

IV   Legendary History................................105

V   Aztec Migration-Myths............................ 111

VI   Surviving Paganism................................118

Chapter IV. Yucatan........................................124

I   The Maya......................................... 124

II   Votan, Zamna, and Kukulcan.....................131

III   Yucatec Deities..................................136
 xii   CONTENTS

PAGE

IV   Rites and Symbols...............................142

V   The Maya Cycles.................................146

VI   The Creation..........•......................152

Chapter V. Central America...............................156

I   Quiche and Cakchiquel...........•............156

II   The Popul Vuh....................................159

III   The Hero Brothers...............................168

IV   The Annals of the Cakchiquel....................177

V   Honduras and Nicaragua..........................183

Chapter VI. The Andean North.............................187

I   The Cultured Peoples of the Andes...............187

II   The Isthmians....................................189

III   El Dorado.......................................194

IV   Myths of the Chibcha........................... 198

V   The Men from the Sea............................204

Chapter VII. The Andean South............................210

I   The Empire of the Incas.........................210

II   The Yunca Pantheons..............................220

III   The Myths of the Chincha........................227

IV   Viracocha and Tonapa............................232

V   The Children of the Sun.........................242

VI   Legends of the Incas............................248

Chapter VIII. The Tropical Forests: the Orinoco and

Guiana..............................................253

I   Lands and Peoples...............................253

II   Spirits and Shamans..............................256

III   How Evils Befell Mankind........................261

IV   Creation and Cataclysm..........................266

V   Nature and Human Nature.........................275

Chapter IX. The Tropical Forests: the Amazon and

Brazil..............................................281

I   The Amazons.....................................281

II   Food-Makers and Dance-Masks......................287

III   Gods, Ghosts, and Bogeys........................295

IV   Imps, Were-Beasts, and Cannibals................300

V   Sun, Moon, and Stars............................304

VI   Fire, Flood, and Transformations.............311
 CONTENTS

xiii

PAGE

Chapter X. The Pampas   to the Land of Fire............316

I The Far South....................................316

II   El Chaco and the Pampeans.......................318

III   The Araucanians.................................324

IV   The Patagonians.................................331

V   The Fuegians....................................338

Notes....................................................345

Bibliography.............................................379
 t

'X;
 ILLUSTRATIONS

FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE   FACING PAGE

I The Dragon of Quirigua — Photogravure . Frontispiece
II Antillean Triangular Stone Images...... 24

III   Antillean Stone Ring........................ 28

IV   Dance in Honor of the Earth Goddess, Haiti ...   34

V   Aztec Goddess, probably Coatlicue........... 46

VI   Tutelaries of the Quarters, Codex Ferjervary-Mayer

— Coloured................................... 56

VII   Coyolxauhqui, Xochipilli, and Xiuhcoatl....... 60

VIII   Tezcatlipoca, Codex Borgia — Coloured.......... 64

IX   Quetzalcoatl, Macuilxochitl, Huitzilopochtli, Codex

Borgia — Coloured............................ 70

X   Mask of Xipe Totec............................. 76

XI   Mictlantecutli, God of Death................... 80

XII   Heavenly Bodies, Codex Vaticanus B and Codex

Borgia — Coloured............................ 88

XIII   Ends of Suns, or Ages of the World, Codex Vatica-

nus A — Coloured............................. 94

XIV   Aztec Calendar Stone..........................100

XV   Temple of Xochicalco..........................106

XVI   Section of the Tezcucan “Map Tlotzin” — Col-
oured ...............................................112

XVII   Interior of Chamber, Mitla.....................118

XVIII   Temple 3, Ruins of Tikal......................*126

XIX   Map of Yucatan Showing Location of   Maya Cities 130

XX   B as-relief Tablets, Palenque................ 136

XXI   B as-relief Lintel, Menche, Showing Priest and

Penitent.....................................144

XXII   “Serpent Numbers,” Codex Dresdensis   — Coloured 152

XXIII   Ceremonial Precinct, Quirigua..................160
 XVI

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE   FACING PAGE

XXIV   Image in Mouth of the Dragon of Quirigua . . .   168

XXV   Stela 12, Piedras Negras........................178

XXVI   Amulet in the Form of a Vampire................190

XXVII   Colombian Goldwork.............................196

XXVIII   Mother Goddess and Ceremonial Dish, Colombia .   200

XXIX   Vase Painting of Balsa, Truxillo................206

XXX   Machu Picchu...................................212

XXXI   Monolith, Chavin de Huantar.....................218

XXXII   Nasca Vase, Showing Multi-Headed Deity ....   222

XXXIII   Nasca Deity, in Embroidery — Coloured ....   226

XXXIV   Nasca Vase, Showing Sky Deity..................230

XXXV   Monolithic Gateway, Tiahuanaco..................234

XXXVI   Plaque, probably Representing Viracocha ....   236

XXXVII   Vase Painting from Pachacamac — Coloured . . .   240

XXXVIII   Temple of the Windows, Machu Picchu.............248

XXXIX   Carved Seats and Metate........................264

XL Vase from the Island of Marajo....................286

XLI Brazilian Dance Masks.............................294

XLII Trophy Head, from Ecuador........................304

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

FIGURE   '   PAGE

1   Chart showing Culture Sequences in Mexico and Peru . . .   367

2   Figure from a Potsherd, Calchaqui Region............369
 INTRODUCTION

THERE is an element of obvious incongruity in the use
of the term “Latin American” to designate the native
Indian myths of Mexico and of Central and South America.
Unfortunately, we have no convenient geographical term
which embraces all those portions of America which fell to
Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, and in default of this,
the term designating their culture, Latin in character, has
come into use — aptly enough when its application is to
transplanted Iberian institutions and peoples, but in no
logical mode relating to the aborigines of these regions. More
than this, there are no aboriginal unities of native culture
and ideas which follow the divisions made by the several
Caucasian conquests of the Americas. It is primarily as
consequence of their conquest by Spaniards that Mexico and
Central America fall with the southern continent in our
thought; from the point of view of their primitive ethnology
there is little evidence (at least for recent times) 1 of southern
influence until Yucatan and Guatemala are passed. There
are, to be sure, striking resemblances between the Mexican
and Andean aboriginal civilizations; and there are, again,
broad similarities between the ideas and customs of the less
advanced tribes of the two continents, such that we may
correctly infer a certain racial character as typical of all Amer-
ican Indians; but amid these similarities there are grouped
differences which, as between the continents, are scarcely less
distinctive than are their fauna and flora, — say, calumet
and eagle’s plume as against blowgun and parrot’s feather, —
and these hold level for level: the Amazonian and the Inca
 2

INTRODUCTION

are as distinctively South American as the Mississippian and
the Aztec are distinctively North American.

Were the divisions in a treatment of American Indian myth
to follow the rationale of pre-Columbian ethnography,2 the
key-group would be found in the series of civilized or semi-
civilized peoples of the mainly mountainous and plateau
regions of the western continental ridge, roughly from Cancer to
Capricorn, or with outlying spurs from about 350 North
(Zuni and Hopi) to near 350 South (Calchaqui-Diaguite).
Within this region native American agriculture originated;
and along with agriculture were developed the arts of civiliza-
tion in the forms characteristic of America; while from the
several centres of the key-group agriculture and attendant
arts passed on into the plains and forests regions and the great
alluvial valleys of the two continents and into the archipelago
which lies between them. In each continent there is a region
— the Boreal and the Austral — beyond the boundaries of
the native agriculture, and untouched by the arts of the
central civilizations, yet showing an unmistakable community
of ideas, of which (primitive and vague as they are) recurrent
instances are to be found among the intervening groups. Thus
the plat and configuration of autochthonous America divides
into cultural zones that are almost those of the hemispherical
projection, and into altitudes that are curiously parallel to'
the continental altitudes: the higher civilizations of the
plateaux, the more or less barbarous cultures of the unstable
tribes of the great river basins, and the primitive development
of the wandering hordes of the frigid coasts. The primitive
stage may be assumed to be the foundational one throughout
both continents, and it is virtually repeated in the least ad-
vanced groups of all regions; the intermediate stage (except
in such enigmatical groups as that of the North-West Coast
Indians of North America) appears to owe much to definite
acculturation as a consequence of the spread of the arts and
industries developed by the most advanced peoples. More-
 INTRODUCTION

3

[Prometheus]

over, the outer unities of mode of life are reflected by inner
communities of thought; for there are unmistakable kinships
of idea, not only throughout the civilized group, but also in
the whole range of the regions affected by its arts; while
underlying these and outcropping at the poles, there is a
definable stratum of virtually identical primitive thought.
Nevertheless, these unities are cut across by differences,
partly environmental and partly historical in origin, which
give, as said above, distinctive character to the parallel groups
of the two continents. One might, indeed, say that the cul-
tural division is twinned, north and south, — with a certain
primacy, as of elder birth and clear superiority in the northern
groups; for, on the whole, the Maya is superior to the Inca,
just as the Iroquois and Sioux are superior to Carib and
Araucanian, and the Eskimo to the Fuegian.

Such, in loose form, is the native configuration of American
culture and hence of native American thought, and without
question a desirable mode of treating the latter would be to
follow this natural chart. Nevertheless, there are reasons which
fully justify, in the study of native ideas, the bringing together
in a single treatment of all the materials relating to the peoples
of Latin America. The most obvious of these reasons is the
unity of the descriptive literature, in its earlier and primary
works almost wholly Spanish. It is not merely that such writers
as Las Casas, Acosta, Herrera, and Gomara pass ubiquitously
from region to region of the Spanish conquests, now north,
now south, in the course of their narratives; it is rather that
a certain colouristic harmony is derived from what might be
termed the linguistic prejudices of their tongue, which, there-
fore, they share with those Spanish chroniclers whose field of
description is limited to some one region. The mere fact that
the ideas of an Indian nation are first described by a sixteenth
century Spaniard — friar, bishop, or cavalier — gives to them
the flavour of their translation and context, and thus estab-
lishes a sort of community between all groups of ideas so de-
 4

INTRODUCTION

scribed. Nor need this be matter for regret: primitive thought,
with its burning concreteness and its lack of relational expres-
sion, is as truly untranslatable into analytical languages as
poetry is untranslatable; and it is, on the whole, good fortune
to have, as it were, but one linguistic colour cast upon so large
a body of aboriginal ideas.

Further — what may not be to the liking of the ethnologist,
but is certainly of high zest to the lover of romance — the
Spanish colour is quite as much in the nature of imagination
as in the hue of expression. No book on Latin American
mythology could be complete without description of those
truly Latinian fables which the discoverers brought with them
to the New World, and there, wedding them to native tradi-
tions (ill-heard and fabulously repeated), soon created such a
realm of gorgeous marvel as glamoured the age with fantasy
and set the coolest heads to mad adventure. In such names as
Antilles, Brazil, the Amazon, Old World myths are fixed in
New World geography; and beyond these there is the whole
series of fantastic tales with which the Spaniard, in a sort of
imaginative munificence, has enriched the literature and the
romantic resources of this world of ours. The Fountain of
Eternal Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Island of the
Amazons and the marvellous virtues of the Amazon Stone, El
Dorado (“the Gilded Man”), the treasure cities of Manoa
and Omagua, the lost empire of the Gran Moxo and the Gran
Paytiti, Patagonian giants, and “men whose heads do grow
between their shoulders,” and finally, most wide-spread of all,
the miracles of the robed and bearded white man who, long
ago, had come to teach the Indian a new way of life and a
purer worship and had left the cross to be his sign, in whom no
pious mind could see other than the blessed Saint Thomas:
all these were in part a freight of the caravels, and they re-
present collectively a chapter second to none in mythopoesy.
There is no match for this cargo of imported fantasy in the
parts of America colonized by the English and the French.
 INTRODUCTION

5

This, however, need not be accredited merely to cooler blood
and calmer race: the North American colonies belong to the
seventeenth century, a good hundred years after the Spaniards
had completed their most golden conquests, and for the Span-
iard, no less than for the others, the hour of intoxication and
extravagance had by then gone by — leaving its flamboyant
tones to warm the colours of succeeding times. Thus it is that
Latin American myth is in no faint degree truly Latinian.

But while there is a certain Old World seasoning in Latin
American myth, native traditions are, of course, the substan-
tial material of the study. This material is striking and various.
It embraces the usual substrata of demoniac beliefs and
animistic credulities, and above these such elaborate forma-
tions as the Aztec and Maya pantheons, with their amazing
astral and calendric interpretations, or the enigmatic and
fervid religion of Peru. Many of the stories are little more
than vocal superstitions; others, such as the conquering of
death in the Popul Vuh, the Brazilian tale of the release of the
imprisoned night, or the superb Surinam legend of Maconaura
and Anuanaitu, will compare, both for dramatic power and
subtle suggestion, with the best that the world can show.
There is, of course, the constant difficulty of deciding where
myth clearly emerges from the misty realm of folk-lore, and,
at the other extreme, where it is succeeded by science and
religion; but this difficulty is more theoretic than practical: in
its central character mythology is present wherever there are
animating gods operant in the body of nature, and myth is pres-
ent wherever spirits or deities are shown as dramatically inter-
acting causes. With a few possible exceptions (the possibility
being probably but the expression of our ignorance), all Ameri-
can Indians are mythopoets, whose mythology is characterized
in characterizing their beliefs.

The practical problem of handling and apportioning the
subject-matter is similar to that presented in the case of
North America, and rather more difficult. In the first place,
 6

INTRODUCTION

it were idle to undertake the mere narration of stories and
superstitions without some delineation of the conditions of
the life and culture of those who make them; frequently, the
whole relevance of the tale is to the manner of life. In the
next place, the feasible mode of apportionment, by regional 'di-
visions, is made difficult not only by the vastness of some of
the regions, but even more so by the unevenness of culture,
and hence of the range of ideas. If the lines were drawn on the
scale of Old World studies, Mexico (Nahua and Maya) and
Peru would each deserve a volume; and the proportionately
slight attention which they receive in the present work is due
partly to the need of giving reasonable space to other regions,
partly to the fact that the myths of these fallen empires are
already represented by an accessible literature. Still a third
problem has to do with the order in which the matters should
be presented. From the point of view of native affinities, the
logical step from the Antilles is to the Orinoco and Guiana
region (that is, from Chapter I to Chapter VIII).3 But since,
in beginning with the Antilles, one is really following the course
of discovery — seeing, as it were, with Spanish eyes — the
natural continuation is on to Mexico and Peru, and thence to
the more slowly uncovered regions of central South America.
This procedure, also, follows a certain bibliographical trend:
the relative importance of Spanish authors is much less for
the latter chapters of the book, and the sources of material,
in general, are of later origin.

Finally, a word might be said with respect to interpretation.
No matter how conscientiously one may aim at straight
narration, the mere need for coherence will compel some in-
terpreting; while every translation is, in its degree, an inter-
pretation (and one literally impossible). Besides and beyond
all this, there are the prepossessions of the recorders to be
taken into account — honest men who interpret according
to their lights. There are the Biblical prepossessions of the
early Padres, for whom the Tower of Babel and the Dispersion
 INTRODUCTION

7

were recent and real events: granting a Noachian Deluge of
the thoroughness which they had in mind, nothing could be
more rational than were their readings of aboriginal legends
of events of a kindred nature, or than their speculations as to
what sons of Shem the Indians might be. There are the tradi-
tionary visions of migratory descendants of the Lost Tribes,
of far-wandering Buddhist monks, of sea-faring Orientals, and
forgotten Atlantideans; and there is the wonderful Euhemerism
of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg (ever the more admirable
in the more reading) — neither the first nor the last of his
tribe, but assuredly the most gifted of them all. There are,
again, the theological biases of missionaries, for whom the
devil is seldom far and God is generally near; and there are
the no less ingrained prejudices of the anthropologists who
serenely Tylorize and fetishize the most recalcitrant materials,
and of the philologists who solarize and astralize because the
model was once set for them. America has proven an abun-
dant field for the illustration of all these methods of reading
the riddle of man’s fancy; and it is scarcely to be desired that
one should report the matters without some reflection of the
colourations. But, in sooth, how could myth be myth apart
from meaning?

Which leads (by no devious routing of reflection) to some
consideration of the meaning of mythology and of our interest
in it. Such interest may be of any of several types. A first,
and still persistent, interest, and one to which we owe, for
America, from Ramon Pane onward, more actual material
than to any other, is the desire of the Christian missionary to
discover in the native mind those points of approach and
elements of community which will best enable him to spread
the faith of Christendom. In many cases, of course, the mis-
sionary is seized with a purely speculative zeal for recording
facts, but it is usually possible in such records to detect
the influence of the impulse which first brought him into the
field, — and which, it may be added, makes of his services a
 8

INTRODUCTION

matter for the gratitude of all who follow him. A second in-
terest, which is often not sharply divorced from the first, as
instanced in Missionary Brett’s poetizing of the myths of the
Guiana Indians,4 is the aesthetic and imaginative. What
classical mythology has done for the art and poetry of Chris-
tian Europe all men know: Dante and Milton, Botticelli and
Michelangelo are only less its debtors than are Homer and
Phidias. Further, the Renaissance curiosity, with its passion
for the antique gems and heathen gods whose forms so stimu-
lated its own expressions, was at its height when America was
discovered and conquered; and it is small wonder that that
interest was transformed, where the marvel of the New World
was in question, into a wave of American exotism which rose
to its crest in the humanitarian enthusiasm of the eighteenth
century.5 In our own day this interest is continuing, more
soberly but not less fruitfully, in a deliberate effort on the part
of artists, of poets, and of musicians to discover the elements
of lasting beauty in the native arts and mythic themes. From
a certain point of view there is a peril in the aesthetic interest:
most investigators consciously or unconsciously possess it, and
most recorders of native myths consciously or unconsciously
dress their materials with the suaver forms of expression
which the cultivated languages of Europe have developed.
There is, in other words, some untruth to aboriginal thought
in the desire to find or inject art where the original motive
was realistic, or, if aesthetic, governed by a taste foreign to
our own. On the other hand, we recognize readily enough
that the real creative gain, in an artistic sense, must come
from an amalgamation, and with such an example of artis-
tic achievement through amalgamation as is afforded by the
Renaissance, we can but hope that the more intimate adoption
of the ideas and motives of American Indian art into our own
aesthetic consciousness may yet result in an American Renais-
sance no less notable.

A third interest in American mythology is that of the an-
 INTRODUCTION

9

thropologists, by whom the domain is today most cultivated.
Here the foundation is scientific curiosity and the modes are
those of the natural and historical sciences. This type of in-
terest, of course, determines its own problems and methods.
For example, to it we owe most of the exact recording and
minute analysis of materials: the preservation of texts in the
native tongues, and the careful application of ethnological
and archaeological observations to their interpretation. Nat-
urally, the key-problem here is of the origin and distribution
of the American Indian peoples, and the reconstruction of
their history, both physical and ideational, — wherein recent
advances have been veritably in the nature of strides. Along
with this problem of distribution and genesis there has co-
existed the complementary question of the influence of nature
(human and environmental) upon the forms of expression —
a question to which one might ascribe three facets, the philo-
logical, the sociological, and the more strictly bionomic, with
its strong Darwinian leanings. Ultimately the two comple-
mental problems resolve into an effort to read human nature,
as human nature is reflected in its express reactions to the
complex world by which it is modified even while it offers a
conserving resistance, born of the strength of its traditions
and of racial solidarity. This means, at the bottom, an interest
in human psychology.

It is here that the anthropological interest in mythology
passes over into the philosophical. Philosophy strives to
achieve, as it were, a generalized autobiography of the human
mind. It starts, inevitably, with psychology, and with those
elemental unities of experience which our senses (inner and
outer) determine for us; it goes on to try to discover the range
and fullness of meaning of all the variations of human ex-
perience. Philosophers are interested in mythology, therefore,
primarily from a psychological standpoint: they are interested
in reading the mind’s complexion, as mythopoesy reflects it;
in analyzing out the images of sense in human thought, the
 IO

INTRODUCTION

images of instinct, of kind and kin, of speech and number;
and again in reviewing the natural reactions of the human
spirit to the visible and sensible world, with its seasons and
cycles and evident metamorphoses, — reactions which start,
apparently, with a dreamy consciousness of the fluid and in-
coherent character of an outer, man-environing world, and
culminate in a sense of the allegory and drama of things
physical, and the discovery of a thinking self, still hazy as to
its powers and its limitations. The biographic tale is a long
one; it begins in savagery and continues on into the highest
civilization; it is today unfinished, and so long as man lives
and thinks must continue unfinished; but it is not without
form, and its continuities become the more obvious with the
extension of our knowledge of men.

It should be added that each of the interests which have
been named shares in or leads to that final interest which is
most appropriate to all, namely, a common concern for human
welfare. The missionary interest is obviously actuated by
this from the very beginning, and, as applied to America, it
has produced (in Las Casas and his many notable successors)
a truly wonderful series of apostolic figures — in themselves
a moving revelation of the possibilities of human nature.
Hardly less striking is the humanitarianism which has accom-
panied the aesthetic interest — one need but mention Mon-
taigne’s sympathetic curiosity, Rousseau, fantastic in his
eighteenth century credulity, Chateaubriand, with his “epic
of the man of nature,” or Fenimore Cooper’s idealization of
the savage chivalrous,—while the curiosity of the anthropolo-
gist and the philosopher, as must all honest curiosity about
things human, leads at the last to understanding and sym-
pathy, and ultimately to an active desire to preserve the mani-
fest good which enlightens every chapter in the narrative of
human progress.

Finally, it is perhaps worth observing that America affords
a field of truly unique profit for all of these interests. The
 INTRODUCTION

ii

long isolation of its inhabitants from the balance of mankind,
the variety of the forms and levels of their native achievement,
the intrinsic value to humanity at large of what they did
achieve, both in material and ideal modes, all unite to give
to the races of the New Hemisphere an almost other-world
distinction from the Old World peoples from whose midst (in
some remote day) they doubtless sprang. It is true that the
resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought
in the two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their diver-
gences; but this fact is in itself of the highest significance in
that it emphasizes that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as
physical, which is of the whole human brotherhood.

It is surely apparent that one book cannot satisfy all the
interests which have been here defined. It is possible, how-
ever, that a description which should show what, in the main,
are the materials to be found and how they are distributed
with reference to accessible sources of study might well con-
tribute to all. Nothing more ambitious than this is in the
plan of the present work.
 
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY
 :,3
 LATIN-AMERICAN

MYTHOLOGY

CHAPTER I
THE ANTILLES

I.   THE ISLANDERS1

A GLANCE at a map of the Western Hemisphere reveals
two great continents, North and South America, some-
what tenuously united by the Isthmus and the Antilles. The
Isthmus is solid, mountainous land, forming a part of that
backbone of the hemisphere which extends along its western
border, continuous from Alaska to the Land of Fire. The An-
tilles are an archipelago, or rather a group of archipelagoes,
extending without gap from the tip of Florida to Trinidad and
the mouths of the Orinoco. Both connexions have a certain
weight, or leaning, toward North America. The Isthmus nar-
rows southward almost to the point of its attachment to
South America, while to the north it broadens out into Central
America, the peninsula of Yucatan, and the plateau of Mexico.
Similarly, the southern division of the archipelago, the Lesser
Antilles, forms an arc of islets, mere stepping-stones, as it were,
from the southern continent to the large islands of the Greater
Antilles — Porto Rico, Hispaniola or Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba —
which are natural outliers of the continent to the north. Cuba,
indeed, almost unites Yucatan and Florida; while breasting
Cuba and Florida, toward the open sea, is a third island
group, the Bahamas, still further emphasizing the northern
predominance.
 i6

[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

There is a superficial resemblance between the connexions
of the northern and southern land bodies in the Old World and
in the New — the Isthmus of Suez having its counterpart in
Panama; the peninsulas and large islands of southern Europe
corresponding to Florida, Yucatan, and the Greater Antilles;
and the break at Gibraltar suggesting the uncertain bridge of
the Lesser Antilles. But the resemblance is merely superficial.
The Mediterranean served far more as a unifier than as a
divider of cultures and civilizations in antiquity; all its shores
were in a sense a single land even before Rome united them
politically. The Caribbean, on the other hand, was a true
obstacle to the primitive intercourse of the western conti-
nents, having its proper Old World analogue in the Sahara
Desert rather than in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, we can
carry this truer analogy a step further, pointing out that just
as Old World culture went southward, from Egypt into Ethio-
pia, by way of the comparatively secure route of the Nile, so
New World civilization found its securest path by way of the
solid land of the Isthmus, while the islets of the Lesser An-
tilles and the isle-like oases of the Sahara were alike unfriendly
to profoundly influential intercourse.

In one striking particular the analogies of the Old World
are reversed in the New: at least in recent periods, the migra-
tion of native races and culture has been from the south to
the north. This is the more extraordinary in view of the land
predominance which, as has been indicated, belongs to the
north. The Isthmus was held by, and is now representative
of, the Chibchan stock, extending far south into Ecuador;
while the Antilles, at the time of the discovery, were almost
entirely possessed by tribes of two great South American
stocks, Arawakan and Carib. In Cuba, and probably in the
Bahamas, there were remnants of more ancient peoples —
timid and crude folk, whose kindred seem to have been the
makers of the shell-mounds of Florida, and whose provenience
was doubtless the northern continent; but neither the race
 THE ANTILLES

17

nor the affinities of these vanished peoples is certainly known;
even in pre-Columbian times they were succumbing to the
war-like Calusa of southern Florida and to the still more dan-
gerous Arawakan tribes from the south.

Of the two powerful races from the south, the first com-
ers were doubtless the Ta'ino2 (as the Antillean Arawak are
named), whom the Spaniards found in possession of most of
Cuba and of the other greater islands, Porto Rico alone show-
ing a strong Carib element along with the Arawak. The
Lesser Antilles, bordering the sea which was named for their
race, was inhabited by Carib tribes, whose language com-
prised a man-tongue and a woman-tongue, the latter contain-
ing many Arawak words — a fact which has led to the in-
teresting (though uncertain) inference that the first Carib
invaders slew all the warriors of their Arawak predecessors,
taking the women for their own wives. Only when they came
to Porto Rico, the first of the Greater Antilles in their route,
were they partially stopped by the mass and strength of the
more highly developed Taino peoples; some, indeed, obtained
a foothold here, while beyond, in Hispaniola, one of the five
caciques3 dividing the power of the island was reputed a
Carib, and in Cuba itself have been found bones believed to
be those of Carib marauders. The typical culture of the An-
tilles, that of the Arawakan Ta'ino, was scarcely less aggres-
sive than the Carib. Arawaks gained a foothold in Florida,
and their influence, in trade at least, seems to have extended
far into Muskhogean territories to the north, while it may
have affected Yucatan and Honduras to the west. Nor was it
meanly savage in type. The Antilles furnish every incentive
of climate, food supply, rich resources, and easy communica-
tion for development of civilization; and at the time of the
discovery of the Taino peoples, they were already advanced in
the arts of agriculture, pottery-making, weaving, and stone-
working, combined with some knowledge of metals. Further-
more, they had developed their social organization to such an
 i8

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

extent that their chiefs, or caciques, with power in some cases
hereditary, were the heads of veritable nations — all of Ja-
maica was under one ruler, Hispaniola had five, while the
Ciboney of Cuba and the Borinqueno of Porto Rico were
powerful peoples. The Spanish'conquerors of the islands suc-
ceeded early in virtually annihilating these nations, but their
handiwork and the traditions which they have left still com-
mand respect.

II.   THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS4

Even before Columbus’s day the mythical Island of Antilia
was marked on the maps out in the Atlantic west; and when the
archipelago which Columbus first discovered came to be known
as an archipelago, the name, in the plural form Antilles, was
not unnaturally applied to it. Probably, too, it was with
more than the glamour of discovery — enchanting as that
must have been — that Columbus first looked upon the new-
found lands. From time immemorial European imagination
had been haunted by legends of Isles of the Gods, Isles of the
Happy Dead — Fortunate Isles, in some weird sense, lying
far out in the enchanted seas; and it is no marvel if Columbus
should have felt himself the finder of this blessed realm. In
one of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella he wrote: “This
country excels all others as far as the day surpasses the night
in splendour; the natives love their neighbours as themselves;
their conversation is the sweetest imaginable; their faces
always smiling; and so gentle and so affectionate are they that
I swear to your highness there is not a better people in the
world.”

Something of the same idealization, coupled with a happy
ignorance, underlay, no doubt, the statement which Columbus
makes in his letters to Ferdinand’s officials, Gabriel Sanchez
and Luis de Santangel, describing his first voyage: “They
are not acquainted with any kind of worship and are not
 THE ANTILLES ,

19

idolaters, but believe that all power and, indeed, all good
things are in heaven.” Columbus adds that the natives be-
lieved him and his vessels and his crews to be descended from
heaven, and the Indians whom he took with him from his first
landing, to serve as interpreters, cried out to the others,
“Come, come, and see the people from heaven!” This same
simplicity was cruelly exploited by the Spaniards of later date,
for after the mines of Hispaniola were opened, and the native
labour of the island was exhausted, the Bahamas were nearly
emptied of inhabitants by the ruse that the Spaniards would
convey them to the shores where dwelt their departed rela-
tives and friends. Belief in heaven-spirits and belief in living
souls of their dead were surely deep-seated in these first-met
of New World peoples.

The earliest encounters were probably with tribes of the
Ta'fno race, for the Indians taken from San Salvador were
readily understood in the Greater Antilles; and it was with
this race that Columbus had to do on his initial voyage. Yet
even then he was learning of other peoples. He was told that
in the western part of Cuba (“Juana” was the name he gave
to the island) there was a province whose inhabitants were
born with tails — a form of derogation of inferior peoples
familiar in many parts of the world — and the story very
likely designated remnants of the autochthones of the islands.
Again, as he explored eastward, he began to hear of the Carib
cannibals, with whom he became acquainted on later voyages.
“These are the men,” he reports, “who form unions with
certain women who dwell alone in the island of Matenino,
which lies next to Espanola on the side toward India; these
latter employ themselves in no labour suitable to their own
sex, for they use bows and javelins as I have already described
their paramours as doing, and for defensive armour they have
plates of brass, of which metal they possess great abundance.”
Thus we have the beginning of that legend of Amazons 5 in
the New World which not only occupied the fancies of ex-
 20

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

plorers and historiographers for many decades, but eventually,
as the domain of these mythical women was pushed farther
and farther into the beyond, gave its name to the great river
which drains what was then the mysterious heart of the
southern continent. Possibly the source of the tale lay in a
difference of Ta'ino and Carib customs, for among the latter
the women, as the Spaniards speedily discovered, were quick
with bow and spear; possibly it lay in the fact, already noted,
that the Caribs, dispatching the men of a conquered tribe,
formed unions with their women, who spoke a language differ-
ing from that of their conquerors.

Other legends of the Old World, besides that of Amazonian
warriors, gained a footing in the New, mingling, not infre-
quently, with similar native tales. The “Septe Cidade” of
the Island of Antilia had been founded, according to Portu-
guese tradition, by the Archbishop of Oporto and six bishops,
fleeing from the Moors in the eighth century; and it was these
cities, identified by the Spaniards with the seven caves whence
the Aztecs traced their race, that led Cabeza de Vaca onward
in his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola and resulted in the
discovery of the Pueblos in New Mexico. Similarly, Ponce de
Leon partly brought and partly found the story of the Fountain
of Youth,6 or the life-renewing Jordan, in search of which he
went into Florida. The story is narrated in the “Memoir on
Florida” of Hernando d’Escalente Fontaneda, who says that
the Indians of Cuba and the other isles told lies of this mythical
river; but that the story was not merely invented as a gratifica-
tion of the Spaniards’ thirst for marvels is suggested by Fon-
taneda’s further statement that long before his time a great
number of Indians from Cuba had come into Florida in search
of this same wonder — a possible explanation of the Arawakan
colony on the Florida coast.

But it was chiefly with tales of gold that the Spaniards’
ears were pleasured. Columbus, writing to de Santangel,
promised his sovereigns not only spices and dyes and Brazil-
 THE ANTILLES

21

wood from their new realm, fruits and cotton and slaves, but
“gold as much as they need”; and this promise was all too
well founded for the good of either Spaniard or native, since
the spoil of western gold, more than aught else, resulted in the
wars which eventually impoverished Spain; and thirst for
sudden wealth was the chief cause of the early extermination
of the native peoples of the Antilles. Las Casas, bitter and
full of pity, gives us the contrasting pictures. The first is of
the cacique Hatuey,7 fled from Haiti to Cuba to escape the
Spaniards and there assembling his people before a chest of
gold: “Behold,” he said, “the god of the Spaniards! Let us
do to him, if it seem good to you, areitos \solemn dances], that
thus doing we shall please him, and he will command the
Spaniards that they do us no harm.” The other is the image of
the Spanish tyrant, enslaving the Indians in mines “to the
end that he might make gold of the bodies and souls of those
for whom Jesus Christ suffered death.”

III.   ZEMIISM8

The Spanish conquistador, reckless of native life in his eager
quest of gold, and the Spanish preaching friar, often yielding
himself to death for the spread of the Gospel, are the two
types of men most impressively delineated in the pages of the
first decades of Spain’s history in America, illustrating the
complex and conflicting motives which urged the great ad-
venture. As early as the writings of Columbus these two
motives stand out, and the promise of wealth and the promise
of souls to save are alike eloquent in his thought. In order to
convert, one must first understand; and Columbus himself
is our earliest authority on the religion of the men of the In-
dies, showing how his mind was moved to this problem. In
the History of the Life of Columbus, by his son Fernando, the
Admiral is quoted in description of the Indian religion.

“ I could discover,” he says, “ neither idolatry nor any other
 22

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

sect among them, though every one of their kings . . . has a
.house apart from the town, in which there is nothing at all but
some wooden images carved by them, called cemis; nor is
there anything done in those houses but what is for the ser-
vice of those cemis, they repairing to perform certain ceremo-
nies, and pray there, as we do to our churches. In these houses
they have a handsome round table, made like a dish, on which
is some powder which they lay on the head of the cemis with a
certain ceremony; then through a cane that has two branches,
clapped to their nose, they snuff up this powder: the words
they say none of our people understand. This powder puts
them beside themselves, as if they were drunk. They also
give the image a name, and I believe it is their father’s or
grandfather’s, or both; for they have more than one, and some
above ten, all in memory of their forefathers. . . . The peo-
ple and caciques boast among themselves of having the best
cemis. When they go to these, their cemis, they shun the
Christians, and will not let them go into those houses; and if
they suspect they will come, they take away their cemis and
hide them in the woods for fear they should be taken from
them; and what is most ridiculous, they used to steal one an-
other’s cemis. It happened once that the Christians on a
sudden rushed into the house with them, and presently the
cemi cried out, speaking in their language, by which it ap-
peared to be artificially made; for it being hollow they had
applied a trunk to it, which answered to a dark corner of the
house covered with boughs and leaves, where a man was con-
cealed who spoke what the cacique ordered him. The Span-
iards, therefore, reflecting on what it might be, kicked down the
cemi, and found as has been said; and the cacique, seeing they
had discovered his practice, earnestly begged of them not to
speak of it to his subjects, or the other Indians, because he
kept them in obedience by that policy.”

This, the great Admiral quaintly concedes, “has some re-
semblance to idolatry.” In fact, his description points clearly
 THE ANTILLES

23

to well-developed cults: there are temples, with altars, idols,
oracles, and priests, and there is even a shrewd adaptation of
religion to politics — the certain mark of sophistication in
matters of cult. Benzoni, who visited the Indies some fifty
years after their discovery, says of the islanders: “They wor-
shipped, and still worship, various deities, many painted,
others sculptured, some formed of clay, others of wood, or
gold, or silver. . . . And although our priests still daily en-
deavour to destroy these idols, yet the ministers of their faith
keep a great many of them hidden in caves and underground,
sacrificing to them occultly, and asking in what manner they
can possibly expel the Christians from their country.” Idols of
gold and silver have not been preserved to modern times, but
examples in stone and wood and baked clay are in present-
day collections, and one, at least, of the wooden images has a
hollow head, open at the back for the reception of the speak-
ing-tube by which the priest conveyed the wisdom of his
cacique. A peculiar type of Antillean cultus-image, men-
tioned by Peter Martyr, among others, was made of “plaited
cotton, tightly stuffed inside,” though its use seems to have
been rather in connexion with funeral rites (perhaps as apotro-
paic fetishes) than in worship of nature-powers.

The work of archaeologists, especially in the Greater An-
tilles, has brought to light many curious objects certainly
connected with the old Antillean cults. There are idols and
images, ranging in height from near three feet to an inch or
so; and the latter, often perforated, were used, perhaps, as
Peter Martyr describes: “When they are about to go into
battle, they tie small images representing little demons upon
their foreheads.” There are, again, masks and grotesque faces,
sometimes cunningly carved, sometimes crude pictographs.
Most characteristic are the triangular stones with a human
or an animal face on one side; the stone collars or yokes, some
slender and some massive in construction, but all representing
laborious toil; and the “elbow stones” with carved panels —
 24

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

objects of which the true use and meaning is forgotten, though
their connexion with cult is not to be doubted.9 Possibly a
hint of their meaning is to be found in the narrative of Colum-
bus, which, after describing the zemis, goes on to say: “Most
of the caciques have three great stones also, to which they and
their people show a great devotion. The one they say helps
corn and all sorts of grain; the second makes women be de-
livered without pain; and the third procures rain and fair
weather, according as they stand in need of either.”

From the name zemi (variously spelt by the older writers),
applied to the Antillean cult-images, the aboriginal faith of
this region has come to be called zemiism; and it is not diffi-
cult, from the descriptions left us, to reconstruct its general
character. “They believe,” says Peter Martyr, “that the
zemes send rain or sunshine in response to their prayers, ac-
cording to their needs. They believe the zemes to be inter-
mediaries between them and God, whom they represent as
one, eternal, omnipotent, and invisible. Each cacique has his
zemes, which he honours with particular care. Their an-
cestors gave to the supreme and eternal Being two names,
Iocauna and Guamaonocon. But this supreme Being was
himself brought forth by a mother, who has five names, Atta-
beira, Mamona, Guacarapita, Iella, and Guimazoa.” Here we
have the typical American Indian conception of Mother Earth
and Father Sky and a host of intermediary powers, deriving
their potency in some dim way from the two great life-givers.
In the name zemi itself is perhaps an indication of the animistic
foundation of the religion, for by some authorities it is held to
mean “animal” or “animal-being,” while others see in it a
corruption of guami, “ruler” — a source which would ally it
with one of the terms for the Supreme Being as given by Peter
Martyr; for Guamaonocon is interpreted as meaning “Ruler
of the Earth.”

Other appellations of the Sky Father, who “lives in the
sun,” are Jocakuvague, Yocahu, Vague, and Maorocon or
 
 PLATE II

Antillean triangular carved stones, lateral and
top views. In addition to the grotesque masks,
limbs are clearly indicated. For reference to their
probable significance, see pages 23—24 and the note
given in connexion (page 350). After 25 ARBEt
Plates XLVI and XLIX.
 
 

[Prometheus]

 THE ANTILLES

25

Maorocoti; while Fray Ramon Pane gives names for the Earth
Mother closely paralleling Peter Martyr’s list: Atabei (“First-
in-Being”), Iermaoguacar, Apito, and Zuimaco. Guabancex
was a goddess of wind and water, and had two subordinates,
Guatauva, her messenger, and Coatrischie, the tempest-
raiser. Yobanua-Borna was a rain-deity whose shrine was in
a cavern, and who likewise had two subordinates, or ministers.
The Haitians are said to have made pilgrimages to a cave in
which were kept two statues of wood, gods again of rain, or
of sun and rain; and it is likely that the double-figure images
preserved from this region are representations of these or of
some other pair of Antillean twin deities. Baidrama, or Vay-
brama, was also seemingly a twinned divinity, and clearly
was the strength-giver: “They say,” Fray Ramon tells us,
“in time of wars he was burnt, and afterwards being washed
with the juice of yucca, his arms grew out again, his body
spread, and he recovered his eyes”; and the worshippers of
the god bathed themselves in the sap of the yucca when they
desired strength or healing. Other zemis mentioned by Pane
are Opigielguoviran, a dog-like being which plunged into a
morass when the Spaniards came, never to be seen again; and
Faraguvaol, a beam or tree-trunk with the power of wander-
ing at will. Here there seems to be indication of a vegetation-
cult, which is borne out by Pane’s description of the way in
which wooden zemis were made — strikingly analogous to
West African fetish-construction: “Those of wood are made
thus: when any one is travelling he says he sees some tree
that shakes its root; the man, in great fright, stops and asks
who he is; it answers, ‘My name is Buhuitihu [a name for
priest, or medicine-man],10 and he will inform you who I am.’
The man repairing to the said physician, tells him what he
has seen. The wizard, or conjurer, runs immediately to see
the tree the other has told him of, sits down by it and makes
it cogioba [an offering of tobacco] . . . He stands up, gives it
all its titles, as if it were some great lord, and asks of it, ‘Tell
 26

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

me who you are, what you do here, what you will have with me,
and why you send for me? Tell me whether you will have me
cut you, whether you will go along with me, and how you will
have me carry you; and I will build you a house and endow it.’
Immediately that tree, or cemi, becomes an idol, or devil,
answers, telling how he will have him do it. He cuts it into
such a shape as he is directed, builds his house, and endows
it; and makes cogioba for it several times in the year, which
cogioba is to pray to it, to please it, to ask and know of the
said cemi what good or evil is to happen, and to beg wealth
of it.”

In such descriptions we get our picture of zemiism, a reli-
gion rising above the animism which was its obvious source,
becoming predominantly anthropomorphic in its representa-
tions of superhuman beings, yet showing no signs of passing
from crude fetish-worship to that symbolic use of images
which marks the higher forms of idolatry. The ritual was ap-
parently not bloody — offerings of tobacco, the use of purges
and narcotics inducing vision and frenzy, and the dramatic
dances, or areitos, which marked all solemn occasions and the
great seasons of life, such as birth and marriage and death —
these were the important features. Oblatio sacrificiorum per-
tinet ad jus naturale, says Las Casas (quoting St. Thomas
Aquinas) in his description of Haitian rites; and to the law
of man’s nature may surely be ascribed that impulse which
caused the Antillean to make his offerings to Heaven and Earth
and to the powers that dwell therein.

Nor was he forgetful of the potencies within himself. With
his nature-worship was a closely associated ancestor-worship.
When they can no longer see the reflection of a person in the
pupil of the eye, the soul is fled, say the Arawak — fled to
become a %emi. The early writers all dwell upon this belief
in the potency and propinquity of the souls of the departed.
They are shut up by day, but walk abroad by night, says
Fray Ramon; and sometimes they return to their kinsmen in
 THE ANTILLES

2 7

the form of Incubi: “thus it is they know them: they feel their
belly, and if they cannot find their navel, they say they are
dead; for they say the dead have no navel.” The navel is the
symbol of birth and of the attachment of the body to its life;
hence the dead, though they may possess all other bodily
members, lack this; and the Indians have, says Pane, one
name for the soul in the living body and another for the soul of
the departed.

The bones of the dead, especially of caciques and great men,
enclosed sometimes in baskets, sometimes in plaited cotton
images, were regarded as powerful fetishes; and from what is
told us of the funeral ceremonies certain beliefs may be in-
ferred. The statement by Columbus, already quoted, closes
with an account of some such rites: “When these Indians die,
they have several ways of performing their obsequies, but
the manner of burying their caciques is thus: they open and
dry him at the fire, that he may keep whole. Of others they
take only the head, others they bury in a grot or den, and lay
a calabash of water and bread on his head; others they bum
in the house where they die, and when they are at the last
gasp, they suffer them not to die but strangle them; and this
is done to caciques. Others are turned out of the house, and
others put them into a hammock, which is their bed, laying
bread and water by their head, never returning to see them
any more. Some that are dangerously ill are carried to the
cacique, who tells them whether they are to be strangled or
not, and what he says is done. I have taken pains to find out
what it is they believe, and whether they know what becomes
of them after they are dead,” and the answer was that “they
go to a certain vale, which every great cacique supposes to be
in his country, where they affirm they find their parents and
all their predecessors, and that they eat, have women, and
give themselves up to pleasures and pastimes.” This is very
much the belief of all the primitive world, but it has one in-
teresting feature. The strangling of caciques and of those
 28   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

named by caciques clearly indicates that there was a belief
in a different fate for men who die by nature and men who
die with the breath of life not yet exhausted; quite likely it
was some Valhalla reserved for the brave, such as the Norse-
man found who escaped the “straw death,” or the Aztec
warrior whom Tonatiuh snatched up into the mansions of
the Sun.

IV.   TAINO MYTHS11

“I ordered,” says Columbus, “one Friar Ramon, who un-
derstood their language, to set down all their language and
antiquities”; and it is to this Fray Ramon Pane, “a poor
anchorite of the order of St. Jerome,” as he tells us, that
thanks are due for most of what is preserved of Tamo myth-
ology. The myths which he gathered are from the island of
Haiti, or Hispaniola, but it is safe to assume that they repre-
sent cycles of tales shared by all the Tamo peoples. They be-
lieve, says the friar, in an invisible and immortal Being, like
Heaven, and they speak of the mother of this heaven-son,
who was called, among other names, Atabei, “the First-in-
Existence.” “They also know whence they came, the origin
of the sun and moon, how the sea was made, and whither the
dead go.”

The earliest Indians appeared, according to the legend,
from two caverns of a certain mountain of Hispaniola —
“most of the people that first inhabited the island came out of
Cacibagiagua,” while the others emerged from Amaiauva (it
is altogether likely that the two caves represent two races or
tribal stocks). Before the people came forth, a watchman,
Marocael, guarded the entrances by night; but, once delay-
ing his return into the caves until after dawn, the sun trans-
formed him into a stone; while others, going a-fishing, were
also caught by the sun and were changed into trees. As for
the sun and moon, they, too, came from a certain grotto,
called Giovava, to which, says Fray Ramon, the Indians paid
 
 PLATE III

Antillean stone ting, of the ovate type, with
carved panels. Stone rings, or “collars,” form one
of the types of symbolic stones from this region the
significance of which has so profoundly puzzled
archaeologists. Reference to their possible meaning
will be found on page 24 and in the note (page 350)
there referred to. The specimen here figured is in
the Museum of the American Indian, New York.
Joyce (Central American Archaeology, pages 189-91)
interprets the design as a human figure. The disks
on either side of the head are ear-plugs; arms and
hands may be seen supporting them; the pit be-
tween the elbows is the umbilicus; while the legs
are represented by the upper segments of the dec-
orated panels exterior to the disks.
 
 i

1

1

I

I

i

I
 THE ANTILLES

29

great veneration, having it all painted “without any figure,
but with leaves and the like”; and keeping in it two stone
zemis which looked “as if they sweated”; to these they went
when they wanted rain.

The story of the origin of the sea is a little more complex.
In introducing the tale, Fray Ramon says: “I, writing in
haste and not having paper enough, could not place every-
thing rightly. . . . Let us now return to what we should have
said first, that is, their opinion concerning the origin and be-
ginning of the sea.” There was a certain man, Giaia, whose
son, Giaiael (“Giaia’s son”), undertook to kill his father, but
was himself slain by the parent, who put the bones into a
calabash, which he hung in the top of his house. One day he
took the calabash down, and looking into it, an abundance of
fishes, great and small, came forth, since into these the bones
had changed. Later on, while Giaia was absent, there came to
his house four sons, born at a birth from a certain woman,
Itiba Tahuvava, who was cut open that they might be de-
livered — “the first that they cut out was Caracaracol, that is,
‘Mangy.’” These four brothers took the calabash and ate of
the fish, but seeing Giaia returning, in their haste they re-
placed it badly, with the result that “there ran so much water
from it as overflowed all the country, and with it came out
abundance of fish, and hence they believe the sea had its origin.”
Fray Ramon goes on to tell how, the four brothers being hungry,
one of them begged cassaba bread of a certain man, but was
struck by him with tobacco. Thereupon his shoulder swelled
up painfully; and when it was opened, a live female tortoise
issued forth — “so they built their house and bred up the
tortoise.”

“I understood no more of this matter, and what we have
writ signifies but little, ” continues the friar; yet to the modern
reader the tales have all the marks of a primitive cosmogony,
a cosmogony having many analogues in similar tales from
the two Americas. The notion of a cave or caves from which
 3°

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the parents of the human race and of the animal kinds issue
to people the world is ubiquitous in America; so, too, is the
notion of an age of transformations, in which beings were
altered from their first forms. Peter Martyr, who tells the
same stories in resume, as he says, of Pane’s manuscript, adds
a number of interesting details; as that after the metamor-
phosis of Marocael, or Machchael, as Martyr calls him, the
First Race were refused entrance into the caves when the sun
rose “because they sought to sin,” and so were transformed —
a moral element which recalls similar motifs in Pueblo myths.
But perhaps the most striking analogies are with the cosmog-
onies of the Algonquian and Iroquoian stocks. The four
Caracarols (caracol, “shell,” plural cacaracol, is the evident
derivation), one of whom was called “Mangy,” recall the
Stone Giants, and again recall the twins or (as in a Potawatomi
version) quadruplets whose birth causes their mother’s death,
while the tortoise cut from the shoulder (Martyr says it was
a woman by whom the brothers successively became fathers
of sons and daughters) is at least suggestive of the cosmo-
gonic turtle of North American myth. In the flood-legend,
the idea of fishes being formed from bones is remotely paralleled
by the Eskimo conception of the creation of fishes from the
finger-bones of the daughter of Anguta; and Benzoni tells
how, in his day, the Haitians still had a pumpkin as a relic,
“ saying that it had come out of the sea with all the fish in it.”
In the order of his narrative — though not, apparently, in
the order in which he deemed the events ought to lie — Fray
Ramon follows the story of the emergence of the First People
from caves with the adventures of a hero whom he calls Gua-
gugiana, but whom Peter Martyr terms Vagoniona. It is
easy to recognize in this hero an example of the demiurgic
Trickster-Transformer so common in American myth. Like
the Trickster elsewhere, he has a servant or comrade, Gia-
druvava, and the first story that Pane tells is one of which we
would fain have a fuller version, for even the fragmentary
 THE ANTILLES

3i

sketch of it is full of poetic suggestion. Guagugiana, it seems,
was one of the cave-dwellers of the First Race. One day he
sent forth his servant to seek a certain cleansing herb, but,
as Pane has it, “the sun took him by the way, and he became
a bird that sings in the morning, like the nightingale”; to which
Peter Martyr adds that “on every anniversary of his trans-
formation he fills the night air with songs, bewailing his mis-
fortunes and imploring his master to come to his help.”

In this tale, slender as it is, there is an element of unusual
interest, fortified by various other allusions to Antillean be-
liefs. It would appear that the First People, the cave-dwellers,
were of the nature of spirits or souls, and that the Sun was the
true Transformer, whose strength-giving rays gave to each,
as it emerged to light, the form which it was to keep. The dis-
embodied soul (opia) haunts the night, moreover, as if night
were its native season; in the day it is powerless, and men
have no fear of it. Surely it is a beautiful myth which makes of
the night-bird’s song a longing for the free life of the spirit, or
at least an expression of the feeling of kinship with the spirit-
world.

The tale goes on to tell how Guagugiana, lamenting his lost
comrade, resolved to go forth from the cave in which the First
People dwelt. Yet he went not alone, for he called to the
women: “Leave your husbands! Let us go into other coun-
tries, where we shall get jewels enough! Leave your children;
we will come again for them; carry only herbs with you.”
The women, abandoning all save their nursing children (as
Peter Martyr tells), followed Guagugiana to the island of
Matenino, and there he left them; but the children he took
away and abandoned them beside a brook — or perhaps, as
Martyr implies, he brought them back and left them on the
shore of the sea — where, starving, they cried, “Toa, toa,”
which is to say, “Milk, milk!” “And they thus crying and
begging of the earth, saying, ‘toa, toa,’ like one that very
earnestly begs a thing, they were transformed into little crea-
 32

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

tures like dwarfs, and called tona, because of their begging the
earth.” Martyr’s more prosaic version says that they were
transformed into frogs; but both authorities agree that this is
how the men came to be left without wives; and doubtless it
is this myth from which Columbus gained at least a part of
his notion of the Amazon-like women “who dwell alone in the
island of Matenino.”

Other episodes in the career of Guagugiana, which Pane
recounts in a confused way, are his going to sea with a com-
panion whom he tricked into looking for precious shells and
then threw overboard; his finding of a woman of the sea who
taught him a cure for the pox; this woman’s name was Gua-
bonito, and she taught him the use of amulets and of orna-
ments of white stone and of gold. Peter Martyr’s variant
says: “He is supposed to go to meet a beautiful woman, per-
ceived in the depths of the sea, from whom are obtained the
white shells called by the natives cibas, and other shells of a
yellowish colour called guianos, of both of which they make
necklaces; the caciques, in our own time, regard these trinkets
as sacred.” In this there is a striking suggestion of the Pueblo
myths of the White-Shell Woman of the East and of the sea-
dwelling Guardian of the yellow shells of the West; and it is
quite to be inferred that the regard in which the caciques
held these objects was due to a ritual and magical significance
analogous to that which we know in the Pueblos.

V.   THE AREITOS

“The Spaniards,” says Peter Martyr,12 “lived for some
time in Hispaniola without suspecting that the islanders wor-
shipped anything else than the stars, or that they had any
kind of religion, . . . but after mingling with them for some
years . . . many of the Spaniards began to notice among them
divers ceremonies and rites.” These ceremonies are called
areitos, or areytos, by the Spanish writers; and from the early
 THE ANTILLES

33

descriptions it is obvious that they were rites of the typical
American kind, dramatic dances or mysteries performed in
the great crises of national and personal life, or in the changes
and climaxes of that course of the seasons, which is the life of
Nature. As in the case of myths, so in the case of rites, it is
chiefly those of Haiti which are described for us; but there is
little reason to doubt that these are typical of all the Greater
Antilles.

Birth, marriage, death, going to war, curing the sick, ini-
tiation, and puberty rites all seem to have had their appro-
priate ceremonies. Songs played an important part in these
ceremonies; indeed, the word areito is frequently restricted to
funeral chants, or elegies in praise of heroes. But the chief rite
known to us, and, we may feel assured, the chief rite of the
whole Ta'ino culture, was the ceremony in honour of the
Earth Goddess. This ceremony, as celebrated by the Haitians,
is described by both Benzoni and Gomara with some detail.
Gomara’s account is as follows:13

“When the cacique celebrated the festival in honour of his
principal idol, all the people attended the function. They
decorated the idol very elaborately; the priests arranged them-
selves like a choir about the king, and the cacique sat at the
entrance of the temple with a drum at his side. The men came
painted black, red, blue, and other colours or covered with
branches and garlands of flowers, or feathers and shells, wear-
ing shell bracelets and little shells on their arms and rattles
on their feet. The women also came with similar rattles, but
naked, if they were maids, and not painted; if married, wear-
ing only breechcloths. They approached dancing, and sing-
ing to the sound of the shells, and as they approached the
cacique he saluted them with a drum. Having entered the
temple, they vomited, putting a small stick into their throat,
in order to show the idol that they had nothing evil in their
stomach. They seated themselves like tailors and prayed with
a low voice. Then there approached many women bearing
 34

[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

baskets and cakes on their heads and many roses, flowers, and
fragrant herbs. They formed a circle as they prayed and
began to chant something like an old ballad in praise of the
god. All rose to respond at the close of the ballad; they changed
their tone and sang another song in praise of the cacique,
after which they offered the bread to the idol, kneeling. The
priests took the gift, blessed, and divided it; and so the feast
ended, but the recipients of the bread preserved it all the year
and held that house unfortunate and liable to many dangers
which was without it.”

In this rite it is easy to recognize a festival in honour of a
divinity of fertility, probably a corn deity, or perhaps a god-
dess who is the mother of corn spirits. Benzoni says of the
Haitians that “they worshipped two wooden figures as the
gods of abundance, and at some periods of the year many
Indians went on a pilgrimage to them.” These may be the
two zemis of the painted grotto of the Sun and the Moon,
mentioned by Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr, for the latter
says that “they go on pilgrimages to that cavern just as we go
to Rome”; but it is certain that they were associated with
agriculture, since it was to them that prayers were made for
rain and fruitfulness. In an interesting old picture, printe'd
in Picart, the rite of the Earth Goddess is represented, much
as described by Gomara and Benzoni. The goddess herself is
shown with several heads, each that of a different animal,
and near her are two lesser idols of grotesque form. It is possi-
ble that the Earth was conceived as the mother of all life,
animal as well as vegetable, and that her two attendants
represented yucca and maize, the two principal food plants of
the Antilleans. Some authorities regard the chief of the Taino
gods, the son of the great First-in-Being, as a yucca spirit;
and, indeed, the name of the plant appears to enter into such
forms as Iocauna, Jocakuvague, Yocahuguama. Yet it is
little likely that we shall ever have certainty on this point,
for of the poems which, Peter Martyr tells us, the sons of
 
 PLATE IV

Dance, or Areito, of the Haitian Indians in honor
of the Earth Goddess. The ceremony is described
by both Benzoni and Gomara, the latter’s descrip-
tion being quoted in this volume, pages 33-34.
After the drawing in Picart, The Religious Cere-
monies and Customs of the Several Nations of the
known World, London, 1731-37, Plate No. 78.
 
 
 THE ANTILLES   35

chiefs sang to the people on feast days, in the form of sacred
chants, none are preserved to us.

That the Taino had, besides these great public festivals,
rites for the individual also is abundantly witnessed in the
old books. Like all American Indians, they were mystics and
vision-seekers. Benzoni says that when the doctors wished
to cure a man who was ill, he was lulled into unconsciousness
by tobacco smoke, and “on returning to his senses he told a
thousand stories of his having been at the council of the
gods and other high visions”—a description which recalls im
Thurn’s account of his own experiences in the hands of an
Arawak peaiman.14 Something analogous to the individual
totem, or “medicine,” of other Indians was certainly known
to them. “The islanders,” says Peter Martyr, “pay homage
to numerous zemes, each person having his own. Some are
made of wood, because it is amongst the trees and in the dark-
ness of night they have received the message of the gods.
Others, who have heard the voice among the rocks, make their
zemes of stone; while others, who heard their revelation while
they were cultivating their ages—the kind of cereal I have
already mentioned [sweet potato, or yam],—make theirs of
roots.” Martyr goes on to describe trances, induced, he
thinks, by tobacco, in which the chiefs seek prophetic revela-
tions, stammered out in incoherent words. One of the most
interesting of the early stories tells of such a prophecy re-
ceived from Yocahuguama, the yucca spirit. Doubtless the
earliest version of the tale is that of Ramon Pane:15

“That great lord who, they say, is in heaven ... is this
Cazziva [cassava], who kept a sort of abstinence here, which
all of them generally perform; for they shut themselves up six
or seven days, without taking any sustenance but the juice
of herbs, with which they also wash themselves. After this
time they begin to eat something that is nourishing. During
the time they have been without eating, weakness makes
them say they have seen something they earnestly desired,
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

36

for they all perform that abstinence in honour of the cemtes to
know whether they shall obtain victory over their enemies, or
to acquire wealth or any other thing they desire. They say this
cacique affirmed he spoke with Giocauvaghama, who told him
that whosoever survived him would not long enjoy his power,
because they should see a people clad, in their country, who
would rule over and kill them, and they should die for hunger.
They thought at first these should be the cannibals, but after-
wards considering that they only plundered and fled, they
believed it was some other people the cemi spoke of; and now
they believe it is the admiral and those that came with him.”
This is the first of those stories of clothed and bearded strangers
(the beard is added in some versions), coming to overthrow
the gods and kingdoms of the Indians, which were encountered
in various portions of the New World. So much importance was
attached to it, says Gomara, that a song was formed com-
memorating it, sung as an areito in a ceremonial dance.

VI.   CARIB LORE16

Not only Columbus, but other early writers praised the
peacefully happy and amiably virtuous character of the In-
dians of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles; and though
this description may have been in some degree coloured by
their ideal of what dwellers in the Fortunate Isles ought to be,
there is yet little in the old accounts of these Indians to con-
travene their good report. With small question, however, this
same picture served only to intensify the grimness of its com-
panion portrait, for the folk of the Lesser Antilles, the “Carib-
bee Islands” of seamen’s romance, were painted as hard £nd
mirthless savages, murderers and marauders, ferocious in war,
and abhorrent cannibals — altogether such as would be dra-
matically appropriate as the aborigines of islands that were
to become the paradise of pirates.

On his second voyage Columbus encountered men of this
 THE ANTILLES

37

race, finding them treacherous and fierce. Unlike the Taino,
the men wore their hair long and they painted themselves
with strange devices; their beards were plucked out, and
their eyes and eyebrows were stained to give them a terrible
appearance — at least so thought Chanca, who describes
them for us. The women — that is, the true Carib women,
not the captives, of whom they had many — were as savage
fighters as the men; and the Spaniards distinguished them
from the captive Taino women by the leg-bands, fastened
below the knee and above the ankle, which caused the leg-
muscles to swell out — a trait recorded by im Thurn of the
true Carib of Guiana.

There is small question that these people came from the
mouth of the Orinoco in the southern continent just as the an-
cestors of the Taino had doubtless come before them; and
even at the time of the discovery they were invading the
Greater Antilles and had secured a foothold in Porto Rico.
Nevertheless, they had already been in the lesser islands for a
period sufficiently long to differentiate them, in a degree, from
their continental congeners and to develop among them a
distinctly Antillean type of Carib culture, related on the one
hand to the continent they had left, on the other to the islands
they had conquered. Doubtless the fundamental modification
was due not so much to the change of habitat or to the differ-
ence between alluvial and insular life as to the fact — repeated
from Columbus onward — that they spared and married with
the women of the dispossessed tribes and so fell heirs to many
of their arts and ideas.

Of all Carib customs, after their cannibalism (the word
“cannibal” is a variant of “Carib”), the most striking is the
couvade — the Custom whereby the husband and father, at
the birth of a child, takes to his bed, or rather hammock, as
if he were suffering the pangs of labour. For forty days he
remains in retirement, fasting or on meagre diet; and at the
end of this period a feast is held at which the invited guests
 38

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

lacerate the skin of the patient with their nails and wash the
wounds with a solution of red pepper, he bearing his pain
heroically. Even then his trials are not at an end; for six
moons more he must be careful of his food — should he eat
turtle, the child will become deaf, and so of other creatures,
bird and fish, — such being Pere du Tertre’s description of
this rite, still in vogue on the southern continent.

Other Carib festivals are mentioned by Davies. A cere-
mony attended a council of war, the killing of an enemy, and
the return from war; the launching of a canoe, the building of
a house, and the making of a garden; the birth of a child and
the cutting of its hair; adolescence and participation in the
first war-party; the death of parents, husband, or wife. They
had, of course, their doctors or medicine-men — the peatmen
of the continent, apparently called boii by the islanders, a
name which is surely a variant of the Taino buhuitihu and
doubtless was adopted from the latter; especially as Maboya
(“the Great Boye” or “Great Snake”) is a name recorded for
the tutelary power of these boii, or “snakes.” Maboya, or
Mapoia, is the god who sends the hurricane; and here we have
an interesting point of contact with the mythology of the
great isthmus, since Hurakan, the hurricane, is the Mayan
storm-god. Du Tertre says that [there were many Maboyas;
and it may be that the term is the insular equivalent for
“Kenaima,” by which the mainland Carib designate a member
of the class of death-bringing powers.

Good spirits were also recognized. The names Akambou
and Yris are found for the highest of all, and the name Chemin
— doubtless related to zemi — is applied to the sky-god. It
may be that the island Carib possessed a whole pantheon of
celestial deities, or perhaps the name for the Great Spirit
varied from island to island, as similar names vary among the
related tribes of Guiana.

Fragments of the legends of the island Carib are preserved.
Lou quo, the first man, came down from the sky; other men
 THE ANTILLES

39

were born from his body; and after his death he ascended into
the heavens. The sky itself is eternal; the earth, at first soft,
was hardened by the sun’s rays. The First Race of men were
nearly exterminated by a deluge, from which a lucky few
escaped in a canoe. After death the soul of the valiant Carib
ascends to heaven; the stars are Carib souls. All these are
beliefs which we need not ascribe to Old World suggestion,
for they are found far and wide in America; and equally native
must be the Carib notion that each man has three souls — one
in his heart, one in his head, and one in his shoulders — though
it is only the heart-soul that ascends to paradise at death,
while the other two wander abroad as dangerous and evil
powers. The islanders possessed also a legend of their origin
or migration from among the Galibi, their continental rela-
tives, “Galibi” being, apparently, yet another variant of
“Carib.” Their ancestor, Kalinago, they said, wearying of life
among his own people, embarked for the conquest of new lands,
and after a long voyage settled in Santo Domingo with his
kin, where his numerous children, conspiring against him,
gave him poison. His body died, but his soul found an avatar
in a terrible fish, Atraioman; while his slayers, pursued by
his vengeance, scattered afar among all the isles. Wherever
they went, they destroyed the men, but spared the women;
and they placed the heads of their enemies in rocky caves that
they might show,their sons and their sons’ sons these symbols
of the valour of their fathers. According to some tales all
brave Caribs at death enter a paradise where they forever
wage successful war against the Arawak, while cowards are
condemned in the future world to be enslaved to Arawak
masters.

A more agreeable picture of Carib nature is suggested by
their belief in Icheiri — a kind of Lares and Penates — to
whom in each cabin was erected an altar of banana leaves or
of cane, upon which were placed offerings of cassava flour and
of the first fruits of the field, these Icheiri being conceived as
 40

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

kindly and familiar intermediaries between man below and
the distant heaven power above. There were also spirits that
could enter into a man to lead him to inspired vision — “medi-
cine” spirits, or tutelaries. The god Yris seems to have been
of this character, for du Tertre, who received the story from one
of the missionaries in Santo Domingo, relates that Yris en-
tered into a certain woman and transported her far above the
sun, where she saw lands of a marvellous beauty with verdant
mountains from which gushed springs of living water; and the
god promised her that after her death she should come thither
to dwell with him forever. The savage mystic, too, it would
appear, has her visions of a divine spouse, who shall one day
welcome her into the heaven above the heavens.
 CHAPTER II

MEXICO

I. MIDDLE AMERICA

FROM the Rio Grande to the southern continent extends
the great land bridge connecting North and South
America, forming a region which might properly be called
Middle America. This region divides naturally into several
sections. To the north is the body of Mexico, its coastal lands
mounting abruptly on the western side, but rising more grad-
ually on the eastern littoral toward the broad central plateau,
the shape of which — roughly triangular, with its apex in the
lofty mountains of the south — conforms to that of the whole
land north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Next to this is the
low-lying peninsular region of Yucatan, ascending into moun-
tains toward the Pacific, and forming a great broadening of the
southward tapering land. A second bulge is Central America,
lying between the Gulf of Honduras and the Mosquito Gulf,
and terminating in the thin Isthmus forming an arc about the
Bay of Panama.

The physiography of the region is an index to its pre-
Columbian ethnography.1 The northern portion, including
Lower California and, roughly, the mainlands in its latitudes,
was a region of wild tribes, the best of them much inferior in
culture to the Pueblo Indians on the Gila and the upper Rio
Grande, and the lowest as destitute of arts as any in America.
Yuman and Waicurian tribes in Lower California; Seri on the
Island of Tiburon and the neighbouring mainland; Piman
in the north central and western mainlands; Apache in the
desert-like lands south of the Rio Grande; and Tamaulipecan
 42

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

on the east, coasting the Gulf of Mexico — these are the
principal groups of this region, peoples whose ideas and myths
differ little from those of their kindred groups of the arid
South-west of North America. The Piman group, however,
possesses a special interest in that it forms a possible connexion
between the Shoshonean to the north and the Nahuatlan
nations of the Aztec world. Such peoples as the Papago,
Yaqui, Tarahumare, and Tepehuane are the wilder cousins of
the Nahua, while the Tepecano, Huichol, and Cora tribes,
just to the south, distinctly show Aztec acculturation. In
general, the Mexican tribes north of the Tropic of Cancer be-
long, in habit and thought, with the groups of the South-West
of the northern continent; ethnically, Middle America falls
south of the Tropic.

Below this line, extending as far as the Isthmus of Tehuan-
tepec, is the region dominated by the empire of the Aztec,
marked by the civilization which bears their name.2 As a
matter of fact, although at the time of the culmination of
their power this whole region was politically subordinated to
the Aztec (it was not completely conquered by them), it con-
tained several centres of culture, each in degree distinct. To
the north, about the Panuco, were the Huastec, a branch of
the Maya stock; while immediately south of them, and also
on the Gulf Coast, were the Totonac, possibly of Maya kin-
ship. The central highlands, immediately west of these peo-
ples, were occupied by the Otomi, primitive and warlike foes
of the Aztec emperors. On their west, in turn, the Otomi had
a common frontier with Nahuatlan tribes — Huichol, Cora,
and others — forming a transitional group between the wild
tribes of the north and the civilized Nahua. Quite surrounded
by Nahuatlan and Otomian tribes was the Tarascan stock of
Michoacan, a group of peoples whose culture certainly ante-
dates that of the Nahua, of whom, indeed, they may have been
the teachers. Still to the south—their territories nearly conter-
minous with the state of Oaxaca — were the Zapotecan peoples,
 MEXICO

43

chief among them the Zapotec and Mixtec, whose civilization
ranks with those of Nahua and Maya in individual quality,
while in native vitality it has proved stronger than either.

The Zoquean tribes (Mixe, Zoque, and others), back from
the Gulf of Tehuantepec, form a transition to the next great
culture centre, that of the Maya nations. The territories of
this most remarkable of all American civilizations included
the whole of Yucatan, the greater portions of Tabasco, Chiapas,
and Guatemala, and the lands bordering on both sides of the
Gulf of Honduras. Thus the Mayan regions dominate the
strategy of the Americas, since they not only control the junc-
ture of the continents, but, stretching out toward the Greater
Antilles, command the passage between the Gulf of Mexico
and the Caribbean Sea. It is easily conceivable that, had a free
maritime commerce grown up, the Maya might have become,
not merely the Greeks, but the Romans, of the New World.

Central America, occupied by no less than a dozen distinct
linguistic stocks, forms a fourth cultural district. Its peoples
show not only the influences of the Maya and Nahua to the
north (a tribe of the Nahuatlan stock had penetrated as far
south as Lake Nicaragua), but also of the Chibchan civiliza-
tion of the southern continent, dominant in the Isthmus of
Panama, and extending beyond Costa Rica up into Nicaragua.
In addition, there is more than a suggestion of influence from
the Antilles and from the sea-faring Carib. Here, we can truly
say, is the meeting-place of the continents.

The nodes of interest in the culture and history of Middle
America are the Aztec and Maya civilizations, which are
justly regarded as marking the highest attainment of native
Americans.3 Neither Aztec nor Maya could vie with the Peru-
vian peoples in the engineering and political skill which made
the empire of the Incas such a marvel of organization; but in
the general level of the arts, in the intricacy of their science,
and above all in the possession of systems of hieroglyphic
writing and of monumental records the Middle Americans
 44

[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

had touched a level properly comparable with the earliest
civilizations of the Old World, nor can theirs have been vastly
later than Old World culture in origin.

In a number of particulars the civilizations of the Middle
and South American centres show curious parallels. In each
case we are in the presence of an aggressively imperial high-
land (Aztec, Inca) and of a decadent lowland (Maya, Yunca)
culture. In each case the lowland culture is the more advanced
aesthetically and apparently of longer history. Both highland
powers clearly depend upon remote highland predecessors for
their own culture (Aztec harks back to Toltec, Inca to Tia-
huanaco); and in both regions it is a pretty problem for the
archaeologist to determine whether this more remote high-
land civilization is ancestrally akin to the lowland. Again, in
both the apogee of monument building and of the arts seems
to have passed when the Spaniards arrived; indeed, empire
itself was weakening. The Aztec and the Inca tribes (perhaps
the most striking parallel of all) emerged from obscurity about
the same time to proceed on the road to empire, for the tradi-
tional Aztec departure from Aztlan and the Inca departure
from Tampu Tocco alike occurred in the neighbourhood of
1200 a. d. Finally, it was Ahuitzotl,' the predecessor of
Montezuma II, who brought Aztec power to its zenith, and it
was Huayna Capac, the father of Atahualpa, who gave Inca
empire its greatest extent; while both the Aztec empire under
Montezuma, which fell to Cortez in 1519, and the Inca empire
under Atahualpa, conquered by Pizarro in 1524, were in-
ternally weakening at the time. But the crowning misfortune
common to the two empires was the possession of gold, mad-
dening the eyes of the conquistadores.

II.   CONQUISTADORES 4

In 1517 Hernandez de Cordova, sailing from Cuba for the
Bahamas, was driven out of his course by adverse gales;
 MEXICO

45

Yucatan was discovered; and a part of the coast of the Gulf
of Campeche was explored. Battles were fought, and hard-
ships were endured by the discoverers, but the reports of a
higher civilization which they brought back to Cuba, coupled
with specimens' of curious gold-work, induced the governor
of the island to equip a new expedition to continue the ex-
ploration. This venture, of four vessels under the command of
Juan de Grijalva, set out in May, 1518, and following the
course of its predecessor, coasted as far as the province of
Panuco, visiting the Isla de los Sacrificios — near the site of
the future Vera Cruz — and doing profitable trading with
some of the vassals of the Aztec emperor. A caravel which he
dispatched to Cuba with some of his golden profit induced the
governor to undertake a larger military expedition to effect
the conquest of the empire discovered; for now men*began to
realize that a truly imperial realm had been revealed. This
third expedition was placed under the command of Hernando
Cortez; it sailed from Cuba in February, 1519, and landed on
the island of Cozumel, in Maya territory, where the Spaniards
were profoundly impressed at finding the Cross an object of
veneration. The course was resumed, and a battle was fought
near the mouth of the Rio de Tabasco; but Cortez was in
search of richer lands and so moved onward, beyond the lands
of the Maya, until on Good Friday, April 21, 1519, he landed
with all his forces on the site of Vera Cruz. The two years of
the Conquest followed — the tale of which, for fantastic and
romantic adventure, for egregious heroism and veritable
gluttony of bloodshed, has few competitors in human annals:
its climacterics being the seizure of Montezuma in November,
1519; la noche triste, July 1, 1520, when the invaders were
driven from Tenochtitlan; and, finally, the defeat and capture
of Guatemotzin, August 13, 1521.

The reader of the tale cannot but be profoundly moved both
by what the Spaniards found and by what they did. He will
be moved with regret at the wanton destruction of so much
 46   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

that was in its way splendid in Aztec civilization. He will be
moved with revulsion and wonder that such a civilization
could support a religion which, though not without elements
of poetic exaltation, was drugged with obscene and bloody
rites; and he will feel only a shuddering thankfulness that this
faith is of the past. But when he turns to the agents of its
destruction and reads their chronicles, furious with carnage,
he will surely say, with Clavigero, that “the Spaniards can-
not but appear to have been the severest instruments fate
ever made use of to further the ends of Providence,” and amid
conflicting horrors he will be led again into regretful sym-
pathy for the final victims.

An apologist for human nature would say that neither con-
quistador nor papa (as the Spaniards named the Aztec priest)
was quite so despicable as his deeds, that both were moved by
a faith that had redeeming traits. Outwardly, aesthetically,
the whole scene is bizarre and devilish; inwardly, it is not with-
out devotion and heroism. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, adven-
turer not only with Cortez, but with Cordova and Grijalva
before him, one of the sturdiest of the conquerors and destined
to be their foremost chronicler, records for us one unforget-
table incident which presents the whole inwardness and
outwardness of the situation — gorgeous cruelty and simple
humanity — in a single image. It was four days after the army
of Cortez had entered the Mexican capital; and after having
been shown the wonders of the populous markets of Tenoch-
titlan, the visitors were escorted, at their own request, to the
platform top of the great teocalli overlooking Tlatelolco, the
mart of Mexico. From the platform Montezuma proudly
pointed to the quartered city below, and beyond that to the
gleaming lake and the glistening villages on its borders — all
a local index of his imperial domains. “We counted among
us,” says the chronicler,5 “soldiers who had traversed different
parts of the world: Constantinople, Italy, Rome; they said
that they had seen nowhere a place so well aligned, so vast,
 mm

0*441(1

-ilQ jin


 PLATE V

Aztec goddess, probably Coatlicue, the mother
of Huitzilopochtli, an earth goddess (see page 74).
The statue is one of two Aztec monuments (the
other being the “Calendar Stone,” Plate XIV)
discovered under the pavement of the principal
plaza of Mexico City in 1790, and is possibly the
very image which Bernal Diaz mistook for “Huichi-
lobos” (see pages 46-49, and Note 5). The goddess
wears the serpent apron, and carries a death’s head
at the girdle; her own head is formed of two serpent
heads, facing, rising from her shoulders. The im-
portance of Coatlicue in Aztec legend is evidenced
by the story of the embassy sent, to her by Mon-
tezuma I (see page 116). After an engraving in
AnMM, first series, Vol. II.
 
 
 MEXICO

47

ordered with such art, and covered with so many people.”
Cortez turned to Montezuma: “You are a great lord,” he
said. “You have shown us your great cities; show us now
your gods.”

“He invited us into a tower,” continues the chronicler,
“into a part in form like a great hall where were two altars
covered with rich woodwork. Upon the altars were reared
two massive forms, like giants with ponderous bodies. The
first, placed at the right, was, they say, Huichilobos [Huit-
zilopochtli], their god of war. His countenance was very large,
the eyes huge and terrifying; all his body, including the head,
was covered with gems, with gold, with pearls large and small,
adherent by means of a glue made from farinaceous roots.
The body was cinctured with great serpents fabricked of gold
and precious stones; in one hand he held a bow, and in the
other arrows. A second little idol, standing beside the great
divinity like a page, carried for him a short spear and a buckler
rich in gold and gems. From the neck of Huichilobos hung
masks of Indians and hearts in gold or in silver surmounted
by blue stones. Near by were to be seen burners with incense
of copal; three hearts of Indians sacrificed that very day
burned there, continuing with the incense the sacrifice that
had just taken place. The walls and floor of this sanctuary
were so bathed with congealing blood that they exhaled a
horrid odour.

“Turning our gaze to the left, we saw there another great
mass, of the height of Huichilobos. Its face resembled the
snout of a bear, and its shining eyes were made of mirrors
called tezcatl in the language of the country; its body was cov-
ered with rich gems, in like manner with Huichilobos, for
they are called brothers. They adore Tezcatepuca [Tezcatli-
poca] as god of the lower worlds, and attribute to him the
care of the souls of Mexicans. His body was bound about with
little devils having the tails of snakes. About him also upon
the walls there was such a crust of blood and the floor so
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

48

soaked with it that not the butcheries of Castile exhale such
a stench. There was to be seen, moreover, the offering of five
hearts of victims sacrificed that day. At the culminating point
of the temple was a niche of woodwork, richly carved; within
it, a statue representing a being half man, half crocodile, en-
riched with jewels and partly covered by a mantle. They
said that this idol was the god of sowings and of fruits; the
half of his body contained all the grains of the country. I do
not recall the name of this divinity; what I do know is that
here also all was soiled with blood, wall and altar, and that the
stench was such that we did not delay to go forth to take the
air. There we found a drum of immense size; when struck it
gave forth a lugubrious sound, such as an infernal instrument
could not want. It could be heard for two leagues about, and
it was said to be stretched with the skins of gigantic serpents.

“Upon the terrace were to be seen an endless number of
things diabolical in appearance: speaking trumpets, horns,
knives, many hearts of Indians burned as incense to idols;
and all covered with blood in such quantity that I vowed it to
malediction! As moreover, everywhere arose the odours of a
charnel, it moved us strongly to depart from these exhalations
and above all from so repulsive a sight.

“ It was then that our general, by means of our interpreter,
said to Montezuma, smiling: ‘Sire, I cannot understand how
being so great a prince and so wise as you are, that you have
not perceived in your reflections that your idols are not gods,
but evilly named demons. That Your Majesty may recognize
this and all your priests be convinced, grant me the grace of
finding it good that I erect a Cross upon the height of this
tower, and that in the same part of the sanctuary where are
your Huichilobos and Tezcatepuca, we construct a shrine and
elevate the image of Our Lady; and you will see the fear which
she will inspire in these idols, of which you are the dupes.’
Montezuma replied partly in anger, while the priests made
menacing gestures: ‘Sir Malinche, if I had thought that you
 MEXICO

49

could offer blasphemies, such as you have just done, I had
not shown you my deities. Our gods we hold to be good; it is
they who give us health, rains, good harvests, storms, victo-
ries, and all that we desire. We ought to adore them and
make them sacrifices. What I beg of you is that you will say
not a word more that is not in their honour.’ Our general,
having heard and seeing his emotion, thought best not to reply;
so, affecting a gay air, he said: ‘ It is already the hour that we
and Your Majesty must part.’ To which Montezuma an-
swered, true, but as for him, he must pray and make sacrifice
in expiation of the sin he had committed in giving us access
to his temple, which had had for consequence our presenta-
tion to his gods and the want of respect through which we had
rendered ourselves culpable, blaspheming against them.” So
the Spaniards departed, leaving Montezuma to his expiatory
prayers and no doubt bloody sacrifices.

III.   THE AZTEC PANTHEON6

Within the precincts of the temple-pyramid, and not far
from it, was a lesser building which Bernal Diaz describes, a
house of idols, diabolisms, serpents, tools for carving the
bodies of sacrificed victims, and pots and kettles to cook them
for the cannibal repasts of the priests, the entrance being
formed by gaping jaws “such as one pictures at the mouth of
Inferno, showing great teeth for the devouring of poor souls.”
The place was foul with blood and black with smoke, “and for
my part,” says Diaz, “I was accustomed to call it ‘Hell.’”

It is indeed doubtful whether the human imagination has
ever elsewhere conjured up such soul-satisfying devils as are
the gods of the Aztec pantheon. Beside them Old World
demons seem prankishly amiable sprites: the Mediaeval
imagination at best (or worst) gives us but a somewhat de-
ranged barnyard, while even Chinese devils modulate into
pleasantly decorative motifs. But the Aztec gods, in their
 50

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

formal presentments, and seldom less in their material char-
acters, ugly, ghastly, foul, afford unalloyed shudders which
time cannot still nor custom stale. To be sure, the ensemble
frequently shows a vigour of design which suggests decora-
tion (though the decorative spirit is never sensitive, as it
often is in Maya art); but this suggestion is too illusory to
abide: it passes like a mist, and the imagination is gripped by
the raw horror of the Thing. Aztec religious art seems, in fact,
to move in a more primitively realistic atmosphere than that
in which the religious art of other peoples has come to simi-
larly adept expression; it shows little of that tendency —
which Yucatan and Peru in America, as well as the ancient and
Oriental nations, had all attained — to subordinate the idea to
the expressional form, and to soften even the horrible with the
suavity of aesthetic charm. The Aztec gods were as grimly busi-
ness-like in form as the realities of their service were fearful.

In number these divinities were myriad and in relations
chaotic. There were clan and tribal, city and national gods,
not only of the victorious race, but of their confederates and
subjects, for the Aztec followed the custom of pagan con-
querors, holding it safest to honour the deities native to the
land; and several of their greatest divinities were assuredly
inherited from vanquished peoples — Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc
among them — though an odd and somewhat amusing fact is
that a multitude of the godling idols of ravaged cities were
kept in a kind of prison-house in the Aztec capital, where, it
was assumed, they were incapable of assisting their former
worshippers. There were gods of commerce and industries,
headed by Tacatecutli, god of merchant-adventurers, whose
“peaceful penetration” opened paths for the imperial armies;
gods of potters and weavers and mat-makers, of workers in
wood and stone and metal; gods of agriculture, of sowing and
ripening and reaping; gods of fishermen; gods of the elements
— earth, air, fire, and water; gods of mountains and volca-
noes; creator-gods; animal-gods; gods of medicine, of disease
 MEXICO ,   51

and death, and of the underworld; deity patrons of drunken-
ness and of carnal vice, and deity protectors of the flowers
which these strange peoples loved. The whole heterogeneous
world was filled with divinities, reflecting the old fears of
primitive man and the old tumults of history, each god jealous
of his right and gluttonous of blood — a kind of horrid ex-
teriorization of human passion and desire.

However, this motley pantheon is not without certain
principles of order. The regulations of an elaborate social
system, divided by clan and caste and rank and guild, are re-
duplicated in it; for to every phase of Mexican life religious
rites and divine tutelage were attached. Still more significant
as a means of hierarchic classification is the relation of the
divine beings to the divisions of time and space. A cult of the
quarters of space and their tutelaries and of the powers of
sky-realms above and of earth-realms below is almost uni-
versal among American Indian groups showing any advance-
ment in culture; the gods of the quarters, for example, are
bringers of wind and rain, upholders of heaven, animal chiefs;
the gods above are storm-deities and rulers of the orbs and
dominions of light, on the whole beneficent; the powers below,
under the hegemony of the earth goddess, are spirits of vegeta-
tion and lords of death and things noxious. This is the most
primitive stage in which the family of Heaven and Earth
begin to assume form as an hierarchic pantheon. But the
seasons, beginning with the diurnal alternation of the rule of
light and darkness, and proceeding thence to the changing
phases of the moon and the seasonal journeys of the sun, con-
stantly shift the domination of the world from deity to deity
and from group to group. Thus the lords of day are not the
lords of night, nor are the fates of the mounting morn those
of descending eve: the Sun himself changes his disposition
with the hours. Similarly, the Moon’s phases are tempers
rather than forms; and the year, divided among the gods, runs
the cycle of their influences.
 52

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

The Aztec and other pantheons of the civilized Mexicans
evince all of these elements with complications. Both cos-
mography and calendar are more complex than among the
more northerly Americans, and there is a veritable tangle of
space-craft and time-craft, with astrological and necromantic
conceptions, bound up with every human desire and every
natural activity. Certainly the most curious feature of this
lore is the influence of certain numbers — especially four
(and five) and nine; and, again, six (and seven) and thirteen.
These number-groups are primarily related to space-divisions.
Thus four is the number of cardinal points, North, South,
East, and West, to which a fifth point is added if the pou sto,
or point of the observer, is included; by a process of redupli-
cation, of which there are several instances in North America,
the number of earth’s cardinal points became the number of
the sky-tiers above and of the earth-tiers below, so that the
cosmos becomes a nine-storeyed structure, with earth its
middle plane. Sometimes (this is characteristic of the Pueblo
Indians) orientation is with reference to six points — the
four directions and the Above and the Below (the pou sto,
when added, becomes a seventh — a grouping which recalls
to us the seven forms of Platonic locomotion — up, down,
forward, backward, right, left, and axial). With these direc-
tions colours, jewels, herbs, and animals are symbolically
associated, becoming emblems of the ruling powers of the
quarters. The number-groups thus cosmographically formed
react upon time-conceptions, especially where ritual is con-
cerned. Thus the Pueblo Indians celebrate lesser festivals of
five days (a day of preparation and four of ritual), and greater
feasts of nine days (reduplicating the four) the whole, in
some cases at least, being comprised in a longer period of
twenty days. The rites of the year among the Zuni and some
others are divided into two six-month groups, and each month
is dedicated to or associated with one of the six colour-symbols
of the six directions; while the Hopi — a fact of especial in-
 MEXICO

S3

terest — make use of thirteen points on the horizon for the
determination of ceremonial dates.7

[Prometheus]

The cosmic and calendric orientation of the Mexicans is
a complex, with elaborations, of both these number-groups
(i. e. four, five, nine, and six, seven, thirteen). According to
one conception there are nine heavens above and nine hells
beneath. Ometecutli (“Twofold Lord”) and Omeciuatl
(“Twofold Lady”) the male and female powers of generation,
dwell in Omeyocan (“the Place of the Twofold”) at the cul-
mination of the universe; and it is from Omeyocan that the
souls of babes, bringing the lots “assigned to them from the
commencement of the world,” 8 descend to mortal birth;
while in the opposite direction the souls of the dead, after four
years of wandering, having passed the nine-fold stream of the
underworld, go to find their rest in Chicunauhmictlan, the
ninth pit. Nine “Lords of the Night” preside over its nine
hours, and potently over the affairs of men. Mictlantecutli,
the skeleton god of death, is lord of the midnight hour; the
owl is his bird; his consort is Mictlanciuatl; and the place of .
their abode, windowless and lightless, is “huge enough to re-
ceive the whole world.” Over the first hour of night and the
first of morning (there are Lords of the Day, too) presides
Xiuhtecutli, the fire-god, for the hearth of the universe, like
the hearth of the house, is the world’s centre.

But the ninefold conception of the universe is not without
rival. A second notion (of Toltec source, according to Sa-
hagun) speaks of twelve heavens; or of thirteen, reckoning
earth as one. The Toltec, says Sahagun, were the first to
count the days of the year, the nights, and the hours, and to
calculate the movements of the heavens by the movements
of the stars; they affirmed that Ometecutli and Omeciuatl rule
over the twelve heavens and the earth, and are procreators
of all life below. There is some ground for believing that with
this there was associated a belief in twelve corresponding
under-worlds, for Seler 9 plausibly argues that the five-and-
 54

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

twenty divine pairs of Codex Vaticanus B represent twelve
pairs of rulers of hours of the day, twelve of hours of the night,
and one intermediate. However, the arrangement which
Seler finds predominating is that of thirteen Lords of the Day
and nine Lords of the Night — implying a commingling of
the two systems — and this scheme (the day-hour lords fol-
lowing the Aubin Tonalamatl and the Codex Borbonicus, as
Seler interprets them) he reconstructs dial-fashion, as follows:

(Noon)

1.

7. Xochipilli Cinteotl
(Flower-God as Maize-God)

6. Teoyaoimqui

(Warrior’s Death-God)
5. Tlazolteotl

(Goddess of Dirt)

4. Tonatiuh
(the Sun-God)

3. Chalchiuhtlicue   (Day)

(Goddess of Water)

2. Tlaltecutli

(the Earth as Gaping Jaws)
Xiuhtecutli
(God of Fire)

8.   Tlaloc

(God of Rain)

9.   Quetzalcoatl
(as Wind-God)

10.   Tezcatlipoca
(the Great God)

11.   Mictlantecutli
(God of the Dead)

12.   Tlauizcalpantecutli
(the Planet Venus)

13.   Ilamatecutli

(Mother-of the Gods)

IX. Tlaloc   I. Xiuhtecutli

(God of Rain)   (God of Fire)

Vlll. Tepeyollotl   (Night)   U. Itztli

(Heart of the Mountain)   (Stone-Knife God)

VII. Tlazolteotl   HI. Piltzintecutli-Tonatiuh

(Earth Goddess)   (Lord of Princes, the Sun)

VI. Chalchiuhtlicue   IV. Cinteotl

(Goddess of Flowing Water)   (Maize-God)

V. Mictlantecutli
(God of the Underworld)

(Midnight)

But the gods are patrons not only of the celestial worlds
and of the underworlds, hours of the day and of the night;
they are also rulers and tutelaries of the quarters of earth and
heaven, and of the numerous divisions and periods of time
involved in the complicated Mexican calendar. The in-
fluences of the cosmos were conceived to vary not merely
with the seasonal or solar year of 365 days, but also with the
 MEXICO

55

Tonalamatl (a calendric period of 13 x 20, or 260, days); again
with a 584-day period of the phases of Venus; and finally with
the cycles formed by measuring these periods into one an-
other. Here, it is evident, we are in the presence not only of a
scheme capable of utilizing an extensive pantheon, but of one
having divinatory possibilities second to no astrology.

As such it was used by the Mexican priests, and various
codices, or pinturas, preserved from the general destruction of
Aztec manuscripts are nothing but calendric charts to calcu-
late days for feasts and days auspicious or inauspicious for
enterprise. In one of these, the Codex Ferjervary-Mayer, the
first sheet is devoted to a figure in the general form of a cross
pattee combined with an X, or St. Andrew’s cross. This figure,
as explained by Seler,10 affords a graphic illustration of Aztec
ideas. It represents the five regions of the world and their
deities, the good and bad days of the Tonalamatl, the nine
Lords of the Night, and the four trees (in form like tau-
crosses) which rise into the quarters of heaven, perhaps as its
support. In the Middle Place, the pou sto, is the red image of
Xiuhtecutli, the Fire-Deity — “the Mother, the Father of the
Gods, who dwells in the navel of the Earth”) — armed with
spears and spear-thrower, while from the divinity’s body four
streams of blood flow to the four cardinal points, terminating
in symbols appropriate to these points — East, a yellow hand
typifying the sun’s ray; North, the stump of a leg, symbol of
Tezcatlipoca as Mictlantecutli, lord of the underworld; West,
where the sun dies, the vertebrae and ribs of a skeleton;
South, Tezcatlipoca as lord of the air, with featherdown in
his head-gear. The arms of the St. Andrew’s cross terminate
in birds — quetzal, macaw, eagle, parrot — bearing shields
upon which are depicted the four day-signs after which the
years are named (because, in sequence, they fall on the first
day of the year), each year being brought into relation with a
correspondingly symbolized world-quarter; within each arm
of the cross, below the day-sign, is a sign denoting plenty or
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56

famine. But the main part of the design, about the centre, is
occupied with symbols of the quarters of the heavens. In each
section is a T-shaped tree, surmounted by a bird, with tutelary
deities on either side of the trunk. Above, framed in red, the
tree rises from an image of the sun, set on a temple, while a
quetzal bird surmounts it; the gods on either side are (left)
Itztli, the Stone-Knife God, and (right) Tonatiuh, the Sun;
the whole symbolizes the tree which rises into the eastern
heavens. The trapezoid opposite this, coloured blue, symbol
of the west, contains a thorn-tree rising from the body of the
dragon of the eclipse (for the heavens descend to darkness in
this region) and surmounted by a humming-bird, which, ac-
cording to Aztec belief, dies with the dry and revives with the
rainy season; the attendant deities are Chalchiuhtlicue, god-
dess of flowing water, and the earth goddess Tlazolteotl, deity
of dirt and of sin. To the right, framed in yellow, a thorny
tree rises from a dish containing emblems of expiation, while
an eagle surmounts it; the attendants are Tlaloc, the rain-god,
and Tepeyollotl, the Heart of the Mountains, Voice of the
Jaguar — all a token of the northern heavens. Opposite this
is a green trapezoid containing a parrot-surmounted tree ris-
ing from the jaws of the Earth, and having, on one side, Cin-
teotl, the maize-god, and on the other, Mictlantecutli, the
divinity of death. The nine deities, he of the centre and the
four pairs, form the group of los Senores de la Noche (“the
Lords of Night”); while the whole figure symbolizes the
orientation of the world-powers in space and time — years
and Tonalamatls, earth-realms and sky-realms.

The recurrence of cross-forms in this and similar pictures is
striking: the Greek cross, the tau-cross, St. Andrew’s cross.
The Codex Vaticanus B contains a series of symbols of the
trees of the quarters approximating the Roman cross in form,
suggesting the cross-figured tablets of Palenque. In the
analogous series of the Codex Borgia, each tree issues from
the recumbent body of an earth divinity or underworld deity,
 
 PLATE VI

First page of the Codex Ferjervary-Mayer, rep-
resenting the five regions of the world and their
tutelary deities. Seler’s interpretation of this figure
is given, in brief, on pages 55-56 of this book.
 
 
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57

each surmounted by a heaven-bird; and again all are cruci-
form. There is also a tree of the Middle Place in the series,
rising from the body of the Earth Goddess, who is masked
with a death’s head and lies upon the spines of a crocodile—
“the fish from which Earth was made” — surmounted by the
quetzal bird (Pharomacrus mocinno), whose green and flowing
tail-plumage is the symbol of fructifying moisture and re-
sponding fertility — “already has it changed to quetzal
feathers, already all has become green, already the rainy time
is here!” About the stem of the tree are the circles of the
world-encompassing sea, and on either side of it, springing also
from the body of the goddess, are two great ears of maize.
The attendant or tutelar deities in this image are Quetzal-
coatl (“the green Feather-Snake”), god of the winds, and
Macuilxochitl (“the Five Flowers”), the divinity of music
and dancing. Another series of figures in this same Codex
represent the gods of the quarters as caryatid-like upbearers
of the skies — Quetzalcoatl of the east; Huitzilopochtli, the
Aztec war-god, of the south; Tlauizcalpantecutli, Venus as
Evening Star, of the west; Mictlantecutli, the death-god, of
the north. All these, however, are only a few of the many ex-
amples of the multifarious cosmic and calendric arrangements
of the gods of the Aztec pantheon.

IV.   THE GREAT GODS 11 ^

On the cosmic and astral side the regnant powers of the
Aztec pantheon are the Gaping Jaws of Earth; the Sea as a
circumambient Great Serpent; and the Death’s-Head God of
the Underworld; while above are the Sun wearing a collar of
life-giving rays; the Moon represented as marked by a rabbit
(for in Mexican myth the Moon shone as brightly as the Sun
till the latter darkened his rival by casting a rabbit upon his
face); and finally the Great Star, “Lord in the House of
Dawn,” the planet Venus, characteristically shown with a
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58

body streaked red and white, now Morning Star, now Even-
ing Star. The Sun and Venus are far more important than the
Moon, for the reason that their periods (365 and 584 days
respectively), along with the Tonalamatl (260 days), form the
foundation for calendric computations. The regents of the
quarters of space and of the divisions of time are ranged in
numerous and complex groups under - these deities of the
cosmos.

But the divinities who are thus important cosmically are
not in like measure important politically, nor indeed mytho-
logically, since the great gods of the Aztec, like those of other
consciously political peoples, were those that presided over
the activities of statecraft — war and agriculture and political
destiny. In the Aztec capital the central teocalli was the shrine
of Huitzilopochtli, the war-god and national deity of the rul-
ing tribe. The teocalli above the market-place, which Bernal
Diaz describes, was devoted to Coatlicue, the mother of the
war-god, to Tezcatlipoca, the omnipotent divinity of all the
Nahua tribes, and, in a second shrine, to Tlaloc, the rain-god,
whose cult, according to tradition, was older than the coming
of the first Nahua. In a third temple, built in circular rather
than pyramidal form, was the shrine of what was perhaps the
most ancient deity of all, Quetzalcoatl (“the Feather-Snake”),
lord of wind and weather. These — Huitzilopochtli, Tezcat-
lipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and Tlaloc — are the gods that are su-
preme in picturesque emphasis in the Aztec pantheon.

1. Huitzilopochtli 12

The great teocalli of Huitzilopochtli stood in the centre of
Tenochtitlan and was dedicated in the year i486 by Ahuitzotl,
the emperor preceding the last Montezuma, with the sacrifice
of huge numbers of captive warriors — sixty to eighty thou-
sand, if we are to believe the chroniclers. On the platform top
of the pyramidal structure, bearing the fane of the war-god
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59

and also (as in the case of the temple in the market place) a
shrine of Tlaloc, was space, tradition says, for a thousand
warriors, and it was here, in 1520, that Cortez and his com-
panions waged their most picturesque battle, fighting their
way up the temple stairs, clearing the summit of some four
hundred Aztec warriors, burning the fanes, and hurling the
images of the gods to the pavements below. After the Con-
quest the temple was razed, and the Cathedral which still
adorns the City of Mexico was erected on or near a site which
had probably seen more human blood shed for superstition
than has any other in the world.

The name of the war-god, Huitzilopochtli (or Uitzilopochtli),
is curiously innocent in suggestion — “Humming-Bird of the
South” (literally, “Humming-Bird-Left-Side,” for in naming
the directions the Nahua called the south the “left” of the
sun). Humming-bird feathers on his left leg formed part of
the insignia of the divinity; the fire-snake, Xiuhcoatl, was an-
other attribute, and the spear-thrower which he carried was
serpentine in form; among his weapons were arrows tipped
with balls of featherdown; and it was to his glory that gladia-
torial sacrifices were held in which captive warriors, chained
to the sacrificial rock, were armed with down-tipped weapons
and forced to fight to the death with Aztec champions. One
of the most romantic of native tales recounts the capture, by
wile, of the Tlascalan chieftain, Tlahuicol. Such was his renown
that Montezuma offered him citizenship, rather than the usual
death by sacrifice, and even sent him at the head of a mili-
tary expedition in which the Tlascalan won notable victories.
But the chieftain refused all proffers of grace, claiming the
right to die a warrior’s death on the sacrificial stone, and at
last, after three years of captivity, Montezuma conceded to
him the privilege sought — the gladiatorial sacrifice. The
Tlascalan is said to have slain eight Aztec warriors and to
have wounded twenty before he finally succumbed. It may
be remarked in passing that the Tlascalan deity, Camaxtli,
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the Tarascan Curicaveri, the Chichimec Mixcoatl, and the
tribal god of the Tepanec and Otomi, Otontecutli or Xocotl,
were similar to, if not identical with, Huitzilopochtli.

The myth of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, which Sahagun
relates, throws light upon the character of the divinity. His
mother, Coatlicue (“She of the Serpent-Woven Skirt”),
dwelling on Coatepec (“Serpent Mountain”), had a family
consisting of a daughter, Coyolxauhqui (“She whose Face is
Painted with Bells”), and of many sons, known collectively
as the Centzonuitznaua (“the Four Hundred Southerners”).
One day, while doing penance upon the mountain, a ball of
feathers fell upon her, and having placed this in her bosom, it
was observed, shortly afterward, that she was pregnant. Her
sons, the Centzonuitznaua, urged by Coyolxauhqui, planned
to slay their mother to wipe out the disgrace which they con-
ceived to have befallen them; but though Coatlicue was
frightened, the unborn child commanded her to have no fear.
One of the Four Hundred, turning traitor, communicated to
the still unborn Huitzilopochtli the approach of the hostile
brothers, and at the moment of their arrival the god was born
in full panoply, carrying a blue shield and dart, his limbs
painted blue, his head adorned with plumes, and his left leg
decked with humming-bird feathers. Commanding his serv-
ant to light a torch, in shape a serpent, with this Xiuhcoatl
he slew Coyolxauhqui, and destroying her body, he placed her
head upon the summit of Coatepec. Then taking up his arms,
he pursued and slew the Centzonuitznaua, a very few of whom
succeeded in escaping to Uitztlampa (“the Place of Thorns”),
the South.

The myth seemingly identifies Huitzilopochtli as a god of
the southern sun. The hostile sister is the moon; the brothers
are the stars driven from the heavens by the rising sun, whose
blue shield is surely the blue buckler of the daylit sky; and
probably the balls of featherdown tipping his arrows are
cloud-symbols. Sahagun describes a sacramental rite in which
 
 PLATE VII

1.   Colossal stone head representing Coyolxauh-
qui, the Moon goddess, sister of Huitzilopochtli
(see page 60). The head is not a fragment, but
bears figures upon its base, and doubtless represents
Coyolxauhqui as slain by the Fire Snake, Xiuh-
coatl, hurled by Huitzilopochtli, and afterwards be-
headed by him. The original is in the Museo
Nacional, Mexico.

2.   Statue of the god of feasting, Xochipilli,
“Lord of Flowers” (see page 77). The crest is
missing. The original is in the British Museum.

3.   The Fire Snake, Xiuhcoatl, as represented in
stone. The Fire Snake is associated with Huitzi-
lopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, and the fire god, Xiuhte-
cutli; and stands, perhaps, in a kind of opposition
to the “Green Feather Snake,” Quetzalcoatl, the
latter signifying rain and vegetation, the former
drought and want (cf. the hymn to Xipe Totec,
page 77). The original is in the British Museum.
 
 )


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61

an image of the god’s body, made of grain, was eaten by a
group of youths who were for a year the servitors of the deity,
with duties so onerous that the young men sometimes fled
the country, preferring death at the hands of their enemies —
a statement which leads to the suspicion that here was some
ordeal connected with chivalric advancement. Certainly
Huitzilopochtli was a god of warriors, and it is probable that
those devoted to him sought the warrior’s death, which meant
ascent into the skies rather than that descent into murky
Mictlan which was the lot of the ordinary. In this connexion
the name of the divinity and the humming-bird feather in-
signia acquire significance; for again it is Sahagun who relates
that the souls of ascending warriors, after four years, are
‘‘metamorphosed into various kinds of birds of rich plumage
and brilliant colour which go about drawing the sweet from
the flowers of the sky, as do the humming-birds upon earth.”

2. Tezcatlipoca 13

Tezcatlipoca, or “Smoking Mirror,” was so called because
of his most conspicuous emblem, a mirror from which a spiral
of smoke is sometimes represented as ascending, and in which
the god was supposed to see all that takes place on earth, in
heaven, and in hell. Frequently the mirror is shown as re-
placing one of his feet (loss or abnormality of one foot is com-
mon in the Mexican pantheon), explained mythically as
severed when the doors of the underworld closed prematurely
upon it — for Tezcatlipoca in one of his many functions is
deity of the setting sun. In other aspects he is a moon-god,
the moon of the evening skies; again, a divinity of the night;
or sometimes, with blindfold eyes, a god of the underworld
and of the dead; and in the calendric charts he is represented
as regent of the northern heavens, although sometimes (per-
haps identified with Huitzilopochtli) he is ruler of the south.
Probably he is at bottom the incarnation of the changing
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[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

heavens, symbolized by his mirror, now fiery, now murky,
reflecting the encompassed universe. He is the red Tezcatli-
poca and the black — the heaven of day and the heaven of
night. He is the Warrior of the North and the Warrior of the
South, symbolizing the course of the yearly sun, which, in the
latitude of Mexico, culminates with the alternating seasons
to the north and to the south of the zenith. His emblems in-
clude the Fire-Snake, symbol of heavenly fires; and again he
is Iztli-Tezcatlipoca, the Stone-Knife God of the underworld,
of blood-letting penance, and of human sacrifice. Sahagun
says of him that he raised wars, enmities, and discords wherever
he went; nevertheless, he was the ruler of the world, and from
him proceeded all prosperities and enrichments. Frequently
he is represented as a jaguar, which to the Mexicans was the
dragon of the eclipse, a were-beast, and the patron of magicians;
cross-roads were marked by seats for Tezcatlipoca, the god
who traversed all ways; and he was called the Wizard and the
Transformer. In himself he was invisible and impalpable,
penetrating all things; or, if he appeared to men, it was as
a flitting shadow; yet he could assume multifarious mon-
strous forms to tempt and try men, striking them with disease
and death. As Yoalli Ehecatl, the Night Wind, he wandered
about in search of evil-doers, and sinners summoned him in
their confessions. On the other hand, he was “the Youth”
(Telpochtli), and as Omacatl (“Two-Reed”) he was lord of
banquets and festivities.

It is evident that Tezcatlipoca is the Great Transformer,
identified with the heavens and all its breaths, twofold in all
things: day, night; life, death; good, evil. Certainly he seems
to have been held in more awe than any other Mexican god
and well merits the supremacy (not political, but religious)
which tradition assigns to him. The most notable of the
prayers which Sahagun transcribes are filled with poetic
veneration for this deity, and had we only these invocations
as record — not also tales of the fearful human sacrifices —
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63

we should assuredly assign to their Aztec composers a pure
and noble religious sentiment. Perhaps theirs was so, for
men’s actions everywhere seem worse than the creeds which
impel them. Thus, in time of plague the priests prayed:

“0 mighty Lord, under whose wings we seek protection, defence,
and shelter! Thou art invisible, impalpable, as the air and as the
night. I come in humility and in littleness, daring to appear before
Thy Majesty. I come uttering my words like one choking and
stammering; my speech is wandering, like as the way of one who
strayeth from the path and stumbleth. I am possessed of the fear
of exciting thy wrath against me rather than the hope of meriting
thy grace. But, Lord, do with my body as it pleaseth thee, for thou
hast indeed abandoned us according to thy counsels taken in heaven
and in hell. Oh, sorrow! thine anger and thine indignation are de-
scended upon us in all our days . . .

“O Lord, very kindly! Thou knowest that we mortals are like
unto children which, when punished, weep and sigh, repenting their
faults. It is thus that these men, ruined by thy chastisements, re-
proach themselves grievously. They confess in thy presence; they
atone for their evil deeds, imposing penance upon themselves. Lord,
very good, very compassionate, very noble, very precious! let the
chastisement which thou hast inflicted suffice, and let the ills which
thou hast sent in castigation find their end! ”

Throughout the prayers there are characterizations of the god,
not a few of them echoing a kind of world-weary melancholy
that seems so typical of Aztec supplications. When the new
king is crowned, the priest prays: “Perchance, deeming him-
self worthy of his high employ, he will think to perpetuate
himself long therein. Will not this be for him a dream of
sorrow? Will he find in this dignity received at thy hands an
occasion of pride and presumption, till it hap that he despise
the world, assuming to himself a sumptuous show? Thy
Majesty knoweth well whereto he must come within a few
brief days — for we men are but thy spectacle, thy theatre,
serving for thy laughter and diversion.” And when the king
is dead: “Thou hast given him to taste in this world a few of
thy sweets and suavities, making them to pass before his
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64

eyes like the will-o’-the-wisp, which vanisheth in an instant;
such is the dignity of the post wherein thou didst place him,
and in which he had a few days in thy service, prostrate, in
tears, breathing his devoted prayers unto thy Majesty.”
Again: “Thou art invisible and impalpable, and we believe
that thy gaze doth penetrate the stones and into the hearts
of the trees, seeing clearly all that is concealed therein. So
dost thou see and comprehend what is in our hearts and in
our thoughts; before thee our souls are as a waft of smoke or
as a vapour that riseth from the earth.”

Perhaps the most striking rite in the Aztec year was the
springtime sacrifice to Tezcatlipoca — near Easter, Sahagun
says. In the previous year a youth had been selected from a
group of captives trained for the purpose, physically without
blemish and having all accomplishments possible. He was
trained to sing and to play the flute, to carry flowers and to
smoke with elegance; he was dressed in rich apparel and was
constantly accompanied by eight pages. The king himself
provided for his habiliment, since “he held him already to be
a god.” For nearly a year this youth was entertained and
feasted, honoured by the nobility and venerated by the popu-
lace as the living embodiment of Tezcatlipoca. Twenty days
before the festival his livery was changed, and his long hair
was dressed like that of an Aztec chieftain. Four maidens, deli-
cately reared, were assigned to him as wives, called by the
names of four goddesses — Xochiquetzal (“ Flowering Quetzal-
Plume”), Xilonen (“Young Maize”), Atlatonan (a goddess
of the coast), and Uixtociuatl (goddess of the salt water).
Five days previous to the sacrifice a series of feasts and dances
was begun, continued during each of the following four days
in separate quarters of the city. Then came the final day; the
youth was taken beyond the city; his goddess-wives aban-
doned him; and he was brought to a little road-side temple for
the consummation of the rite. He ascended its four stages,
breaking a flute at each stage, till at the top he was seized,
 ill

I
 PLATE VIII

Figure from the Codex Borgia representing the red
and the black Tezcatlipoca facing one another
across a tlachtli court upon which is shown a sacri-
ficial victim painted with the red and white stripes
of the Morning and Evening Star (Venus). The
red Tezcatlipoca symbolizes day, the black Tez-
catlipoca, night; the ball court is a symbol of the
universe; the Morning and Evening Star might
very naturally be looked upon as a sacrifice to the
heaven god.
 
 
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65

and the priest opening his breast with a single blow, pre-
sented his heart to the sun. Immediately another youth was
chosen for the following year, for the Tezcatlipoca must never
die. It was said, remarks Sahagun, that this youth’s fate
signified that those who possess wealth and march amid
pleasures during life will end their career in grief and poverty;
while Torquemada more grimly comments that “the soul of
the victim went down to the company of his false gods, in hell.”
For the student of to-day, however, the rite is but another
significant symbol of the god who dies and is born again.

In myth Tezcatlipoca plays the leading role as adversary
of Quetzalcoatl, the ruler and god of the Toltec city of Tollan.
In Sahagun’s version of the story, three magicians, Huitzil-
opochtli, Titlacauan (“We are his Slaves,” an epithet of
Tezcatlipoca), and Tlacauepan, the younger brother of the
others, undertook by magic and wile to drive Quetzalcoatl
from the country and to overthrow the Toltec power. The
three deities are obviously tribal gods of Nahuatlan nations,
and Tezcatlipoca, who plays the chief part in the legends, is
clearly the god of first importance at this early period, possi-
bly the principal deity of all the Nahua; he was also the fore-
most divinity of Tezcuco, which, almost to the eve of the
Conquest, was the leading partner in the Aztec confederacy.
As the tale goes, Quetzalcoatl was ailing; Tezcatlipoca ap-
peared in the guise of an old man, a physician, and admin-
istered to the ailing god, not medicine, but a liquor which in-
toxicated him. Texcatlipoca then assumed the form of a
nude Indian of a strange tribe, a seller of green peppers, and
walked before the palace of Uemac, temporal chief of the
Toltec. Here he was seen by the chief’s daughter, who fell ill
of love for him. Uemac ordered the stranger brought before
him and demanded of Toueyo (as the stranger called himself)
why he was not clothed as other men. “It is not the custom
of my country,” Toueyo answered. “You have inspired my
daughter with caprice; you must cure her,” said Uemac. “That
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

is impossible; kill me; I would die, for I do not deserve such
words, seeking as I am only to earn an honest living.” “Never-
theless, you shall cure her,” replied the chief, “it is necessary;
have no fear.” So he caused the marriage of his daughter with
the stranger, who thus became a chieftain among the Toltec.
Winning a victory for his new countrymen, he announced a
feast in Tollan; and when the multitudes were assembled, he
caused them to dance to his singing until they were as men in-
toxicated or demented; they danced into a ravine and were
changed into rocks, they fell from a bridge and became stones
in the waters below. Again, in company with Tlacauepan, he
appeared in the market-place of Tollan and caused the infant
Huitzilopochtli to dance upon his hand. The people, crowd-
ing near, crushed several of their number dead; enraged, they
slew the performers and, on the advice of Tlacauepan, fas-
tened ropes to their bodies to drag them out; but all who
touched the cords fell dead. By this and other magical de-
vices great numbers of the Toltec were slain, and their dominion
was brought to an end.

3. Quetzalcoatl 14

The most famous and picturesque of New World mythic
figures is that of Quetzalcoatl, although primarily his renown
is due less to the undoubted importance of his cult than to
his association with the coming and the beliefs of the white
men. According to native tradition, Quetzalcoatl had been
the wise and good ruler of Tollan in the Golden Age of Ana-
huac, lawgiver, teacher of the arts, and founder of a purified
religion. Driven from his kingdom by the machinations of
evil magicians, he departed over the eastern sea for Tlapallan,
the land of plenty, promising to return and reinstitute his
kindly creed on some future anniversary of the day of his de-
parture. He was described as an old man, bearded, and white,
clad in a long robe; as with other celestial gods, crosses were
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67

associated with his representations and shrines. When Cortez
landed, the Mexicans were expecting the return of Quetzal-
coatl; and, according to Sahagun, the very outlooks who first
beheld the ships of the Spaniards had been posted to watch
for the coming god. The white men (perhaps the image was
aided by their shining armour, their robed priests, their
crosses) were inevitably assumed to be the deity, and among
the gifts sent to them by Montezuma were the turquoise mask,
feather mantle, and other apparel appropriate to the god. It
is certain that the belief materially aided the Spaniards in the
early stages of their advance, and it is small wonder that the
myth which was so helpful to their ambitions should have ap-
pealed to their imaginations. The missionary priests, gaining
some idea of native traditions and finding among them ideas,
emblems, and rites analogous to those of Christendom (the
deluge, the cross, baptism, sacraments, confession), not un-
naturally saw in the figure of the robed and bearded reformer
of religion a Christian teacher, and they were not slow to iden-
tify him with St. Thomas, the Apostle. When an almost
identical story was found throughout Central America, the
Andean region, and, indeed, wide-spread in South America,
the same explanation was adopted, and the wanderings of
the Saint became vast beyond the dreams of Marco Polo or
any other vaunted traveller, while memorials of his miracles
are still displayed in regions as remote from Mexico as the
basin of La Plata. Naturally, too, the interest of the subject
has not waned with time, for whether we view the Quetzal-
coatl myth in relation to its association with European ideas
or with respect to its aboriginal analogues in the two Americas,
it presents a variety of interest scarcely equalled by any other
tale of the New World.

The name of the god is formed of quetzal, designating the
long, green tail-plumes of Pharomacrus mocinno, and coatl
(“serpent”); it means, therefore, “the Green-Feather Snake,”
and immediately puts Quetzalcoatl into the group of celestial
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

powers of which the plumed serpent is a symbol, among the
Hopi and Zuiii to the north as well as among Andean peoples
far to the south. Sahagun says that Quetzalcoatl is a wind-
god, who “sweeps the roads for the rain-gods, that they may
rain.” Quetzal-plumes were a symbol of greening vegetation,
• and it is altogether probable that the Plumed Serpent-God was
originally a deity of rain-clouds, the sky-serpent embodiment
of the rainbow or the lightning. The turquoise snake-mask
or bird-mask, characteristic of the god, is surely an emblem
of the skies, and like other sky-gods he carries a serpent-
shaped spear-thrower. The beard (which other Mexican
deities sometimes wear) is perhaps a symbol of descending
rain, perhaps (as on some Navaho figures) of pollen, or fer-
tilization. Curiously enough, Quetzalcoatl is not commonly
shown as the white god which the tradition would lead us to
expect, but typically with a dark-hued body; it may be that
the dark hue and the robe of legend are both emblems of
rain-clouds.

The tradition of his whiteness may come from his stellar
associations, for though he is sometimes shown with emblems
of moon or sun, he is more particularly identified with the
morning star. According to the Annals of Quauhtitlan, Quet-
zalcoatl, when driven from Tollan, immolated himself on the
shores of the eastern sea, and from his ashes rose birds with
shining feathers (symbols of warrior souls mounting to the
sun), while his heart became the Morning Star, wandering
for eight days in the underworld before it ascended in splendour.
In numerous legends Quetzalcoatl is associated with Tez-
catlipoca, commonly as an antagonist; and if we may believe
one tale, recounted by Mendieta, Tezcatlipoca, defeating
Quetzalcoatl in ball-play (a game directly symbolic of the
movements of the heavenly orbs), cast him out of the land into
the east, where he encountered the sun and was burned. This
story (clearly a variant of the tale of the banishment of Quet-
zalcoatl told in the Annals of Quauhtitlan and by Sahagun) is
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69

interpreted by Seler as a myth of the morning moon, driven
back by night (the dark Tezcatlipoca) to be consumed by the
rising sun. A reverse story represents Tezcatlipoca, the sun,
as stricken down by the club of Quetzalcoatl, transformed
into a jaguar, the man-devouring demon of night, while
Quetzalcoatl becomes sun in his place. Normally Quetzal-
coatl is a god of the eastern heavens, and sometimes he is pic-
tured as the caryatid or upbearer of the sky of that quarter.

Perhaps it is in this character that he was conceived as a
lord of life, a meaning naturally intensified by his association
with the rejuvenating rains and with the wind, which is the
breath of life. A woman who had become pregnant was
praised by the relatives of her husband for her faithfulness in
religious devotions. “It is for these,” they said, “that our
lord Quetzalcoatl, author and creator, has vouchsafed this
grace — even as it was decreed in the sky by that one who is
man and woman under the names Ometecutli and Omeciuatl.”
Moreover the new-born was addressed: “Little son and lord,
person of high value, of great price and esteem! 0 precious
stone, emerald, topaz, rare plume, fruit of lofty generation!
be welcome among us! Thou hast been formed in the highest
places, above the ninth heaven, where the two supreme gods
dwell. The Divine Majesty hath cast thee in his mould, as
one casts a golden bead; thou hast been pierced, like a rich
stone artistically wrought, by thy father and mother, the
great god and the great goddess, assisted by their son, Quet-
zalcoatl.” The deity also figures as a world creator, as in the
Sahagun manuscript in the Academia de la Historia, from
which Seler translates:

“And thus said our fathers, our grandfathers,

They said that he made, created, and formed us
Whose creatures we are, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl;

And he made the heavens, the sun, the earth.”

It is in another character, however, that Quetzalcoatl is
romantically of most interest. His cult was less sanguinary
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

than that of most Aztec divinities, though assuredly not an-
tagonistic to human sacrifice, as some traditions say. He was a
penance-inflicting god, perhaps particularly a deity of priests
and their lore; yet he was also associated with education and
the rearing of the young. He is named as the patron of the
arts, the teacher of metallurgy and of letters, and in tradition
he is the god of the cultured people of yore from whom the
Aztec derived their civilization. A part of the story, as nar-
rated by Sahagun, has been told: how Quetzalcoatl was the
aged and wise priest-king of Tollan, driven thence by the magic
and guile of Tezcatlipoca and his companions. The tale goes
on to tell how Quetzalcoatl, chagrined and ailing, resolved to
depart from his kingdom for his ancient home, Tlapallan. He
burned his houses built of shell and silver, buried his treasure,
changed the cacao-trees into mesquite, and set forth, pre-
ceded by servants in the form of birds of rich plumage. Com-
ing to Quauhtitlan, he demanded a mirror and gazing into it,
he said, “I am old,” wherefore he named the city “the old
Quauhtitlan.” Seating himself at another place and gazing
back upon Tollan, as he wept, his tears pierced the rock, which
also bore thenceforth the marks where his hands had rested.
He encountered certain magicians, who demanded of him, before
they would let him pass, the arts of refining silver, of working
in wood, stone, and feathers, and of painting; and as he crossed
the sierra, all his companions, who were dwarfs and hump-
backs, died of the cold. Many other localities received memo-
rials of his passage: at one place he played a game of ball, at
another shot arrows into a tree so that they formed a cross,
at another caused underworld houses to be built — all clearly
cosmic symbols — and finally coming to the sea, he departed
for Tlapallan on his serpent-raft. In Ixtlilxochitl’s history,
Quetzalcoatl first appeared in the third period of the world,
taught the arts, instituted the worship of the cross — “tree of
nourishment and of life” — and ended the period with his
departure. Tradition names the last king of the Toltec “Topil-
 kf

I
 PLATE IX

Figures from the Codex Borgia, representing cos-
mic tutelaries.

[Prometheus]

The upper figure represents the tree of the
Middle Place rising from the body of the Earth
Goddess, recumbent upon the spines of the croco-
dile from which Earth was made. The tree is
encircled by the world sea and is surmounted by
the Quetzal, whose plumage typifies vegetation;
two ears of maize spring up at its roots. The at-
tendant deities are Quetzalcoatl and Macuilxo-
chitl, both symbols of fertility. In the figure they
are apparently nourishing themselves on the up-
flowing blood, or vital saps, of the body of Earth.
The figure should be compared with the Palenque
Cross and Foliate Cross tablets (Plate XVIII a, b).
See, also, pages 57, 68, 77.

The lower figure represents one of the four cary-
atid-like supporters of the heavens, Huitzilopochtli,
as the Atlas of the southern quarter. See page 57.
 2

//
 
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tzin Quetzalcoatl,” and it may be assumed as not improbable
that stories of the disasters attending the fall of Tollan, under
a king bearing the name of the ancient divinity, represent an
historical element, confused with nature elements, in the
myths of Quetzalcoatl, — such an assumption accounting for
the heroic glamour surrounding the god, who, like King
Arthur, is half kingly mortal, half divinity. In Cholula, '
whither many of the Toltec were said to have fled with the
fall of their empire, was the loftiest pyramid in Mexico, dedi-
cated to Quetzalcoatl and even in the eyes of Aztec conquerors
a seat of venerable sanctities — the emblem of the culture
whose conquest had conquered them.

4. Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue15

The rain-god, Tlaloc, was less important in myth than in
cult. He was a deity of great antiquity, and a mountain, east
of Tezcuco, bearing his name, was said to have had from re-
mote times a statue of the god, carved in white lava. His
especial abode, Tlalocan, supposed to be upon the crests of
hills, was rich in all foods and was the home of the maize-
goddesses; and there, with his dwarf (or child) servants,
Tlaloc possesses four jars from which he pours water down
upon the earth. One water is good and causes maize and other
fruits to flourish; a second brings cobwebs and blight; a third
congeals into frost; a fourth is followed .by dearth of fruit.
These are the waters of the four quarters, and only that of
the east is good. When the dwarfs smash their jars, there is
thunder; and pieces cast below are thunderbolts. The number
of the Tlaloque was regarded as great, so that, indeed, every
mountain had its Tlaloc.

Like Quetzalcoatl, the god was shown with a serpent-mask,
except that Tlaloc’s was formed, not of one, but of two ser-
pents; and from the conventionalization of the serpentine
coils of this mask came the customary representation of the
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

god’s eyes as surrounded by wide, blue circles, and of his lip
as formed by a convoluted band from which are fanglike de-
pendencies. The double-headed serpent — a symbol no less
wide-spread than the plumed serpent — is frequently his
attribute. His association with mountains brought him also
into connexion with volcanoes and fire, and it was he who was
said to have presided over the Rain-Sun, one of the cosmo-
gonic epochs, during which there rained, not water, but fire
and red-hot stones.

The worship of Tlaloc was among the most ghastly in
Mexico. Perhaps for the purpose of keeping up the number of
his rain-dwarfs, children were constantly sacrificed to him.
If we may believe Sahagun, at the feast of the Tlaloque “they
sought out a great number of babes at the breast, which they
purchased of their mothers. They chose by preference those
who had two crowns in their hair and who had been born
under a good sign. They pretended that these would form a
more agreeable sacrifice to the gods, to the end that they might
obtain rain at the opportune time. . . . They killed a great
number of babes each year; and after they had put them to
death, they cooked and ate them. ... If the children wept
and shed tears abundantly, those who beheld it rejoiced and
said that this was a sign of rain very near.” No wonder the
brave friar turns from his narrative to cry out against such
horror. Yet, he says, “the cause of this cruel blindness, of
which the poor children were victims, should not be directly
imputed to the natural inspirations of their parents, who, in-
deed, shed abundant tears and delivered themselves to the
practice with dolour of soul; one should rather see therein the
hateful and barbarous hand of Satan, our eternal enemy, em-
ploying all his malign ruses to urge on to this fatal act.”
Unfortunately, it is to be suspected that the rite was very far-
spread, for in the myths of many of the wild Mexican tribes
and even in those of the Pueblo tribes north of Mexico the
story of the sacrifice of children to the water-gods constantly
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73

recurs — though, perhaps, this was but the far-cast rumour
of the terrible superstition of the south.

The goddess of flowing waters, of springs and rivulets, Chal-
chiuhtlicue, was regarded as sister of the Tlaloque and was
frequently honoured in rites in connexion with them. Like
Tlaloc, she played no minor role in the calendric division of
powers, and she also ruled over one of the “ Suns ” of the cos-
mogonic period. Serpents and maize were associated with
her, and like the similar deities she had both her beneficent and
malevolent moods, being not merely a cleanser, but also a
cause of shipwreck and watery deaths. At the bathing of the
new-born she was addressed: “Merciful Lady Chalchiuhtlicue,
thy servant here present is come into this world, sent by our
father and mother, Ometecutli and Omeciuatl, who reside at
the ninth heaven. We know not what gifts he bringeth; we
know not what hath been assigned to him from before the be-
ginning of the world, nor with what lot he cometh enveloped.
We know not if this lot be good or bad, or to what end he will
be followed by ill fortune. We know not what faults or de-
fects he may inherit from his father and mother. Behold him
between thy hands! Wash him and deliver him from impuri-
ties as thou knowest should be, for he is confided to thy power.
Cleanse him of the contaminations he hath received from his
parents; let the water take away the soil and the stain, and
let him be freed from all taint. May it please thee, O goddess,
that his heart and his life be purified, that he may dwell in
this world in peace and wisdom. May this water take away
all ills, for which this babe is put into thy hands, thou who
art mother and sister of the gods, and who alone art worthy
to possess it and to give it, to wash from him the evils which he
beareth from before the beginning of the world. Deign to do
this that we ask, now that the child is in thy presence.” It
is not difficult to see how this rite should have suggested to
the first missionaries their own Christian sacrament of baptism.
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

V.   THE POWERS OF LIFE16

Universally Earth is the mythic Mother of Gods and Men,
and Giver of Life; nor does the Mexican pantheon offer an
exception to the rule, although its embodiments of the Earth
Mother possess associations which give a character of their
own. Like similar goddesses, the Mexican Earth Mothers
are prophetic and divinatory, and in various forms they appear
in the calendric omen-books. They are goddesses of medicine,
too, probably owing this function primarily to their associa-
tion with the sweat-bath, which, in its primitive form of earth-
lodge and heated stones, is the fundamental instrument of
American Indian therapeutics. It is here, possibly, that
these goddesses get their connexion with the fire-gods, of
whom they are not infrequently consorts, and with whom they
share the butterfly insignia — a symbol of fertility, for the
fire-god, at earth’s centre, was believed to generate the warmth
of life. Serpents also are signs of the earth goddesses, not the
plumed serpents of the skies, but underworld powers, like-
wise associated with generation in Aztec symbolism. A third
animal connected with generation, and hence with these
deities, is the deer — the white, dead Deer of the East de-
noted plenty; the stricken, brown Deer of the North was a
symbol of drought, and related to the fire-gods. The eagle,
also, is sometimes found associated with the goddesses by a
process of indirection, for the eagle is primarily the heavenly
warrior, Tonatiuh, the Sun. Frequently, however, the earth
goddess is a war-goddess; Coatlicue, mother of the war-god
Huitzilopochtli, is an earth deity, wearing the serpent skirt;
and it was a wide-spread belief among the Mexicans that the
Earth was the first victim offered on the sacrificial stone to the
Sun — the first, therefore, to die a warrior’s death. When a
victim was dedicated for sacrifice, therefore, his captor adorned
himself in eagle’s down in honour, at once, of the Sun and of
the goddess who had been the primal offering.
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75

Among the earth goddesses the most famous was Ciuacoatl
(“Snake Woman”), whose voice, roaring through the night,
betokened war. She was also called Tonantzin (“Our Mother”)
and, Sahagun says, “these two circumstances give her a re-
semblance to our mother Eve who was duped by the Ser-
pent.” Other names for the same divinity were Ilamatecutli
(“the Old Goddess”), sometimes represented as the Earth
Toad, Tlatecutli, swallowing a stone knife; Itzpapalotl (“Ob-
sidian Butterfly”), occasionally shown as a deer; Temazcal-
teci (“Grandmother of the Sweat-Bath”); and Teteoinnan,
the Mother of the Gods, who, like several other of the earth
goddesses, was also a lunar deity. In her honour a harvest-
home was celebrated in which her Huastec priests (for she
probably hailed from the eastern coast) bore phallic emblems.

Closely connected with the earth goddesses are their chil-
dren, the vegetation-deities. Of these the maize-spirits are
the most important, maize being the great cereal of the high-
land region, and, indeed, so much the “com” of primitive
America that the latter word has come to mean maize in the
English-speaking parts of the New World. Cinteotl was the
maize-god, and Chicomecoatl (“Seven Snakes”), also known
as Xilonen, was his female counterpart, their symbol being
the young maize-ear. Because of the use of maize as the staff
of life, a crown filled with this grain was the symbol of Tona-
catecutli (“Lord of our Flesh”), creator-god and food-giver.
Pedro de Rios says 17 of him that he was “the first Lord that
the world was said to have had, and who, as it pleased him,
blew and divided the waters from the heaven and from the
earth, which before him were all intermingled; and he it is
who disposed them as they now are, and so they called him
‘Lord of our Bodies’ and ‘Lord of the Overflow’; and he gave
them all things, and therefore he alone was pictured with the
royal crown. He was further called ‘Seven Flowers’ [Chico-
mexochitl], because they said that he divided the principali-
ties of the world. He had no temple of any kind, nor were
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76

offerings brought to him, because they say he desired them
not, as it were to a greater Majesty.” This god was also
identified with the Milky Way.

Of all Mexican vegetation-deities, however, at once the
most important and the most horrible was Xipe Totec (“Our
Lord the Flayed”), represented as clad in a human skin,
stripped from the body of a sacrificed captive. He was the god
of the renewal of vegetation — the fresh skin which Earth
receives with the recurrent green — and his great festival, the
Feast of the Man-Flaying, was held in the spring when the
fresh verdure was appearing. At this time, men, women, and
children captives were sacrificed, their bodies eaten, and the
skins flayed from them to be worn by personators of the god.
That there was a kind of sacrament in this rite is evident from
Sahagun’s statement that the captor did not partake of the
flesh of his own captive, regarding it as part of his own body.
Again, youths clad in skins flayed from sacrificed warriors
were called by the god’s own name, and they waged mimic
warfare with bands pitted against them; if a captive was
made, a mock sacrifice was enacted. The famous sacrificio
gladiatorio was also celebrated in the god’s honour, the victim,
with weak weapons, being pitted against strong warriors
until he succumbed. The magic properties of the skins tom
from victims’ bodies is shown by the fact that persons suffer-
ing from diseases of the skin and eye wore these trophies for
their healing, the period being twenty days. Xipe Totec was
clad in a green garment, but yellow was his predominant
colour; his ornaments were golden, and he was the patron of
gold-workers — a symbolism probably related to the ripening
grain, for with all that is horrible about him Xipe Totec is
at bottom a simple agricultural deity. At his festival were
stately areitos, and songs were chanted, one of which is pre-
served: 18

“Thou night-time drinker, why dost thou delay?

Put on thy disguise — thy golden garment, put it on!
 
 PLATE X

Stone mask of Xipe Totec. The face is repre-
sented as covered by the skin of a sacrificed victim,
flaying being a rite with which this god was honored.
The reverse of the mask bears an image of‘the god
in relief. The original is in the British Museum.
 
 
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77

“My Lord, let thine emerald waters come descending!

Now is the old tree changed to green plumage —

The Fire-Snake is transformed into the Quetzal!

“It may be that I am to die, I, the young maize-plant;

Like an emerald is my heart; gold would I see it be;

I shall be happy when first it is ripe — the war-chief born!

“My Lord, when there is abundance in the maize-fields,

I shall look to thy mountains, verily thy worshipper;

I shall be happy when first it is ripe — the war-chief born!”

Less unattractive is the group of deities of flowers and
dancing, games and feasting — Xochipilli (“Flower Lord”),
Macuilxochitl (“Five Blossoms”), and Ixtlilton (“Little
Black-Face”). Xochipilli is in part a divinity of the young
maize, probably as pollinating, and is sometimes viewed as a
son of Cinteotl. As is natural, he and his brothers are occa-
sionally associated with the pulque-gods, the Centzontotochtin,
of whom there were a great number — among them Patecatl,
lord and discoverer of the ocpatli (the peyote) from which
liquor is made, Texcatzoncatl (“Straw Mirror”), Colhuatzin-
catl (“the Winged”), and Ometochtli (“Two Rabbit”) —
deities who were supposed to possess their worshippers and
to be the real agents of the drunken man’s mischief. The more
especial associate of the flower-gods, however, is Xochiquetzal
(“Flower Feather”), who is said to have been originally the
spouse of Tlaloc, but to have been carried away by Tezcatli-
poca and to have been established by him as the goddess of
love. Her throne is described as being above the ninth heaven,
and there is reason to think that in this role she is identical
with Tonacaciuatl, the consort of the creator-god, Tonacate-
cutli.19 Her home was in Xochitlicacan (“Place of Flowers”) in
Itzeecayan (“Place of Cool Winds”), or in Tamoanchan, the
Paradise of the West — the region whence came the Ciuateteo,
the ghostly women who at certain seasons swooped down in
eagles’ form, striking children with epilepsy and inspiring
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78

men with lust. Xochiquetzal was, indeed, the patroness of
the unmarried women who lived with the young bachelor
warriors and marched to war with them, and who sometimes,
at the goddess’s festival, immolated themselves upon her
altars. In a more pleasing aspect she was the deity of weaving
and spinning and of making all beautiful and artistic fabrics,
and she is portrayed in bright and many-coloured raiment,
not forgetting the butterfly at her lips, emblem of life and of
the seeker after sweets. In a hymn 20 she is named along with
her lover, Piltzintecutli (“Lord of Princes”), who is presumed
to be the same as Xochipilli:

“Out of the land of water and mist, I come, Xochiquetzal —

Out of the land where the Sun enters his house, out of Tamoanchan-

“Weepeth the pious Piltzintecutli;

He seeketh Xochiquetzal.

Dark it is whither I must go.”

Seler suggests that this lamentation is perchance the expres-
sion of a Proserpina myth — of the carrying off into the un-
derworld of the bright goddess of flowers and of the quest for
her by her disconsolate lover.

Of far darker hue is the goddess whom Sahagun 21 calls
“another Venus,” Tlazolteotl (“Goddess of Uncleanliness”),
the deity in particular of lust and sexual sin. To her priests
confession was made of carnal sins and drunkenness, and by
them penance was inflicted, including as a feature piercing
the tongue with a maguey thorn and the insertion therein of
straws and osier twigs. Sahagun remarks that the Indians
awaited old age before confessing carnal sins, “a thing easy
to comprehend, since, although they had committed their
faults during youth, they would not confess before an ad-
vanced age in order not to find themselves obliged to cease
from disorderly conduct before age came upon them; this, be-
cause of their belief that one who fell into a sin already once
confessed could receive no absolution. From all of which,”
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79

he continues, “it is natural to reach the conclusion that the
Indians of New Spain believed themselves obliged to confess
once in their lifetime, and that in lumine naturali, with no
knowledge of the things of the faith.” One of the titles of
Tlazolteotl is “Heart of the Earth,” and since she is represented
in the same attire as the great mother of the gods, it is pre-
sumed that she is a special form of the Earth Mother, Te-
teoinnan, with emphasis upon her character as deity of fer-
tility. Sometimes she is spoken of as Ixcuiname (“the Four-
faced”) and is regarded plurally as a group of four sisters
who, according to Sahagun, represent four ages of woman’s
maturity. In the Annals of Quauhtitlan it is related that the
Ixcuiname came to Tollan from Huasteca. “And in the place
called Where-the-Huaxtec-weep they summoned their cap-
tives, whom they had taken in Huaxteca, and explained to
them what the business was, telling them that, ‘We go now
to Tollan, we want to couple the Earth with you, we want to
hold a feast with you: for till now no battle offerings have
been made with men. We want to make a beginning of it,
and shoot you to death with arrows.’” In Aztec paintings of
the arrow sacrifice the victim is shown suspended from a
ladder-like scaffold, whence the blood from the arrow wounds
drips to earth. This blood was the emblem of the fertilizing
seed, dropped into the womb of the goddess; and it is at least
worthy of remark that the form of the Skidi Pawnee fertility
sacrifice, in honour of the Morning Star, was identical, scaf-
fold and all, with that in vogue in Mexico.

VI.   THE POWERS OF DEATH

Earth, the Great Mother, is a giver of life, but Earth, the
cavernous, is Lord of Death. The Mexicans are second to no
people in the grimness of their representations of this power.
As Tepeyollotl (“Heart of the Mountain”), earth’s cavern,
it is the spotted jaguar monster which leaps up out of the
 8o

[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

west to seize the declining sun, and its roars may be heard
in the echoing hills. As Tlaltecutli (“Lord of the Earth”)
it is the hideous Toad with Gaping Jaws, which must be
nourished with the blood of sacrificed men, precisely as the
Sun above must be nurtured; for the Mexican idea of warfare
seems to have been that it must be waged to keep perpetual
the ascending vapours and the descending flow from the
hearts of sacrificed victims, that Tonatiuh and Tlaltecutli
might gain sustenance in heaven and in earth.22

But the grimmest figure is that of Hades himself, Mictlan-
tecutli, the skeleton God of the Dead — also called, says
Sahagun, Tzontemoc (“He of the Falling Hair”). Sahagun
describes the journey to the abode of this divinity. When a
mortal — man, woman, child, lord, or thrall — died of disease,
his soul descended to Mictlan, and beside the corpse the last
words were spoken:23 “Our son, thou art finished with the
sufferings and fatigues of this life. It hath pleased Our Lord
to take thee hence, for thou hast not eternal life in this world:
our existence is as a ray of the sun. He hath given thee the
grace of knowing us and of associating in our common life.
Now the god Mictlantecutli, otherwise called Acolnauacatl
or Tzontemoc, as also the goddess Mictecaciuatl, hath made
thee to share his abode. We shall all follow thee, for it is our
destiny, and the abode is broad enough to receive the whole
world. Thou wilt be heard of no longer among us. Behold,
thou art gone to the domain of darkness, where there is neither
light nor window. Never shalt thou come hither again, nor
needst thou concern thyself for thy return, for thine absence
is eternal. Thou dost leave thy children poor and orphaned,
not knowing what will be their end nor how they will support
the fatigues of this life. As for us, we shall not delay to go to
join thee there where thou wilt be.” Similar words were spoken
to the relatives: “Hath this death come because some being
wisheth us ill or mocketh us? Nay, it is because Our Lord hath
willed that such be his end.” Then the body was wrapped,
 
 PLATE XI

Green stone image of Mictlantecutli, the skeleton
god of death and of the underworld. The original
is in the Stuttgart Museum.
 
 
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81

mummy-form, and a few drops of water were poured upon the
head: “Lo, the water of which thou hast made use in this
life”; and a vessel of water was presented: “This for thy
journey.” Next, certain papers were laid before the body in
due order: “Lo, with this thou shalt pass the two clashing
mountains.” “With this thou shalt pass the road where the
serpent awaiteth thee.” “With this thou shalt pass the place
of the green lizard.” “Lo, wherewithal thou shalt cross the
eight deserts.” “And the eight hills.” “And behold with
what thou canst traverse the place of the winds that bear ob-
sidian knives.” Thus the perils of the underworld were to be
passed and the soul, arrived before Mictlantecutli, was, after
four years, to fare on until he should arrive at Chiconauapan,
the “Nine-Fold Stream” of the underworld. Across this he
would be borne by the red dog which, sacrificed at his grave,
had been his faithful companion; and thence master and
hound would enter into the eternal house of the dead, Chico-
namictlan, the “Ninth Hell.”

Yet not all who died pursued this journey. To the terres-
trial paradise, Tlalocan, the abode of Tlaloc, rich with every
kind of fruit and abundant with joys, departed those slain by
lightning, the drowned, victims of skin-diseases, and persons
who died of dropsical affections — a heterogeneous lot whose
company is to be ascribed to the various attributes of the rain-
gods. With them should be included victims sacrificed to
these deities, who perhaps themselves became rain-makers
and servants of the Lords of the Rain. More fortunate still
were they who ascended to the mansions of the Sun — those
who fell in war, those who perished on the sacrificial altar or
were sacrificed by burning, and women who died in child-
birth. Those warriors, it was said, whose shields had been
pierced could behold the Sun through the holes; to the
others Tonatiuh was invisible; but all entered into the sky
gardens, whose trees were other than those of this world;
and there, after four years, they were transformed into
 82   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

birds of bright plumage, drawing the honey from the celestial
blossoms.

It was in the eastern heavens that the souls of warriors
found their paradise. Here they met the Sun as he rose in the
morning, striking their bucklers with joyous cries and ac-
companying him on his journey to the meridian, where they
were encountered by the War Women of the western heavens,
the Ciuateteo, or Ciuapipiltin, souls of women who had gone
to war or had died in childbed. These escorted the Sun
down the western sky, bearing him on a gorgeous palanquin,
into Tamoanchan (“the House of the Descent”).24 At the
portals of the underworld they were met by the Lords of
Hell, who conducted the Sun into their abode; for when it ceases
to be day here, the day begins in the realm below. Possibly it
was from this association with the underworld powers that
the Ciuateteo acquired their sinister traits, for they were
sometimes identified with the descending stars, the Tzitzimime,
which follow the Sun’s descent and become embodied as
Demons of the Dark.

But the Sun has yet another comrade on his journey. As
the soul of the dead Aztec is accompanied and guided into the
nether world by his faithful dog, so the Sun has for com-
panion the dog Xolotl. Xolotl is a god who presides over the
game of tlachtli, the Mexican ball-game, analogous to tennis,
in which a rubber ball was bounced back and forth in a court,
not hurled or struck by hand, but by shoulder or thigh. As
with other Indian ball-games, this was regarded as symbolic
of the sun’s course, and Xolotl was said to play the game on a
magic court, which could be nothing else than the heavens.
He was, moreover, deity of twins and other monstrous forms
(for twins were regarded as monstrous), and it was hump-
backs and dwarfs that were sacrificed to the Sun on the occa-
sion of an eclipse, when it was deemed that the solar divinity
had need of them. A myth narrated by Sahagun possibly ex-
plains or reflects this belief. In the beginning of things there
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83

was no sun and no moon; but two of the gods immolated
themselves, and from their ashes rose the orbs of night and
day, although neither sun nor moon as yet had motion. Then
all the gods resolved to sacrifice themselves in order to give
life and motion to the heavenly bodies. Xolotl alone refused:
“Gods, I will not die,” he said; and when the priest of the
sacrifice came, he fled, transforming himself into a twin-
stalked maize plant, such as is called xolotl; discovered, he
escaped again and assumed the form of a maguey called
mexolotl; and evading capture a third time, he entered the
water and became a larva, axolotl — only to be found and
offered up. A second version of the legend, recorded by Men-
dieta, makes Xolotl the sacrificial celebrant who gave death
to the other gods and then to himself that the sun might have
life. In still another tale, recorded also by Mendieta, it is the
dog Xolotl who is sent to the Underworld for bones of the
forefathers, that the first human pair might be created; but
being pursued by Mictlantecutli, Xolotl stumbled, and the
bone that he carried was dropped and broken into fragments,
from which the various kinds of people sprang. Tales such as
these are strongly reminiscent of the coyote stories of the
northern continent, and it is possible that Xolotl himself is
only a special form of Coyote, the trickster and transformer,
especially as Ueuecoyotl (“Old Coyote”), borrowed from
the more primitive Otomi, was a recognized member of the
Aztec pantheon, as a god of feasts and dances, and perhaps
of trickery as well.

Of all the recorded beliefs connected with the dead the
most affecting is the brief account of the limbo of child-souls
reported by the clerical expositor of Codex Vaticanus A.
There was, he says,25 “a third place for souls which passed
from this life, to which went only the souls of children who
died before attaining the use of reason. They feigned the
existence of a tree from which milk distilled, where all chil-
dren who died at such an age were carried; since the Devil,
 84   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

who is so inimical to the honour of God, even in this instance
wished to show his rivalry: for in the same way as our holy
doctors teach the existence of limbo for children who die
without baptism, or without the circumcision of the old law,
or without the sacrifice of the natural man, so he has caused
these poor people to believe that there was such a place for
their children; and he has superadded another error — the
persuading them that these children have to return thence to
repeople the world after the third destruction which they
suppose that it must undergo, for they believe that the world
has already been twice destroyed.” The belief in an infant
paradise, with its Tree of Life whence the souls of babes draw
nourishment, biding the day of their rebirth, is a pleasant
relief from the nightmarelike quality of most Aztec notions —
not less familiarly human than are the pious reflections of the
good friar who records it.
 CHAPTER III
MEXICO

{Continued)

I.   COSMOGONY1

MEXICAN cosmogonies conform to a wide-spread Ameri-
can type. There is first an ancient creator, little im-
portant in cult, who is the remote giver and sustainer of the
life of the universe; and next comes a generation of gods,
magicians and transformers rather than true creators, who
form and transform the beings of times primeval and eventually
bring the world to its present condition. The earlier world-
epochs, or “Suns,” as the Mexicans called them, are commonly
four in number, and each is terminated by the catastrophic
destruction of its Sun and of its peoples, fire and flood over-
whelming creation in successive cataclysms. Not all of this,
in single completeness, is preserved in any one account, but
from the various fragments and abridgements that are extant
the whole may be reasonably reconstructed.

One of the simpler tales (simple at least in its transmitted
form) is of the Tarascan deity, Tucupacha. “They hold him
to be creator of all things,” says Herrera,2 “that he gives life
and death, good and evil fortune, and they call upon him in
their tribulations, gazing toward the sky where they believe
him to be.” This deity first created heaven and earth and hell;
then he formed a man and a woman of clay, but they were
destroyed in bathing; again he made a human pair, using cin-
ders and metals, and from these the world was peopled. But
the god sent a flood, from which he preserved a certain priest,
Texpi, and his wife, with seeds and with animals, floating in an
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

ark-like log. Texpi discovered land by sending out birds, after
the fashion of Noah, and it is quite possible that the legend as
recounted is not altogether native.

More primitive in type and more interesting in form is the
Mixtec cosmogony narrated by Fray Gregorio Garcia, which
begins thus :3 “ In the year and in the day of obscurity and dark-
ness, when there were as yet no days nor years, the world was
a chaos sunk in darkness, while the earth was covered with
water, on which scum and slime floated.” This exordium,
with its effort to describe the void by negation and the be-
ginning of time by the absence of its denominations, is strik-
ingly reminiscent of the creation-narrative in Genesis ii. and
of the similar Babylonian cosmogony; the negative mode, em-
ployed in all three, is essentially true to that stage when human
thought is first struggling to grapple with abstractions, seeking
to define them rather by a process of denudation than by one
of limitation of the field of thought. The Mixtec tale proceeds
with a group of incidents, (i) The Deer-God and the Deer-
Goddess (the deer is an emblem of fecundity) — known also
as the Puma-Snake and the Jaguar-Snake, in which character
they doubtless represent the tawny heaven of the day-sky and
the starry vault of night — magically raised a cliff above the
abyss of waters, on the summit of which they placed an axe,
edge upward, upon which the heavens rested. (2) Here, at
the Place-where-the-Heavens-stood, they lived many cen-
turies, and here they reared their two boys, Wind-of-the-Nine-
Serpents and Wind-of-the-Nine-Caves, who possessed the
power of transforming themselves into eagles and serpents,
and even of passing through solid bodies. The symbolism of
these two boys as typifying the upper and the nether world is
obvious; they can only be one more example of the demiurgic
twins common in American cosmogony. (3) The brothers
inaugurated sacrifice and penance, the cultivation of flowers
and fruits; and with vows and prayers they besought their
ancestral gods to let the light appear, to cause the water to be
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87

separated from the earth, and to permit the dry land to be
freed from its covering. (4) The earth was peopled, but a
flood destroyed this First People, and the world was restored
by the “ Creator of all Things.”

It is probable that this Mixtec Creator-of-All-Things was the
same deity as he who was known to their Zapotec kindred as
Coqui-Xee or Coqui-Cilla (“Lord of the Beginning”), of whom
it was said that “he was the creator of all things and was him-
self uncreated.” Seler is of opinion that Coqui-Xee is a spirit
of “the beginning” in the sense of dawn and the east and the
rising sun, and that since he is also known as Piye-Tao, or
“the Great Wind,” he is none other than the Zapotec Quet-
zalcoatl, who also is an increate creator. Coqui-Xee, however,
is “merely the principle, the essence of the creative deity or of
deity in general without reference to the act of creating the
world and human beings”; for that act is rather to be ascribed
to the primeval pair (equivalent to the Deer-God and Deer-
Goddess of the Mixtec), Cozaana (“Creator, the Maker of all
Beasts”) and Huichaana (“Creator, the Maker of Men and
Fishes”).

The ideas of the Nahuatlan tribes were similar. Of the
Chichimec Sahagun4 says that “they had only a single god,
Mixcoatl, whose image they possessed; but they believed in
another invisible god, not represented by any image, called
Yoalli Ehecatl, that is to say, God invisible, impalpable,
beneficent, protector, omnipotent, by whose strength alone
the whole world lives, and who, by his sole knowledge, rules
voluntarily all things.” Mixcoatl (“Cloud-Snake”), the tribal
god of the Chichimec and Otomi, is certainly an analogue
of Quetzalcoatl or of Huitzilopochtli, like them figuring as
demiurge; and Yoalli Ehecatl (“Wind and Night,” or “Night-
Wind”) is an epithet applied to Tezcatlipoca, who also is
addressed as “Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

All of these gods are of the sky and atmosphere, and all of
them appear as creative powers, though mainly in the demiurgic
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

role. Back of and above them is the ancient Twofold One, the
Male-Female or Male and Female principle of generation,
which not only first created the world, but maintains it fecund.
This being, sometimes called Tloque Nauaque, or “Lord of
the By,” i. e. the Omnipresent, is represented as a divine pair,
known under several names. Sahagun commonly speaks of
them asOmetecutli and Omeciuatl (“Twi-Lord,” “Twi-Lady ”),
and in his account of the Toltec he states that they reign over
the twelve heavens and the earth; the existence of all things
depends upon them, and from them proceeds the “influence
and warmth whereby infants are engendered in the wombs of
their mothers.” Tonacatecutli and Tonacaciutl (“Lord of Our
Flesh,” “Lady of Our Flesh”) is another pair of names, used
with reference to the creation of the human body out of maize
and to its support thereby.5 A third pair of terms, appearing
in Mendieta and in the Annals of Quauhtitlan, is Citlallatonac
and Citlalicue (“Lord” and “Lady of the Starry Zones”).
In the Annals Quetzalcoatl, as high-priest of the Toltec, is said
to have dedicated a cult to “Citlalicue Citlallatonac, Tonaca-
ciuatl Tonacatecutli . . . who is clothed in charcoal, clothed
in blood, who giveth food to the earth; and he cried aloft, to
the Omeyocan, to the heaven lying above the nine that are
bound together.” Nevertheless, these deities — or rather
deity, for Tloque Nauaque seems to be, like the Zuni Awona-
wilona, bisexual in nature — received little recognition in the
formal cult; and it was said that they desired none.

In connexion with these primal creators appear the demiur-
gic transformers, Quetzalcoatl usually playing the important
part. According to Sahagun’s fragmentary accounts, the gods
were gathered from time immemorial in a place called Teotiua-
can. They asked: “Who shall govern and direct the world?
Who will be Sun?” Tecuciztecatl (“Cockle-Shell House”) and
the pox-afflicted Nanauatzin volunteered. They were dressed
in ceremonial garments and fasted for four days; and then the
gods ranged themselves about a sacrificial fire, which the candi-
 
 PLATE XII

Figures representing the heavenly bodies.

The upper figure, from Codex Vaticanus B, rep-
resents the conflict of light and darkness. The
Eagle is either the Morning Star or the Sun; the
Plumed Serpent is the symbol of the Cosmic Waters,
from whose throat the Hare, perhaps the Earth or
Moon, is being snatched by the Eagle. Similar
figures appear in other codices, the Serpent being
in one instance represented as torn by the Eagle’s
talons.

The lower figure, from Codex Borgia, portrays
Sun, Moon, and Morning Star. The Sun-god is
within the rayed disk; he holds a bundle of spears
in one hand, a spear-thrower in the other; a stream
of blood, apparently from a sacrifice offered by the
Morning Star, which has the form of an ocelot,
nourishes the Sun. The Moon appears as a Hare
upon the face of the crescent, which is filled with
water and set upon a background of dark sky.
 2
 I
 MEXICO   89

dates were asked to enter. Tecuciztecatl recoiled from the
intense heat until encouraged by the example of Nanauatzin,
who plunged into it; and because of this Nanauatzin became
the Sun, while Tecuciztecatl assumed second place as Moon.
The gods now ranged themselves to await the appearance of
the Sun, but not knowing where to expect it, and gazing in
various directions, some of them, including Quetzalcoatl,
turned their faces toward the east, where the Sun finally
manifested himself, close-followed by the Moon. Their light
being then equal, was so bright that none might endure it, and
the deities accordingly asked one another, “How can this be?
Is it good that they should shine with equal light?” One of
them ran and threw a rabbit into the face of Tecuciztecatl,
which thenceforth shone as does now the moon; but since the
sun and the moon rested upon the earth, without rising,
the gods saw that they must immolate themselves to give
motion to the orbs of light. Xolotl fled, but was finally caught
and sacrificed; yet even so the orbs did not stir until the wind
blew with such violence as to compel them — first, the sun, and
afterward the moon. Quetzalcoatl, the wind-god, is, of course,
thus the giver of life to sun and moon as he is also, in the prayers
the bearer of the breath of life from the divine pair to the new-
born.

[Prometheus]

A complete version of the same myth is given by Mendieta,6
who credits it to Fray Andres de Olmos, transmitted by word
of mouth from Mexican caciques. Each province had its own
narrative, he says, but they were agreed that in heaven were
a god and goddess, Citlallatonac and Citlalicue, and that the
goddess gave birth to a stone knife (tecpatl), to the amazement
and horror of her other sons which were in heaven. The stone
hurled forth by these outraged sons and falling to Chicomoxtoc
(“Seven Caves”), was shattered, and from its fragments arose
sixteen hundred earth-godlings. These sent Tlotli, the Hawk,
heavenward to demand of their mother the privilege of creating
men to be their servants; and she replied that they should send
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

to Mictlantecutli, Lord of Hell, for a bone or ashes of the dead,
from which a man and woman would be born. Xolotl was
dispatched as messenger, secured the bone, and fled with it;
but being pursued by the Lord of Hell, he stumbled, and the
bone broke. With such fragments as he could secure he
reached the earth, and the bones, placed in a vessel, were sprin-
kled with blood drawn from the bodies of the gods. On the
fourth day a boy emerged from the mixture; on the eighth, a girl;
and these were reared by Xolotl to become parents of mankind.
Men differ in size because the bone broke into unequal frag-
ments; and as human beings multiplied, they were assigned as
servants to the several gods. Now, the Sun had not been
shining for a long time, and the deities assembled at Teotiuacan
to consider the matter. Having built a great fire, they an-
nounced that that one among their devotees who should first
hurl himself into it should have the honour of becoming the
Sun, and when one had courageously entered the flames, they
awaited the sunrise, wagering as to the quarter in which he
would appear; but they guessed wrong, and for this they were
condemned to be sacrificed, as they were soon to learn. When
the Sun appeared, he remained ominously motionless; and al-
though Tlotli was sent to demand that he continue his journey,
he refused, saying that he should remain where he was until
they were all destroyed. Citli (“Hare”) in anger shot the Sun
with an arrow, but the latter hurled it back, piercing the fore-
head of his antagonist. The gods then recognized their inferior-
ity and allowed themselves to be sacrificed, their hearts being
torn out by Xolotl, who slew himself last of all. Before de-
parting, however, each divinity gave to his followers, as a
sacred bundle, his vesture wrapped about a green gem which
was to serve as a heart. Tezcatlipoca was one of the departed
deities, but one day he appeared to a mourning follower whom
he commanded to journey to the House of the Sun beyond the
waters and to bring thence singers and musical instruments
to make a feast for him. This the messenger did, singing as he
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9i

went. The Sun warned his people not to harken to the stranger,
but the music was irresistible, and some of them were lured
to follow him back to earth, where they instituted the musical
rites. Such details as the formation of the ceremonial bundles
and the journey of the song-seeker to the House of the Sun
immediately suggest numerous analogues among the wild
tribes of the north, indicating the primitive and doubtless
ancient character of the myth.

II.   THE FOUR SUNS7

In the developed cosmogonic myths the cycles, or “Suns,”
of the early world are the turns of the drama of creation.
Ixtlilxochitl names four ages, following the creation of the
world and man by a supreme god, “Creator of All Things,
Lord of Heaven and Earth.” Atonatiuh, “the Sun of Waters,”
was the first age terminated by a deluge in which all creatures
perished. Next came Tlalchitonatiuh, “the Sun of Earth”;
this was the age of giants, and it ended with a terrific earth-
quake and the fall of mountains. “The Sun of Air,” Ehca-
tonatiuh, closed with a furious wind, which destroyed edifices,
uprooted trees, and even moved the rocks. It was during this
period that a great number of monkeys appeared “brought by
the wind,” and these were regarded as men changed into ani-
mals. Quetzalcoatl appeared in this third Sun, teaching the way
of virtue and the arts of life; but his doctrines failed to take root,
so he departed toward the east, promising to return another
day. With his departure “the Sun of Air” came to its end, and
Tlatonatiuh, “ the Sun of Fire,” began, so called because it was
expected that the next destruction would be by fire.

Other versions give four Suns as already completed, making
the present into a fifth age of the world. The most detailed
of these cosmogonic myth-records is that given in the Historia
de los Mexicanos for sus pinturas. According to this document
Tonacatecutli and Tonacaciuatl dwelt from the beginning in
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the thirteenth heaven. To them were born, as to an elder
generation, four gods — the ruddy Camaxtli (chief divinity
of the Tlascalans); the black Tezcatlipoca, wizard of the night;
Quetzalcoatl, the wind-god; and the grim Huitzilopochtli, of
whom it was said that he was born without flesh, a skeleton.
For six hundred years these deities lived in idleness; then the
four brethren assembled, creating first the fire (hearth of the uni-
verse) and afterward a half-sun. They formed also Oxomoco
and Cipactonal, the first man and first woman, commanding
that the former should till the ground, and the latter spin and
weave; while to the woman they gave powers of divination
and grains of maize that she might work cures. They also
divided time into days and inaugurated a year of eighteen
twenty-day periods, or three hundred and sixty days. Mictlan-
tecutli and Mictlanciuatl they created to be Lord and Lady of
Hell, and they formed the heavens that are below the thirteenth
storey of the celestial regions, and the waters of the sea, making
in the sea a monster Cipactli, from which they shaped the earth.
The gods of the waters, Tlaloctecutli and his wife Chalchiuh-
tlicue, they created, giving them dominion over the Quarters.
The son of the first pair married a woman formed from a hair
of the goddess Xochiquetzal; and the gods, noticing how little
was the light given forth by the half-sun, resolved to make
another half-sun, whereupon Tezcatlipoca became the sun-
bearer — for what we behold traversing the daily heavens
is not the sun itself, but only its brightness; the true sun is
invisible. The other gods created huge giants, who could uproot
trees by brute force, and whose food was acorns. For thirteen
times fifty-two years, altogether six hundred and seventy-six,
this period lasted — as long as its Sun endured; and it is from
this first Sun that time began to be counted, for during the
six hundred years of the idleness of the gods, while Huitzilo-
pochtli was in his bones, time was not reckoned. This Sun came
to an end when Quetzalcoatl struck down Tezcatlipoca and
became Sun in his place. Tezcatlipoca was metamorphosed
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93

into a jaguar (Ursa Major) which is seen by night in the skies
wheeling down into the waters whither Quetzalcoatl cast him;
and this jaguar devoured the giants of that period. At the
end of six hundred and seventy-six years Quetzalcoatl was
treated by his brothers as he had treated Tezcatlipoca, and his
Sun came to an end with a great wind which carried away most
of the people of that time or transformed them into monkeys.
Then for seven times fifty-two years Tlaloc was Sun; but at
the end of this three hundred and sixty-four years Quetzalcoatl
rained fire from heaven and made Chalchiuhtlicue Sun in place
of her husband, a dignity which she held for three hundred
and twelve years (six times fifty-two); and it was in these days
that maize began to be used. Now two thousand six hundred
and twenty-eight years had passed since the birth of the gods,
and in this year it rained so heavily that the heavens themselves
fell, while the people of that time were transformed into fish.
When the gods saw this, they created four men, with whose aid
Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl again upreared the heavens,
even as they are today; and these two gods becoming lords of
the heavens and of the stars, walked therein. After the deluge
and the restoration of the heavens, Tezcatlipoca discovered
the art of making fire from sticks and of drawing it from the
heart of flint. The first man, Piltzintecutli, and his wife, who
had been made of a hair of Xochiquetzal, did not perish in the
flood, because they were divine. A son was born to them, and
the gods created other people just as they had formerly existed.
But since, except for the fires, all was in darkness, the gods re-
solved to create a new Sun. This was done by Quetzalcoatl,
who cast his own son, by Chalchiuhtlicue, into a great fire,
whence he issued as the Sun of our own time; Tlaloc hurled his
son into the cinders of the fire, and thence rose the Moon, ever
following after the Sun. This Sun, said the gods, should eat
hearts and drink blood, and so they established wars that there
might be sacrifices of captives to nourish the orbs of light.
Most of the other versions of the myth of the epochal Suns
 94

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

similarly date the beginning of sacrifice and penance from the
birth of the present age.

The Annals of Quauhtitlan gives a somewhat different pic-
ture of the course of the epochs. Each epoch begins on the
first day of Tochtli, and the god Quetzalcoatl figures as the
creator. Atonatiuh, the first Sun, ended with a flood and the
transformation of living creatures into fish. Ocelotonatiuh,
“the Jaguar Sun,” was the epoch of giants and of solar eclipse.
Third came “the Sun of Rains,” Quiyauhtonatiuh, ending
with a rain of fire and red-hot rocks; only birds, or those trans-
formed into them, and a human pair who found subterranean
refuge, escaped the conflagration. The fourth, Ecatonatiuh,
is the Sun of destruction by winds; while the fifth is the Sun
of Earthquakes, Famines, Wars, and Confusions, which will
bring our present world to destruction. The author of the
Spiegazione delle tavole del codice mexicano (Codex Vaticanus A)
— not consistent with himself, for in his account of the infants’
limbo he makes ours the third Sun — changes the order some-
what: first, the Sun of Water, which is also the Age of Giants;
second, the Sun of Winds, ending with the transformation
into apes; third, the Sun of Fire; fourth, the Sun of Famine,
terminating with a rain of blood and the fall of Tollan. Four
Suns passed, and a fifth Sun, leading forward to a fifth eventual
destruction, seems, most authorities agree, to represent the
orthodox Mexican myth; though versions like that of Ixtlilxo-
chitl represent only three as past, while others, as Camargo’s
account of the Tlascaltec myth, make the present Sun the third
in a total of four that are to be. Probably one cause of the
confusion with respect to the order of the Suns is the double
association of Quetzalcoatl—first, with the Sun of Winds, which
he, as the Wind-God, would naturally acquire; and second, with
the fall of Tollan and of the Toltec empire, for Quetzalcoatl,
with respect to dynastic succession, is clearly the Toltec Zeus.
The Sun of Winds is normally the second in the series; the fall
of Tollan is generally associated with the end of the Sun last
 n

i
 
 PLATE XIII

Figures from Codex Vaticanus A representing
cataclysms bringing to an end cosmic “Suns,” or
Ages of the World.

The upper figure represents the close of the Sun
of Winds, ending with the transformation of men,
save for an ancestral pair, into apes. The lower
pictures the end of the Sun of Fire, whence only
birds and a human pair in a subterranean retreat
escaped.
 z
 
 MEXICO

95

past: circumstances which may account for the shortened
versions, for it seems little likely (judging from American
analogies) that the notion of four Suns passed is not the most
primitive version.

Another myth confusedly associated now with the Sun of
Waters, now with the Sun last past, is the story of the deluge.
In the pattern conception (if it may so be termed) each Sun be-
gins with the creation or appearance of a First Man and First
Woman and ends with the salvation of a single human pair, all
others being lost or transformed. The first Sun ends with a
deluge and the metamorphosis of the First Men into fish; but
a single pair escaped by being sealed up in a log or ark. In the
Chimalpopoca (Quauhtitlan) version given by Brasseur de
Bourbourg it is related that the waters had been tranquil for
fifty-two years; then, on the first day of the Sun, there came
such a flood as submerged even the mountains, and this en-
dured for fifty-two years. Warned by Tezcatlipoca, however,
a man named Nata, with Nena his wife, hollowed a log and
entered therein; and the god closed the port, saying, “Thou
shalt eat but a single ear of maize, and thy wife but a single
ear also.” When the waters subsided, they issued from their
log, and seeing fish about, they built a fire to roast them.
Citlallatonac and Citlalicue, beholding this from the heavens,
said: “Divine Lord, what is this fire? Wherefore does this
smoke cloud the sky?” Whereupon Tezcatlipoca descended in
anger, crying, “What fire is this?” And he seized the fishes
and transformed them into dogs. Certainly one would relish
an elaboration of this tale; for it would seem that a theft of the
fire must precede — perhaps a suffering Prometheus may have
.followed — the anger of the gods. In another version the
Mexican Noah is named Coxcox, his wife bears the name of
Xochiquetzal; and it is said that their children, born dumb,
received their several forms of speech from the birds. Now
Xochiquetzal is associated (doubtless as a festal goddess) with
Tollan and the age in which she appears is the last of all, that
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

96

in which Tollan is destroyed; whence the deluge is placed at
the end of the fourth Sun.

To the same group of events — the passing of Tollan and
the deluge — belong the stories of the building of the great
pyramid of Cholula and the portents which accompanied it.
It is said 8 that, reared by a chief named Xelua, who escaped
the deluge, it was built so high that it appeared to reach heaven;
and that they who reared it were content, “ since it seemed to
them that they had a place whence to escape from the deluge
if it should happen again, and whence they might ascend into
heaven”; but “a chalcuitl, which is a precious stone, fell thence
[i. e. from the skies] and struck it to the ground; others say
that the chalcuitl was in the shape of a toad; and that whilst
destroying the tower it reprimanded them, inquiring of them
their reason for wishing to ascend into heaven, since it was
sufficient for them to see what was on the earth.” It is worth
while to remember that the hybristic scaling of heaven is no
uncommon motive in American Indian myth, while the moral
of the tale is honestly pagan — “mortal things are the behoof
of mortals,” saith Pindar; nor can we fail to see in the green
jewel the jealous Earth-Titaness, for the toad is Earth’s symbol.

The duration of the cosmic Suns is given various values by
the recorders of the myths. These, no doubt, issued from varia-
tions in calendric computations; for the Mexicans not only
possessed an elaborate calendar; they also used it, in its in-
volved circles of returning signs, as the foundation for calcula-
ting the cycles of cosmic and of human history. It is essential,
therefore, if the genius of Mexican myth be fully grasped, that
the elements of its calendar be made clear.

III.   THE CALENDAR AND ITS CYCLES9

The Mexican calendar is one of the most extraordinary in-
ventions of human intelligence. Elsewhere the science of the
calendar is a lore of sun, moon, and stars, and of their synodic
 MEXICO

97

periods; in the count of time astronomy is mistress, and num-
ber is but the handmaiden. In the Mexican system this rela-
tion is distinctly reversed: it is number that is dominant, and
astronomy that is ancillary. One might, indeed, add that the
number is geometric. It is common enough elsewhere to find
the measures of space influencing the measures of time, but
ordinarily they are the measures of celestial, not of terres-
trial, space; and they are, therefore, moving, and not sta-
tionary, numbers. In the Mexican system the controlling
numerical ideas appear to be the 4 (5) and the 6 (7) of the
world-quarters—these in their duplicate forms, 9(=2 X4 + 1)
and 13 (=2x6 + i) — and all are under the domination of
the four by five digits (two fives of fingers and two of toes) of
their vigesimal system of counting. Man in the Middle Place
of his cosmos; oriented to the rising Sun; four-square with the
Quarters, which are duplicate in the Above and the Below;
counting his natural days by his natural digits: this is the
image which makes most plausible our explanations of the
peculiarly earth-tethered calendar of the Mexicans, and, in
consequence, of a cosmographical rather than an astrological
conception of the Fates and Influences.

Not that the moving heavens were without computation:
astronomy, though secondary, was indispensable.10 The day,
of course, is the creation of the journey of the sun; and the
day, as a time-unit, plays in the Mexican count a part alto-
gether commensurate in importance with that given to the
sun in myth and ritual. The moon, though far less prominent
in every respect, is still conspicuously figured. The morning
star (far and wide a great deity of the American Indian nations)
was second in significance only to the sun; indeed, one of
the most extraordinary achievements of aboriginal American
science was the identification of Phosphorus and Hesperus as
the same star, and the computation of a Venus-period of five
hundred and eighty-four days (the exact period being five
hundred and eighty-three days and twenty-two hours).
 98   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

[Prometheus]

Comets and meteors were regarded as portents; the Milky
Way was the skirt of Citlalicue, or was the white hair of
Mixcoatl of the Zenith; and in the patterns of the stars were
seen the figures that define the topography of the nocturnal
heavens. Sahagun mentions three constellations, which he
vaguely identifies with Gemini, Scorpio, and Ursa Minor;
and in the chart of heavenly bodies, given with his Nahuatlan
text, he figures two other stellar groups; while five is the num-
ber which Tezozomoc names as those for which the king elect
must keep watch on the night of his vigil. Doubtless many
other star-patterns were observed, but these five seem pre-
dominant. Stansbury Hagar, resolving what he regards as
the Mexican Scorpio into Scorpio and Libra, would see in
Sahagun’s figures half of the zodiacal twelve; and in both
Mexico and Peru he believes that he has identified a series of
signs closely equivalent to that of the Old World zodiac. An-
other view (presented by Zelia Nuttall) conceives the Aztec
constellations as forming a series of twenty, corresponding to
the twenty day-signs employed in the calendar. A third in-
terpretation, on the whole, accordant with the evidence, is that
of Seler, who maintains that the five constellations named by
Sahagun and Tezozomoc represent, instead of a zodiac, the
four quarters and the zenith of the sky-world, and are, there-
fore, spatial rather than temporal guides. Seler identifies
Mamalhuaztli, “the Fire-Sticks,” with stars of the east, in or
near Taurus. The Pleiades, rising in the same neighbourhood,
he believes to have been the sign of the zenith; and at the be-
ginning of a new cycle of fifty-two years the new fire was kin-
dled when the Pleiades were in the zenith at midnight — the
very hour, according to Tezozomoc, when the king rises to his
vigil. Citlalachtli, “the Star Ball-Ground,” is called “the
North and its Wheel” by Tezozomoc, and must refer to the
stars which revolve about the northern pole. Colotlixayac,
“Scorpion-Face,” marks the west; while Citlalxonecuilli —
so named, Sahagun tells us, from its resemblance to S-shaped
 MEXICO

99

loaves of bread which were called xonecuilli—is clearly identi-
fied by Tezozomoc with the Southern Cross and adjacent
stars. Thus it appears (granting Seler’s interpretation) that
the constellations served but to mark the pillars of this four-
square world.

Essentially the Mexican calendar is an elaborate day-
count. As with many other American peoples, the system of
notation was vigesimal (probably developed from a quinary
mode of counting), and the days were accordingly reckoned
by twenties: twenty pictographs served as day-signs, end-
lessly repeated like the names of the days of the week. These
twenty-day periods are commonly called “months” (follow-
ing the usage of Spanish writers), though they have no rela-
tion to the moon and its phases; they are, however, like our
months, used as measures of the primitive solar year of three
hundred and sixty-five days, the Aztec year comprising
eighteen months (or sets of twenties) plus five nemontemi, or
“Empty Days,” regarded as unlucky. According to Sahagun,
six nemontemi were counted every fourth year; if this were
true (it is widely doubted), the Mexicans would have had a
calendar which was Julian in effect. Like our months, each
of the eighteen twenties of the solar year had its own name
and its characteristic religious festivals; during the nemontemi
there were neither feasts nor undertakings. The beginning of
the solar year is placed by Sahagun on the first day of the
month Atlcaualco — corresponding, he says, to February 2
— the period of the cessation of rains, and the time of rites
in honour of Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue. Some authorities,
however, believe that the year really began with Toxcatl,
corresponding to the earlier part of May, the period of the
celebration of the great festival of Tezcatlipoca, when his
personator was sacrificed and the next year’s victim was
chosen. The location of the nemontemi in the year is not
certain.

From the fact that to the days of the year were assigned
 100

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

twenty endlessly repeating signs, and the further fact that
the nemontemi were five in number (18 X 20 + 5 = 365), it
follows that the first day of the year would always fall upon
one of four signs; and these signs — Calli (“House”), Tochtli
(“Rabbit”), Acatl (“Reed”), and Tecpatl (“Flint”)—in-
evitably became emphasized in the imagination, not only
with units of time, but also with the Quarters which divide
the world.

But the designation of the days was not simply by the series
of pictographic signs. An additional series was formed of the
numbers one to thirteen, which, like the signs, were repeated
over and over; so that each day had not only a sign, but
also a number. Since only thirteen numerals were employed,
it follows that if any given twenty days have the number one
accompanying the sign of its first day, the sign of the first
day of the ensuing twenty days will be accompanied by the
number eight, the sign of the first day of the third twenty by
two, and so on; not until the end of two hundred and sixty
days (since thirteen is a prime number) will the same number
recur with the initial sign. The representation of this period
of thirteen by twenty days, in which the cycles of numerals
and pictographs passed from an initial correspondence to its
first recurrence, was called by the Aztec the Tonalamatl, or
“Book of Good and Bad Days” — a set of signs employed
for divination as the name implies. Since the Tonalamatl
represents only two hundred and sixty days, it follows that the
last one hundred and fifteen days of the year will have the
same signs and numerals as the first one hundred and fifteen.
For this reason De Jonghe and some others believe that a
third set of day-signs was employed — the nine Lords of the
Night, which (since two hundred and sixty is not evenly
divisible by nine) would suffice to differentiate the days
throughout the year. Seler, however maintains that he has
disproved this theory; if so, there would still be the possibility
of differentiating the days of the second Tonalamatl from
 0

4

i J>i



* *
 PLATE XIV

The Aztec “Calendar Stone,” one of the two
monuments (see Plate V for the other) found be-
neath the pavement of the plaza of the city of
Mexico in 1790. The outer band of decoration is
formed of two “Fire Snakes” (cf. Plates VII 3 and
XXI), each with a human head in its mouth; be-
tween the tips of the serpents’ tails is a glyph giving
the date, 13 Acatl, of the historical Sun, that is,
the beginning of the present Age of the World. A
decorative band formed of the twenty day signs
surrounds the central figure, which consists of a
Sun-face, with the glyph 4 Olin; while in the four
adjacent compartments are the names of the eras
of the four earlier “Suns.” Sun rays, with other
figures, appear in the spaces between the inner and
outer decorative bands. Below is given a key
(after Joyce, Mexican Archaeology, page 74).
 
 1

1

1

J

J

i

i

\

i

i

(

i

J

(

(
 MEXICO

IOI

those of the first by employing the sign of that one of the
eighteen “months” in which the day fell.

In addition to the Tonalamatl, there is another consequence
of the double designation of the days. Each year, it has been
noted, begins with one of four day-signs. But three hundred
and sixty-five is indivisible, evenly, by thirteen; therefore,
the day-signs and numerals for succeeding years must vary,
the day-signs recurring in the same order every four years,
and the numerals in the same order every thirteen years
(since 365 = 13 X 28 + 1), while not until there has elapsed
four times thirteen years will the same day-sign and the same
numeral occur on the first day of the year. These divisions of
the years into groups, determined by their signs and numbers,
were of great significance to the Mexican peoples. The sign
which began each group of thirteen years was regarded as
dominant during that period, and as each of these signs was
dedicated to one of the four Quarters, it is to be supposed that
the powers of the ruling sign determined the fortunes of the
period. The cycle was complete when, at the end of fifty-two
years, the same sign and number recurred as the emblem of
the year. Such an epoch was the occasion for prognostics and
dread anticipations, and it was celebrated with a special feast
at which all fires were extinguished and a new flame was
kindled on the breast of a sacrificial victim. This festival was
called “the Knot of the Years,” and in Aztec pictography
past periods were represented by bundles, each signifying
such a cycle of fifty-two years.

It will be noted that the fifty-two year cycle is also the
period for the recurring coincidence of the day-signs and
numerals in the year and in the Tonalamatl (for, 365 factor-
ing 73 X 5, and 260 factoring 52 X 5, it follows that 52 years
will equal 73 Tonalamatls). It is, therefore, the more extra-
ordinary that in the usual mode of figuring the Tonalamatl
it is begun, not with one of the four signs which name the
years and their cycles, but with another day-sign, Cipactli
 102

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

(“Crocodile”). The plausible explanation of this is that
since the Crocodile was the monster from which Earth was
formed by the creative gods, the divinatory period was in-
augurated under his sign.

The origin of so peculiar a reckoning as the Tonalamatl is
one of the puzzles of Americanist studies. Effort has been
made to connect it with lunar movements, but no astronom-
ical period corresponds with it. Again, it has been pointed out
that the two hundred and sixty days of the Tonalamatl ap-
proximate the period of gestation, and in view of its use, for
divinations and horoscopic forecasts, this is not impossible
as an explanation of its origin. The obvious fact that it
expresses the cycle of coincidence of the twenty day-signs
and thirteen numerals only carries the puzzle back to the
origination of the numeration, with its anomalous thirteen —
for which, as a significant number, no more satisfactory
astronomical reason has been suggested than Leon y Gama’s,
that it represents half of the period of the moon’s visi-
bility. In myth the invention of the Tonalamatl is ascribed
to Cipactonal and Oxomoco (in whom Senor Robelo sees the
personification of Day and Night), and again to Quetzalcoatl.
At his immolation the heart of Quetzalcoatl, it will be re-
called, flew upward to become the Morning Star, and in
special degree the god is associated with this star. “They
said that Quetzalcoatl died when the star became visible, and
henceforward they called him Tlauizcalpantecutli, ‘Lord of
the Dawn.’ They said that when he died he was invisible for
four days; they said he wandered in the underworld, and for
four days more he was bone. Not until eight days were past
did the great star appear. Quetzalcoatl then ascended the
throne as god.” One of the early writers, Ramon y Zamora,
states that the Tonalamatl was determined by the Mexicans
as the period during which Venus is visible as the evening
star; and Forstemann discovered representations of the
Venus-year of five hundred and eighty-four days divided into
 MEXICO

103

periods of ninety, two hundred and fifty, eight, and two hun-
dred and thirty-six days, which he estimated to represent re-
spectively the period of Venus’s invisibility during superior
conjunction (ninety days), of its visibility as evening star
(two hundred and fifty days), of its invisibility during in-
ferior conjunction (eight days), and of its visibility as morning
star (two hundred and thirty-six days). The near corre-
spondence of the period of two hundred and fifty days with
the Tonalamatl, coupled with the identity of the eight days’
invisibility with the period of Quetzalcoatl’s wandering and
lying dead in the underworld, which was followed by his as-
cension to the throne of the eastern heaven, as related in the
myth, give plausibility to the traditions which associate the
formation of the Tonalamatl with the Venus-period. Seler
suggests — and this is perhaps the best explanation yet
offered — that the Tonalamatl is the product of an indirect
association of the solar year (three hundred and sixty-five
days) and of the Venus-period (five hundred and eighty-four
days), for the least common multiple of the numbers of days
in these two periods is twenty-nine hundred and twenty
days, equal to eight solar years and five Venus years; in
associating the two, he says, the inventors of the calendar
lighted upon the number thirteen (8 -)- 5), and hence upon
the Tonalamatl of two hundred and sixty days. If this be the
case, the belief in thirteen heavens and thirteen hours of the
day would be derivative from temporal rather than spatial
observations, from astronomy rather than cosmography. A
somewhat analogous association might be offered in connexion
with the nine of the heavens and the nine of the hours of the
night; for just as there are four signs that always recur as the
designations of the solar years, so for the Venus-period there
are five (since five hundred and eighty-four divided by twenty
leaves four as divisor of the signs), and the sum of these is
nine.

The signs which inaugurate the Venus periods are Cipactli
 104

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

(“Crocodile”), Coatl (“Snake”), Atl (“Water”), Acatl
(“Reed”), and Olin (“Motion”). But here again the numerals
enter in to complicate the series, so that while the day-signs
which inaugurate the Venus-periods recur in groups of five,
they do not recur with the same numeral until the lapse of
thirteen times five periods. This great cycle of Venus-days,
comprising sixty-five repetitions of the apparent course of the
planet, is also a common multiple of the solar year and of the
Tonalamatl, comprising one hundred and four of the former
and one hundred and forty-six of the latter. Thus it was that
at the end of one hundred and four years of three hundred and
sixty-five days the same sign and number-series recurred in
the three great units of the Aztec calendar. When it is remem-
bered that prognostics were to be drawn not merely from the
complex relations of the signs to their place in each of the
three time-units, with their respective elaborations into cycles;
but from their further relations with the regions of the upper
and lower worlds, and also from the numerals, which had good
and evil values of their own, it will be seen that the Mexican
priests were in possession of a fount of craft not second to that
of the astrologers of the Old World.

That so complex a system could easily give rise to error is
evident, and it is probable that, as tradition asserts, from
time to time corrections were made, serving as the inaugura-
tion of new “Suns” or as new “inventions” of time. It may
even be that the “Suns” of the cosmogonic myths are remi-
niscences of calendric corrections, and it is at least a striking
coincidence that the traditions of these “Suns” make them
four in number, like the year-signs, or five in number, like the
Venus-signs. The latter series, too, is distinctly cosmogonic in
symbolism — Crocodile suggests the creation from a fish-like
monster; Snake, the falling heavens; Water, the “Water-Sun”
and the deluge; Reed (the fire-maker), the Sun of Fire; Mo-
tion, the Sun of Wind, or perhaps the Earthquake. But what-
ever be the value of these symbolisms, it is certain that the
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105

Mexicans themselves associated perilous times and cataclysmic
changes with the rounding out of their cycles.

IV.   LEGENDARY HISTORY'

The cosmogonic and calendric cycles (intimately associated)
profoundly influenced the Mexican conception of history.
Orderly arrangement of time is as essential to an advancing
civilization as the ordering of space, and it is natural for the
human imagination to form all of its temporal conceptions
into a single dramatic unity — a World Drama, with its Crea-
tion, Fall, Redemption, and Judgement; or a Cosmic Evolution
from Nebula to Solar System, and Solar System to Nebula.
In the making, such cosmic dramas start from these roots:
(1) Cosmogony and Theogony, for which there is no simpler
image in nature than the creation of the Life of Day from the
Chaos of Night at the command of the Lord of Light; (2)
“Great Years,” or calendric cycles, formed by calculations of
the synodic periods of sun and moon and wandering stars, or,
as in the curious American instance, mainly from simple day-
counts influenced by a complex symbolism of numbers and
by an awkward notation; (3) the recession of history, back
through the period of record to that of racial reminiscence and
of demigod founders and culture-heroes. Of these three ele-
ments, the first and third constitute the material, while the
second becomes the form-giver — the measure of the duration
of the acts and scenes of the drama, as it were — adding, how-
ever, on the material side, the portents and omens imaged in
the stars.

The Mexican system of cosmic Suns is a capital example of
the first element — each Sun introducing a creation or restora-
tion, and each followed by an elemental destruction, while
all are meted out in formal cycles. It is no matter for wonder
that there are varying versions of the order and number of the
cosmogonic cycles, nor that a nebulous and legendary history
 106 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

is varyingly fitted into the cyclic plan; for each political state
and cultural centre tended to develop its own stories in con-
nexion with its own records and traditions. Nevertheless,
there is a broad scheme of historic events common to all the
more advanced Nahuatlan peoples, the uniformity of which
somewhat argues for its truly historic foundation. This is
the legend which assigns to the plateau of Anahuac three suc-
cessive dominations, that of the Toltec, that of the Chichimec
nations, and that of the Aztec and their allies. Although the
remote Toltec period is clouded in myth, archaeology tends
to support the truth of the tales of legendary Tollan, at
least to the extent of identifying the site of a city which for a
long period had been the centre of a power that was, by Mexi-
can standards, to be accounted civilized.

The general characters of Toltec civilization, as tradition
shows it, are those recorded by Sahagun.11 The Toltec were
clever workmen in metals, pottery, jewellery, and fabrics,
indeed, in all the industrial arts. They were notable builders,
adorning the walls of their structures with skilful mosaic. They
were magicians, astrologers, medicine-men, musicians, priests,
inventors of writing, and creators of the calendar. They were
mannerly men, and virtuous, and lying was unknown among
them. But they were not warlike — and this was to be their
ruin.

Their principal deity was Quetzalcoatl, and his chief priest
bore the same name. The temple of the god was the greatest
work of their hands. It was composed of four chambers: that
to the east, of gold; that to the west, encrusted with turquoise
and emerald; that to the south, with sea-shells and silver; that
to the north, with reddish jasper and shell. In another similar
shrine, plumage of the several colours adorned the four apart-
ments. The explicator of Codex Vaticanus A.says that Quetzal-
coatl was the inventor of round temples (it is possible that the
rotundity of his shrines was due to the presumption that the wind
does not love corners), and that he founded four; in the first
 

[Prometheus]

 PLATE XV

The temple of Xochicalco, partially restored. The
relief band, of which a section is given for detail,
shows a serpent; a human figure, doubtless a deity,
is seated beneath one of the great coils. After
photographs in the Peabody Museum.
 
 
 MEXICO

107

princes and nobles fasted; the second was frequented by the
lower classes; the third was “the House of the Serpent,” and
here it was unlawful to lift the eyes from the ground; the fourth
was “the Temple of Shame,” where were sent sinners and men
of immoral life. Details such as these — obviously referring to
familiar features of American Indian ritual — as well as the
numerous myths that narrate the departure of Quetzalcoatl
for the mysterious Tlapallan, followed by a great part of the
Toltec population, clearly belong in the realm of fancy,
shimmeringly veiling historic facts. Thus, when Ixtlilxochitl
states that the reign of each Toltec king was just fifty-two
years, we see simply a statement which identifies calendric with
political periods; yet when he goes on with the qualification
that those kings who died under such a period were replaced by
regents until a new cycle could begin with the election of a
new king, and when he specifically notes that, as exceptions,
Ilacomihua reigned fifty-nine years, and Xiuhquentzin, his
queen, four years after him, we are in the presence of a tradi-
tion which looks much more like history than myth — for
there is no mythic reason that satisfies this shift. Fact, too,
should underlie Saha gun’s naive remark that the Toltec were
expert in the Mexican tongue, although they did not speak
it with the perfection of his day, and again that communities
which spoke a pure Nahua were composed of descendants of
Toltecs who remained in the land when Quetzalcoatl departed—
for behind such notions should lie a story of linguistic super-
session.

Such, indeed, appears to have been the course of events.
The date of the founding of Tollan, according to the Annals
of Quauhtitlan, is, computed in our era, 752 a. d. Ixtlilxochitl
puts the beginning of the Toltec kingship as early as 510 a. d.;
and the end he sets in the year 959, when the last Toltec king,
Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, was overthrown and departed, none
knew whither. It is a plausible hypothesis which assumes the
historicity of this event and which accounts for the myths of
 io8

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the departure of Quetzalcoatl, the god, as due in part to a con-
fusion of the permutations of a nature deity with the gesta of
an earthly hero — a process exemplified in the Old World in the
tales of King Arthur, Celtic god and British hero-king. It is
certain that from an early date the civilization of the Mexican
plateau was racially akin to that of the Maya in the south; it
is not improbable that the Toltec represent an ancient northern
extension of Maya power (the oldest stratum at Tollan shows
Huastec influences, and the Huastec are of Maya kin); and,
finally, when the political overthrow of the Toltec was accom-
plished, and their leaders fled away to Tlapallan, to the south-
east, the northern barbarians who had replaced them gradually
learned the lesson of civilization from the sporadic groups
which remained in various centres after the capital had fallen —
Cholula, Cuernavaca, and Teotihuacan, cities which were to
figure in Nahuatlan lore as the centres of priestly learning.
Such an hypothesis would account for Sahagun’s statement
that the Toltec spoke Nahua imperfectly, for those who re-
mained would have changed to this language; while what may
well be an historical incident of the period of change is Ixtlilxo-
chitl’s account of the reply of the Toltec king of Colhuacan
to the invading Chichimec, refusing to pay tribute, for “they
held the country from their ancestors, to whom it belonged,
and they had never obeyed or payed tribute to any foreign
lord . . . nor recognized other master than the Sun and their
gods.” However, less able in arms than the invaders, they fell
to no great force.

The Chichimec, according to the prevailing accounts, were
a congeries of wild hunting tribes, cave-dwellers by preference,
who vaguely and imperfectly absorbed the culture that had
preceded them in the Valley of Mexico. Ixtlilxochitl has it
that, under the leadership of a chief named after the celestial
dog Xolotl, they entered the Toltec domain a few years after
the fall of Tollan, peaceably possessing themselves of an almost
deserted land. They were soon followed by related tribes,
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109

among whom the most important were the Acolhua, found-
ers of Tezcuco; while later came the Mexicans, or Aztec, who
wandered obscurely from place to place before they finally es-
tablished the town which was to be the capital of their empire.
For several centuries, as the chronicler pictures it, these re-
lated peoples warred and quarrelled turbulently, owning the
shadowy suzerainty of “emperors” whose power waxed or
waned with their personal force — altogether such a picture
as is presented by Mediaeval Europe after the recession of the
Roman Empire before the incursive barbarians. Gradually,
however, just as in Europe, the seed of the elder civilization
took root, and the culture which the Spaniards discovered grew
and consolidated.

Its leaders were not the Aztec, but the related Acolhua,
whose capital, Tezcuco, became the Athens of an empire of
which Tenochtitlan was to be the Rome; and the great age of
Tezcuco came with King Nezahualcoyotl, less than a century
before the appearance of Cortez. Cautious writers point to the
resemblances between the career and character of this monarch
as pictured by Ixtlilxochitl, and that of the Scriptural David:
both, in their youth, are hunted and persecuted by a jealous
king, and are forced into exile and outlawry; both triumphantly
overthrow their enemies and inaugurate reigns of splendour,
erecting temples, cultivating the arts, and reforming the state;
both are singers and psalmists, and prophets of a purified
monotheism; both assent to the execution of an eldest son and
heir because of palace intrigue; and, finally, both, in the hour
of temptation, cause an honoured thane to be treacherously
slain in order that they may possess themselves of a woman
who has captivated their fancy. In each case, too, the queen
dishonourably won becomes the mother of a successor whose
reign is followed by a decline of power, for Nezahualpilli was
the last of the great Tezcucan kings. Certainly the parallels
are striking and the chronicler may well have been influenced
by Biblical analogy in the form which he gives his stories; but
 no

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

it is surely not unfair to remark that such repetitions of event
are to be expected in a world whose possibilities are, after all,
limited in number; that, for example, a whole series of similari-
ties can be drawn between Inca and Aztec history (where there
is no suspicion of influence), and that there are not a few
striking likenesses of the characters of Nezahualcoyotl and
Huayna Capac, to both of whom is ascribed an enlightened
monotheism. Various fragments of Nezahualcoyotl’s poems —
or such as bear his name — have survived, among them a
lament which has the very tone of the Aztec prayers preserved
by Sahagun, and which, indeed, breathes the whole world-weary
dolour of Nahuatlan religion.^2

“Harken to the lamentations of Nezahualcoyotl, communing
with himself upon the fate of Empire — spoken as an example to
others!

“0 king, inquiet and insecure, when thou art dead, thy vassals
shall be destroyed, scattered in dark confusion; on that day ruler-
ship will no longer be in thy hand, but with God the Creator, All-
Powerful.

“Who hath beheld the palace and court of the king of old, Tezo-
zomoc, how flourishing was his power and firm his tyranny, now
overthrown and destroyed — will he think to escape? Mockery and
deceit is this world’s gift, wherefore let all be consumed!

“Dismal it is to contemplate the prosperity enjoyed by this king,
even to his senility, like an old willow, animated by desire and by
ambition, uplifting himself above the weak and humble. Long time
did the green and the flowers offer themselves in the fields of spring-
time, but at last, worm-eaten and dried, the wind of death seized
him, uprooted him, and scattered him in fragments on Earth’s soil.
So, also, the olden king Cozastli passed onward, leaving neither
house nor lineage to preserve his memory.

“With such reflections, with melancholy song, I bring again the
memory of the flowery springtime gone, and of the end of Tezozomoc
who so long knew its joys. Who, harkening, shall withhold his tears?
 MEXICO

hi

Abundance of riches and varied pleasures, are they not like culled
flowers, passed from hand to hand, and at the end cast forth stripped
and withered?

“ Sons of kings, sons of great lords, give heed and consideration to
what is made manifest in my sad and lamenting song, as I relate
how passed the flowery springtime and the end of the powerful king
Tezozomoc! Ah, who, harkening, will be hard enough to restrain
his tears — for all these varied flowers, these pleasures sweet, wither
and end with this passing life!

“Today we possess the abundance and beauty of the blossoming
summer, and harken to the melody of birds, where the butterflies
sip sweet nectar from fragrant petals. But all is like culled flowers,
that pass from hand to hand, and at the end are cast forth, stripped
and withered!”

V. AZTEC MIGRATION-MYTHS13

Common tradition makes of the Aztec, or Mexica, late
comers into the central valley, although they are regarded as
belonging to the general movement of tribes known as the
Chichimec immigration. Apparently they entered obscurely
in the wake of kindred groups, perhaps in the middle of the
eleventh century; wandered from place to place for a period;
and finally settled on the swampy islands of Lake Tezcuco,
founding Tenochtitlan, or Mexico, which eventually became
the capital of empire. The founding of the city is variously
dated — one group of references placing it at or near 1140,
and another assigning dates from 1321 to 1327, variations
which may refer to an earlier and later occupation by different
or related tribal groups. The Aztec formed a league with
their kindred neighbours, the Tecpanec of Tlacopan and the
Acolhua of Tezcuco, in which their own role was a secondary
one, until finally, under Axayacatl, Tizoc, and Ahuitzotl, the
immediate predecessors of the last Montezuma (whose name
is variously rendered Moteuhgoma, Moteczuma, Mote^uma,
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Motecuhzoma, etc.), they rose to undisputed supremacy.
This, however, was in war and politics, for Tezcuco, previous
to the Conquest, was still the seat of Mexican learning.

Many of the Nahuatlan peoples retained mythic remi-
niscences of the period and course of their migrations; but of
the narratives which remain hardly two are in accord, although
most of them mention the “House of Seven Caves” (Chico-
moztoc) as a place of dispersal. Back of this several of the
narratives go, giving details of which the purely mythic char-
acter is evident, for the leaders named are gods and eponymous
sires, while tribes of utterly unrelated stocks are given a
common source. Thus, according to Mendieta’s account,14
at Chicomoztoc dwelt Iztacmixcoatl (“the White Cloud-
Serpent”) and his wife Uancue (“the Old Woman”), from
whom were sprung the ancestors — “as from the sons of Noah”
— of the leading nations of Mexico, excepting that the Toltec
were descended from Ixtacmixcoatl by a second wife, Chimal-
matl (or Chimalma), who is named as mother of Quetzalcoatl,
and who is represented elsewhere as the priestess or ancestress
of the Aztec in their fabled first home, Aztlan.

Sahagun 15 gives a version starting with the landing of the
ancestral Mexicans at Panotlan (“Place of Arrival by Sea”),
whence he says that they proceeded to Guatemala, and thence,
guided by a priest, to Tamoanchan, where the Amoxoaque,
or wise men, left them, departing toward the east with their
ritual manuscripts and promising to return at the end of the
world. Only four of the learned ones remained with the
colonists — Oxomoco, Cipactonal, Tlaltetecuin, and Xochi-
cauaca — and it was they who invented the calendar and its
interpretation in order that men might have a guide for their
conduct. From Tamoanchan the colonists went to Teoti-
huacan, where they made sacrifices and erected pyramids in
honour of the Sun and of the Moon. Here also they elected
their first kings, and here they buried them, regarding them
as gods and saying of them, not that they had died, but that
 
 PLATE XVI

Section, comprising about one third, of the
“Map Tlotzin,” after Aubin, Memoires sur la pein-
ture didactique (Mission scientifique au Mexique et
dans VAmerique Centrale), Plate I. The map is
described by Boturini as a “map on prepared skin
representing the genealogy of the Chichimec em-
perors from Tlotzin to the last king, Don Fernando
Cortes Ixtilxochitzin.” Two of the six “caves,”
or ancestral abodes of the Chichimec, shown on the
whole map, are here represented. At the right,
marked by a bat in the ceiling, is Tzinacanoztoc,
“the Cave of the Bat”; below it, in Nahuatl, being
the inscription, “Tzinacanoztoc, here was born
Ixtilxochitzin.” The second cave shown is Quauh-
yacac, “At the End of the Trees ”; and here are
shown a group of ancestral Chichimec chieftains,
whose wanderings are indicated in the figures below.
The Nahuatlan text below the figure of the cave is
translated: “All came to establish themselves there
at Quauhyacoc, where they were yet all together.
Thence departed Amacui; with his wife he went to
Colhuatlican. Thence again departed Nopal; he
went with his wife to Huexotla. Thence again de-
parted Tlotli; he went with his wife to Oztoticpac.”
 r
 
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113

they had just awakened from a dream called life. “Hence the
ancients were in the habit of saying that when men die, they
in reality began to live,” addressing them: “Lord (or Lady),
awake! the day is coming! Already the first light of dawn
appears! The song of the yellow-plumed birds is heard, and
the many-coloured butterflies are taking wing!” Even at
Tamoanchan a dispersal of the tribes had begun: the Olmac
and the Huastec had departed toward the east, and from them
had come the invention of the intoxicating drink, pulque, and
(apparently as a result of this) the power of creating magical
illusions; for they could make a house seem to be in flames
when nothing of the sort was taking place, they could show
fish in empty waters, and they could even make it appear that
they had cut their own bodies into morsels. But the peoples
associated with the Mexicans departed from Teotihuacan.
First went the Toltec, then the Otomi, who settled in Coatepec,
and last the Nahua; they traversed the deserts, seeking a
home, each tribe guided by its own gods. Worn by pains and
famines, they at length came to the Place of Seven Caves,
where they celebrated their respective rites. The Toltec were
the first to go forth, finally settling at Tollan. The people of
Michoacan departed next, to be followed by the Tepanec,
Acolhua, Tlascaltec, and other Nahuatlan tribes, and last of
all by the Aztec, or Mexicans proper, who, led by their god,
came to Colhuacan. Even here they were not allowed to rest,
but were compelled to resume their wanderings, and, passing
from place to place — “all designated by their names in the
ancient paintings which form the annals of this people” —
finally they came again to Colhuacan, and thence to the
neighbouring island where Tenochtitlan was founded.

Of the “ancient paintings,” mentioned by Sahagun, several
are preserved,16 portraying the journey of the Aztec from
Aztlan, their mythical fatherland, which is represented and
described as located beyond the waters, or as surrounded by
waters; and the first stage of the migration is said to have
 . LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

114

been made by boat. For this reason numerous speculations as
to its locality have placed it overseas — in Asia or on the
North-west Coast of America — although the more con-
servative opinion follows Seler, who holds that it represents
simply an island shrine or temple-centre of the national god,
and hence a focus of national organization rather than of tribal
origin. According to the Codex Boturini (one of the migra-
tion picture-records), as interpreted by Seler and others, after
leaving Aztlan, represented as an island upon which stood the
shrine of Huitzilopochtli in care of the tribal ancestor and
his wife Chimalma, the Aztec landed at Colhuacan (or Teo-
colhuacan, i. e. “the divine Colhuacan”), where they united
with eight related tribes, the Uexotzinca, Chalca, Xochimilca,
Cuitlauaca, Malinalca, Chichimeca, Tepaneca, and Matla-
tzinca, who are said to have had their origin in a cavern of a
crook-peaked mountain. From Colhuacan, led by a priestess
and four priests, they journeyed to a place (represented in
the codex by a broken tree) which Seler identifies as Tamoan-
chan, or “the House of Descent,” and which is also the “House
of Birth,” for it is here that souls are sent from the thirteenth
heaven to be born. Thence, after a sojourn of five years, the
Aztec, perhaps urged on by some portent of which the broken
tree is a symbol, took their departure alone, leaving their
kindred tribes; and guided by Huitzilopochtli, they came to
the land of melon-cacti and mesquite, where the god gave
them bow and arrows and a snare. This land they called
Mimixcoua (“Land of the Cloud-Serpent”); and it was here
that they changed their name, for the first time calling them-
selves “Mexica” — an appellation which Sahagun describes
as formed from that of a chieftain, who was also an inspired
priest, ruling over the nation while they were in the land of
the Chichimec, and whose cradle, it was said, was a maguey
plant, whence he was called Mexicatl (“Mescal Hare”). Per-
haps this is the incident represented in the curious picture
which shows human beings clad in skins and with ceremonial
 MEXICO

face-paintings, recumbent upon desert plants; and no doubt
it signifies some important change in cult, such, perhaps, as
the introduction of the mescal intoxication, with its attendant
visions. It may, too, portray the institution of human sacri-
fice; for the next station indicated on the chart, Cuextecat-
lichocayan (“Where the Huastec Weep”), was the scene of
the offering of the Huastec captives by arrow-slaying (see
p. 79, supra). From this place the journey led to Coatlicamac
(“In the Jaws of the Serpent”), where the people “tied the
years” and kindled the new fire; and from Coatlicamac they
made their way to Tollan, with the reaching of which the
first stage of the migration-story may be said to end. Seler
regards the whole as a myth of the world-quarters: Tamoan-
chan is the West, as in the Books of Fate; Mimixcoua is the
North; Cuextecatlichocayan is the East, as the reference to
the Huastec shows; and Coatlicamac is the South; finally,
Tollan is the Middle Place, being regarded, like other sacred
cities, as the navel of the world.

[Prometheus]

A second stage of the myth depicts the journey of the
Aztec from Tollan, through many stops, back to Colhuacan,
until at last they came to the site of Tenochtitlan. It is said
that as the tribes halted by the waters of Tezcuco they beheld
a great eagle perched on a cactus growing from a wave-washed
rock; and while they gazed the bird ascended to the rising
sun with a serpent in his talons. This was regarded as a
divine augury, and here Tenochtitlan was founded. Such is
the tradition which gives modern Mexico its national emblem.
The places of sojourn between Tollan and Tenochtitlan, as
represented in the writings, are all with fair certainty identified
with towns or sites in the Valley of Mexico, so that here we
are in the realm of history rather than of myth. Historic
also are the names (and approximate dates) of the nine lords
or emperors who ruled from the Mexican capital before the
coming of the Spaniards brought the native power to its un-
happy end.
 ii 6

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

The fifth of the Aztec monarchs was the first Montezuma.
Of him it is told (the story is recorded by Fray Diego Duran) 17
that after he had extended his realm and consolidated his rule,
he decided to send an embassy to the home of his fathers,
especially since he had heard that the mother of Huitzilo-
pochtli was still living there. He summoned his counsellor
Tlacaelel, who brought before him an aged man learned in
the nation’s history. “The place you name,” said the old
man, “is called Aztlan [‘White’], and near it, in the midst of
the water, is a mountain called Culhuacan [‘Crooked Hill’].
In its caverns our fathers dwelt for many years, much at their
ease, and they were known as Mexitin and Azteca. They had
quantities of duck, heron, cormorants, and other waterfowl,
while birds of red and of yellow plumage diverted them with
song. They had fine large fish; handsome trees lined the shores;
and the streams flowed through meadows under the cypress
and alder. In canoes they fared upon the waters, and they
had floating gardens bearing maize, chile, tomatoes, beans,
and all the vegetables which we now eat and which we have
brought thence. But after they left this island and set foot
on land, all this was changed: the herbs pricked them, the
stones wounded, and the fields were full of thistle and of
thorn. Snakes and venomous vermin swarmed everywhere,
while all about were lions and tigers and other dangerous and
hurtful beasts. So is it written in my books.” Then the king
dispatched his messengers with gifts for the mother of Huit-
zilopochtli. They came first to Coatepec, near Tollan, and
there called upon their demons (for they were magicians) to
guide them; and thus they reached Culhuacan, the mountain
in the sea, where they beheld the fisherfolk and the floating
gardens. The people of the land, finding that the foreigners
spoke their tongue, asked what god they worshipped, and
when told that it was Huitzilopochtli and that they were
come with a present for Coatlicue, his mother, if she yet lived,
they conducted the strangers to the steward of the god’s
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117

mother. When they had delivered their message, stating their
mission from the King and his counsellor, the steward an-
swered: “Who is this Montezuma and who is Tlacaelel?
Those who went from here bore no such names; they were
called Tefacatetl, Acacitli, Ofelopan, Ahatl, Xomimitl, Auexotl,
Uicton, Tenoch, chieftains of the tribes, and with them were
the four guardians of Huitzilopochtli.” The messengers an-
swered: “Sir, we own that we do not know these lords, nor
have we seen them, for all are long dead.” “Who, then, killed
them? We who are left here are all yet living. Who, then,
are they who live to-day?” The messengers told of the old
man who retained the record of the journey, and they asked
to be taken before the mother of the god to discharge their
duty. The old man, who was the steward of Coatlicue, led
them forward; but the mountain, as they ascended, was like
a pile of loose sand, in which they sank. “What makes you
so heavy?” asked the guide, who moved lightly on the sur-
face; and they answered, “We eat meat and drink cocoa.”
“It is this meat and drink,” said the elder, “that prevent you
from reaching the place where your fathers dwelt; it is this
that has brought death among you. We know naught of
these, naught of the luxury that drags you down; with us all
is simple and meagre.” Thereupon he took them up, and swift
as wind brought them into the presence of Coatlicue. The
goddess was foul and frightful to behold, and like one near
death, for she was in mourning for her son’s departure; but
when she heard the message and beheld the rich gifts, she sent
word to her son, reminding him of the prophecy that he had
made at the time of his going forth: how he should lead the
seven tribes into the lands they were to possess, making war
and reducing cities and nations to his service; and how at last
he should be overthrown, even as he had overthrown others,
and his weapons cast to earth. “Then, O mother mine, my
time will be accomplished, and I will return fleeing to thy lap,
but until then I shall know naught save pain. Therefore give
 n8 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

me two pairs of sandals, one for going forth and one for re-
turning, and four pairs of sandals, two pair for going forth
and two for returning.” “When he thinks on these words,”
continued the goddess, “and remembers that his mother
yearns after him, bring to him this mantle of nequen and this
breechband.” With these gifts she dismissed the messengers;
and as they descended, the steward of Coatlicue explained
how the people of Aztlan kept their youth, for when they
grew old, they climbed the mountain, and the climbing re-
newed their years. So the messengers returned, by the way
they had come, to King Montezuma.

VI. SURVIVING PAGANISM

In 1502 Montezuma Xocoyotzin (“Montezuma the Young”)
was elected Emperor of Mexico, assuming a pomp and pride
unknown to his predecessors. Five years later, in 1507, the
Aztec “tied the years” and for the last time kindled the new
fire on the breast of a noble captive. Ominous portents began
to appear with the new cycle, and the chronicles abounded
with imaginations of disaster.18 The temple turret of the war-
god was burned; another shrine was destroyed by fire from
heaven, thunderlessly fallen in the midst of rain; a tree-headed
comet was seen; Lake Tezcuco overflowed its banks for no
cause; a rock which the King had ordered made into a sacrificial
altar refused to be moved, saying to the workmen that the
Lord of Creation would not suffer it; twins and monsters were
born, and there were nightly cries, as of women in travail —

“Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death,

And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New-hatched to the woeful time.”

Fishermen caught a strange bird with a crystal in its head, and
in the crystal, as in a mirror, Montezuma beheld unheard-of
 
 PLATE XVII

Interior of chamber, Mitla, showing type of mural
decoration peculiar to this region. After photograph
in the Peabody Museum.
 
 
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119

warriors, armed and slaying. Most terrible of all, a huge
pyramid of fire appeared in the east, night after night, corus-
cating with points of brilliance. In his terror Montezuma sum-
moned old Nezahualpilli of Tezcuco, noted as an astrologer, to
interpret the sign; and this King, whose star was in the decline,
took perhaps a grim satisfaction in reading from the portents
the early overthrow of the empire. Montezuma, it is said, put
the interpretation to test, challenging Nezahualpilli to the
divinatory game of tlachtli; but just on the point of winning,
the monarch lost and returned discomfited. Another tale,
doubtless apocryphal, tells how Papantzin, sister of Monte-
zuma, died and was buried; shortly afterward she was found
sitting by a fountain in the palace garden, and when the lords
were assembled in her presence, she told how a winged youth
had taken her to the banks of a river, beside which she saw
the bones of dead men and heard their groans, while upon the
waters were strange craft, manned by fair and bearded warriors
coming to possess the kingdom. Certain it is, at least, that the
hearts of all men regarded the return of Quetzalcoatl as near —
the oppressed looking with hope, the powerful with dread, to
the coming of the god — and the vestments of the deity were
among the first gifts with which the unhappy Mexican sought
to win the favour of Cortez.

Nevertheless the memory of the King did not fade from na-
tive imagination with the fall of his throne. Stories of the
greatness, the pride and the destruction of Montezuma spread;
they became confused with older legends; and finally the
Mexican monarch himself became the subject of myth. Far
to the north the Papago 19 still show the cave of Montezuma,
whom they have identified with Sihu, the elder brother of
Coyote; and they tell how Montezuma, coming forth from a
cave dug by the Creator, led the Indian nations thence. At
first all went happily, and men and beasts conversed with one
another until a flood ended this age of felicity, only Montezuma
and his brother, Coyote, escaping in arks which they made for
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

themselves. When the waters had subsided, they aided in the
repeopling of the world, and to Montezuma was assigned the
lordship of the new race, but, being swollen with pride and
arrogance by his high dignity, he failed to rule justly. The
Great Spirit, to punish him, removed the sun to a remote part
of the heavens; whereupon Montezuma set about building a
house which should reach the skies, and whose apartments he
lined with jewels and precious metals. This the Great Spirit
destroyed with his thunder; but Montezuma was still rebel-
lious, whereupon as his supreme punishment, the Great Spirit
sent an insect to summon the Spaniards from the East for his
destruction.

How far the political influence of the Aztec Empire extended
is not clearly certain, but there are numerous indications that its
cultural relations were very wide. There are rites and myths of
the Pueblo Indians, Hopi and Zuni, whose resemblance to the
Mexican seems surely to imply a connexion not too remote;
while far to the south, among the Nahua of Lake Nicaragua,
the creator pair and ruling gods, Tamagostad and Qipattoval,
are identical with the Mexican generative couple, Oxomoco
and Cipactonal.20

In outlying districts today the less-touched Nahuatlan tribes
preserve their essential paganism, and Lumholtz’s and Preuss’s
accounts 21 of the pantheons of the Cora and Huichol Indians
give us a living image of what must have been the ancestral
religion of the Nahuatlan tribes, at least in the crude days of
their wanderings. Father Sun, say the Cora, is fierce in the
summer-time, slaying men and animals; but Chuvalete, the
Morning Star, keeps watch over him to prevent him from
harming the people. Morning Star is cool and dislikes heat,
and once he shot the Sun, causing him to fall to earth; but an
old man restored him to the heavens, giving him a new start,
Chuvalete is the first friend of the Cora among the gods, and
it is to him that they address their prayers as they go to the
spring to bathe in the early dawn; they call him, “Elder
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121

Brother,” just as the Earth is “Our Mother” and the Sun “Our
Father.” The Water Serpent of the West, the Moon, the Winds,
the Rain, the Lightning, — all these are familiar deities.
Preuss 22 calls attention to the striking emphasis which the
Cora place on the power of thought: the leaders of the cere-
monies are called “thinkers” and in their prayers and rites the
conception of a magical preservative and creative power in
thought frequently recurs, not only as a power of priests, who
have obtained it through purification, but as the essential
power of the gods. Thus, of the sun about to rise:

“Our Father in Heaven thinks upon his Earth, our Father the
Shining One.

There he is, on the other side of the World.

He thinks with his Thought, our Father, the Shining One.

He remembers, too, what he is, our Father, the Shining One.”

And again it is the sacred words handed down in ritual through
which men acquire that mystical participation in the divine
power that preserves them in life:

“ Here are present his Words, which he has given to us, his children,

Wherewith we live and continue in the World.

Indeed, all his Words are here present, which he has uttered and
left unto us.

Here leaves he unto his children his Thought.”

The Huichol have a more populous pantheon. Tatevali
(“Grandfather Fire”) is the deity of life and health, and also
of shamans and prophesying. Great-grandfather Deer-Tail
is likewise a fire-god and a singing shaman; he is the son of
Grandfather Fire and yet his elder; for, it is said, Great-
grandfather Deer-Tail is the spark produced in striking flint,
while Grandfather Fire is the flame fed by wood. Father Sun
is another important deity who was created, they say, when
the Corn Mother (or the Eagle Mother, as some have it) threw
her young son, armed with bow and arrows, into an oven,
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

whence he emerged as the divinity. Setting Sun is the assis-
tant of Father Sun; and with the Moon, who is a Grandmother,
he helps to keep Tokakami, the black and blood-smeared god
of death, from leaving his underworld abode to devour the
Indians. Tamats, the Elder Brother, is divinity of wind and
air and messenger of the gods;23 the cock belongs to him, be-
cause it follows the course of the Sun and always knows where
the Sun is; and he is also the deity who conquered the under-
world people and put the world into shape. He appears in dif-
ferent forms (like Tezcatlipoca), now a wolf, now a deer, a
pine-tree, a whirlwind; and it is he who taught the ancients
“all they had to do in order to comply with what the gods
wanted at the five points of the world.” There are goddesses,
too. Takotsi Nakawe (“Grandmother Growth”) is the Earth
goddess who gives long life and is the mother of the armadillo,
the peccary, and the bear; to her belong maize, and squash,
and beans, and sheep; she is water, likewise, and is a Rain-
Serpent in the east. Rain-Serpent goddesses live in each of the
Quarters — she of the east is red, and the flowers of spring are
her skirt; she of the west is white, like a white cloud; blue is
the Rain-Serpent goddess of the south, and to her belong seeds
and singing shamans; while the Rain-Serpent goddess of the
north, whose name means “Rain and Fog hanging in the Trees
and Grass,” is spotted. Another goddess is Young Mother
Eagle, the Sun’s mother, and it is she who holds the world in
her talons and guards everything; the stars are her dress.
With Grandmother Growth beneath, Young Mother Eagle
above, and the four Rain-Serpent goddesses, the six cardinal
points of the world are defined. It will be observed, too, that
the goddesses are deities of the feminine element, earth and
water; while the gods are divinities of the masculine elements,
fire and air.

Beliefs such as these inevitably suggest those of the older
Mexico, and similarly in many of the rites of these Indians
there are analogies to Aztec cult. Perhaps most striking of all
 MEXICO

123

is the elaborate and partly mystical adoration of the hikuli,
or peyote (cacti of the genus Lophophora), to which are ascribed
mantic power and the induction of ecstacy; and in which, no
doubt, we see the marvellous plant which the Aztec encountered
in their migration. The cult extends to tribes remote in the
north and is not without a touch of welcome poetry, as in the
Tarahumare song given by Lumholtz 24 —

“Beautiful lily, in bloom this morning, guard me!

Drive away sorcery! Make me grow old!

Let me reach the age at which I have to take up a walking-stick!

I thank thee for exhaling thy fragrance, there where thou art
standing!”
 CHAPTER IV

YUCATAN

I.   THE MAYA

NATIVE American civilization attained its apogee among
the Maya. This is not true in a political sense, for,
though at the time of the Conquest the Maya remembered a
past political greatness, there is no reason to believe that it had
ever been, either in power or in organization, a rival of such
states as the Aztec and Inca. The Mayan cities had been con-
federate in their unions rather than national, aristocratic in
their governments rather than monarchic; and in their great-
est unity the power of their strongest rulers, the lords of Ma-
yapan, appears to have been that of feudal suzerains, or at
best of insecure tyrants. Politically the Mayan cities present
somewhat the aspect of the loose-leaguing Hellenic states, and
it is not without probability that in each case the looseness
of the political organization was directly conducive to the in-
tense civic pride which undoubtedly in each case fostered an
extraordinary development of the arts. For in all the more in-
tellectual tokens of culture — in art, in mathematics, in writing,
and in historical records — the Mayan peoples surpassed all
other native Americans, leaving in the ruins of their cities and
in the profusion of their sculptured monuments such evidences
of genius as only the most famous centres of Old-World anti-
quity can rival.

The territories of the Mayan stock are singularly compact.1
They occupied — and their descendants now occupy — the
Peninsula of Yucatan, the valley of the Usumacinta, and the
cordillera rising westerly and sinking to the Pacific. The Rio
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125

Motagua, emptying into the Gulf of Honduras, and the Rio
Grijalva, debouching into the Bay of Campeche, form re-
spectively their south-eastern and western borders excepting
for the fact that on the eastern coasts of Mexico, facing the
Gulf of Campeche, the Huastec (and perhaps their Totonac
neighbours) represent a Mayan kindred. Between this western
branch and the great Mayan centre of Yucatan the coast was
occupied by intrusive Nahuatlan tribes, landward from whom
lay the territories of the Zoquean and Zapotecan stocks, the
western neighbours of the Mayan peoples.

[Prometheus]

The culture of the Maya is distinctly related, either as parent
or as branch, to the civilizations of Mexico.2 Affinities of
Haustec and Maya works of art indicate that the ancestors
of the two branches were not separated previous to a consider-
able progress in civilization; while, in a broader way, the
cultures of the Nahuatlan, Zapotecan, and Mayan peoples
have common elements of art, ritual, myth, and, above all,
of mathematical and calendric systems which mark them as
sprung from a common source. The Zapotec, situated between
the Nahuatlan and Mayan centres, show an intermediate art
and science, whose elements clearly unite the two extremes;
while the appearance of place-names, such as Nonoual and
Tulan, or Tollan, in both Maya and Nahua tradition imply at
least a remote geographical Community. The Nahuatlan tribes,
if we may believe their own account, were comparatively
recent comers into the realm of a civilization long anteceding
them, and one which they, as barbarians, adopted; the Maya
(at least, mythically) remembered the day of their coming
into Yucatan. On the basis of these two facts and the un-
doubted community of culture of the two races, it has been not
implausibly reasoned that the Toltec of Nahua tradition were
in fact the ancestors of the Maya, who, abandoning their
original home in Mexico, made their way to the peninsula,
there to perfect their civilization; and the common association
of Quetzalcoatl (“Kukulcan” in Maya) with the migration-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

legends adds strength to this theory. Nevertheless, tradition
points to the high antiquity of the southern rather than of the
Mexican centres of civilization; and as the facts seem to be
well explained by the assumption of a northern extension of
Mayan culture in the Toltec or pre-Toltec age, followed by its
recession in the period of its decline in the south, this may be
taken as the more acceptable theory in the light of present
knowledge. According to this view, the Nahua should be re-
garded as the late inheritors of an older civilization which they
had gradually pushed back upon its place of origin and which,
indeed, they were threatening still further at the time of the
Conquest, for even then Nahuatlan tribes had forced them-
selves among and beyond the declining Maya.

When the Spaniards reached Yucatan, its civilization was
already decadent. The greater cities had been abandoned and
were falling into decay, while the country was anarchical with
local enmities. The past greatness of Mayapan and Chichen
Itza was remembered; but rather, as Bishop Landa’s account
shows,3 for the intensification of the jealousies of those who
boasted great descent than as models for emulation. Three
brothers from the east — so runs the Bishop’s narrative — had
founded Chichen Itza, living honourably until one of them died,
when dissensions arose, and the two surviving brothers were
assassinated. Either before this event, or immediately after-
ward, there arrived from the west a great prince named Cucul-
can who, “after his departure, was regarded in Mexico as a god
and was called Cezalcouati; and he was venerated as a divinity
in Yucatan also because of his zeal for the public good.” He
quieted the dissensions of the people and founded the city of
Mayapan, where he built a round temple, with four entrances
opening to the four quarters, “entirely different from all those
that are in Yucatan”; and after ruling in Mayapan for seven
years he returned to Mexico, leaving peace and amity behind
him. The family of the Cocomes succeeded to the rule, and
shortly afterward came Tutul-Xiu and his followers, who had
 I

I

li ii

t

'.Ml*

I

I
 PLATE XVIII

Temple 3, ruins of Tikal. After Memoirs of the
Peabody Museum, Vol. V, Plate II.
 
 
 YUCATAN

127

been wandering in the interior for forty years. These formed an
alliance with Mayapan; but eventually the Cocomes, by intro-
ducing Mexican mercenaries (who brought the bow, previously
unknown there) were able to tyrannize over the people. Under
the leadership of the Xius, rising in revolt, the Cocomes were
overthrown, only one son out of the royal house escaping; and
Mayapan, after live centuries of power, was abandoned. The
single Cocom who escaped gathered his followers and founded
Tibulon calling his province Zututa, while the Mexican mer-
cenaries settled at Canul. Achchel, a noble who had married the
daughter of the Ahkin-Mai, chief priest of Mayapan and keeper
of the mysteries, founded the kingdom of the Cheles on the
coast; and the Xius held the inlands. “Between these three
great princely houses of the Cocomes, Xivis, and Cheles there
were constant struggles and cruel hatreds, and these endure
even now that they have become Christians. The Cocomes say
to the Xivis that they assassinated their sovereign and stole
his domains; the Xivis reply that they are neither less noble
nor less ancient and royal than the others, and that far from
being traitors, they were the liberators of the country in slaying
a tyrant. The Cheles, in turn, claim to be as noble as any,
since they are descended from the most venerated priest of
Mayapan. On another side, they mutually reviled each other
in the matter of food, since the Cheles, dwelling on the coast,
would not give fish or salt to the Cocomes, obliging them to
send far for these, while the Cocomes would not permit the
Cheles the game and fruits of their territory.”

Such is the picture which Bishop Landa gives of the con-
ditions in the north of the peninsula at the time of the Conquest,
about a century after the fall of Mayapan; and native records
and archaeology alike sustain its general truth.4 At Chichen
Itza the so-called Ball Court is regarded as Mexican in in-
spiration, while in the same- city exist the ruins of a round
temple similar to those which tradition ascribes to Kukulcan,
different in character from the normal Mayan types. Reliefs
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

representing warriors in Mexican garb also point to Nahuatlan
incursions, which may in fact have been the occasion for the
dissolution of the Mayan league of the cities of the north —
Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Mayapan — in the Books of Chilam
Balam represented as powerful in the day of the great among
the Maya of Yucatan.

These “Books” are historical chronicles written after the
Conquest by members of native families — chiefly the Tutul-
Xiu—and from them, as key events of Yucatec history, a few
events stand forth so conspicuously that possible dates can be
assigned to them. “This is the arrangement of the katuns
[periods of 7200 days] since the departure was made from the
land, from the house of Nonoual, where were the four Tutul-
Xiu, from Zuiva in the west; they came from the land of Tula-
pan, having formed a league.”5 So begins one of the chronicles,
indicating a remote migration of the Xiu family from the west—
an event which Spinden and Joyce place near 160 A. D.6 The
next event recorded is a stay, eighty years later, at Chacno-
uiton (or Chacnabiton), where a sojourn of ninety-nine years
is recorded; and thence the migration was renewed, Bakhalal,
near the Gulf of Honduras, being occupied for some sixty years.
Here it was that the wanderers “learned of,” or discovered,
Chichen Itza, and hither the people removed about the middle
of the fifth century, only to abandon it after a century or more
in order to occupy Chacanputun, on the Bay of Campeche.
Two hundred and sixty years later this seat was lost, and the
Itza returned, about the year 970 a. d., to Chichen Itza, while
a member of the Tutul-Xiu founded Uxmal, these two cities
joining with Mayapan to form the triple league which, for
more than two centuries, was to bring peace and prosperity
and the climax of its civilization to northern Yucatan. This
happy condition was ended by “ the treachery of Hunac Ceel,”
who introduced foreign warriors (Mexicans, as their names
indicate) into Chichen Itza, overthrew its ruler, Chac Xib Chac,
and caused a state of anarchy. For a brief period power cen-
 YUCATAN

129

tred in Mayapan, which ruled with something like order, until
“by the revolt of the Itza” it also lost its position and was
finally depopulated in 1442, this disaster being closely followed
by plagues, wars, and a terrific storm, accompanied by in-
undation, all of which carried the destruction forward.

This reconstruction of northern Yucatec history, however,
gives no clue to the origin or life of the cities of the south —
Palenque, Piedras Negras, and Yaxchilan in the lower central
valley of the Usumacintla; Seibal on its upper reaches, not far
from Lake Peten, near which are the ruins of Tikal and Naranjo;
while, south-east of these, Copan, on the river of the same
name, and Quirigua mark the boundaries of Mayan power
toward Central America. These cities had been long in ruins
at the time of the Conquest; their builders were forgotten,
and their sites were hardly known; nor do the sparse traditions
which have survived in the south — the Cakchiquel Annals
and the Popul Vuh — throw light upon them. Were it not for
the ingenuity of scholars, who have deciphered the numeral and
dating system of their many monuments, their period would
have remained but vague surmise; nor would this have sufficed
without the aid of the Tutul-Xiu chronicles to bring the read-
ings within the range of our own chronological system. The
problem is by no means a simple one, even when the dates on
the monuments have been read; for the southern centres em-
ployed a system — the “long count,” as it is called — of
which only a single monumental specimen, a lintel at Chichen
Itza, has been discovered in the north. Nevertheless, with the
aid of this inscription, and with the probable identification
of its date in the light of the Books of Chilam Balam, scholars
have arrived at something like consensus as to the period of
the southern floruit of Mayan culture. This falls within the
ninth Maya cycle (160 a. d. to 554 a. d., on Spinden’s reckon-
ing), for it is a remarkable fact that practically all the monu-
ments of the,south are of this cycle; and as the archaeological
evidence indicates an occupancy of nearly two centuries for
 130

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

several of the cities, it is clear that the southern civilization,
like the northern of a later day, was marked by the contem-
poraneous rise of several great centres. Morley 7 suggests that
the south may even have been held by a league of three cities,
as was later the case in the north, Palenque dominating the
west, Tikal the centre and north, and Copan the south and
east. Two archaic inscriptions — on the Tuxtla Statuette and
the Leiden Plate, as the relics are called — bear dates of the
eighth cycle, the earlier falling a century or more before the
beginning of our era; and these, no doubt, imply a nascent
civilization which was to reach the height of its power in the
fifth century, when the cities of the south produced those
masterpieces of sculpture which mark the climax of an Ameri-
can aboriginal art, which was to disappear, a century later,
leaving scarcely a memory in the land of its origin.

As restored by Morley,8 the history of Mayan civilization
falls into two periods of imperial development, each subdivided
into several epochs. The older, or parent empire is that of
the south; the later, formed by colonization begun while the
old civilization was still flourishing, is that of the peninsula.
Morley’s scheme is as follows:

Old Empire

I.   Archaic Period   . . Earliest times . .   C.   360 A. D.
II.   Middle Period . .      C.   460 A. D.
III.   Great Period . .   . . . C. 460 A. D. . . .   c.   600 A. D.
   New Empire         
IV.   Colonization Period   . . C. 42O A. D.   c.   620 A. D.
V.   Transitional Period   . . C. 620 A. D.   c.   980 A. D.
VI.   Renaissance Period   . . . C. 980 A. D.   c.   1190 A. D.
VII.   Toltec Period . .   . . . C. II90 A. D.   c.   1450 A. D.
VIII.   Final Period . .      c.   1537 A. D-

Each of the earlier periods is marked by the appearance of new
sites and the foundation of new cities as well as by advance
 
 PLATE XIX

Map of Yucatan, showing sites of ancient cities.
After Morley, BBE 57, Plate I.
 
 
 YUCATAN

131

in the arts; and as a whole the Old Empire is marked by the
high development of its sculpture and the use of the more
complete mode of reckoning, while in the cities of the New
Empire architecture attains to its highest development.

Such are the more plausible theories of Mayan culture his-
tory, although there are others (those of Brasseur de Bour-
bourg, for example) which would place the age of Mayan
greatness earlier by many centuries.

II.   VOTAN, ZAMNA, AND KUKULCAN

From their remote beginnings, as with other peoples whose
traditions lead back to an age of migrations, the Mayan tribes
remembered culture heroes, tutors in the arts as well as founders
of empire, priests as well as kings, who may have been historic,9
but who in origin were probably gods rather than men — gods
whom time had confused with the persons of their priestly or
royal worshippers, and in whose deeds cosmic and historic
events were distortedly intermingled. Tales of three such heroes
hold a central place in Mayan mythology: Votan, the hero of
Tzental legend, whose name is associated with Palenque and
the tradition of a great “Votanic Empire” of times long past;
Zamna, or Itzamna, a Yucatec hero; and Kukulcan, known to
the Quiche as Gucumatz, who is the Mayan equivalent of
? Quetzalcoatl. All three of these hero-deities are reputed to
have come from afar — strange in costume and in custom, —
to have been the inventors or teachers of writing, and to have
founded new cults.

The Tzental legend of Votan,10 describing him as having ap-
peared from across the sea, declares that when he reached La-
guna de Terminos he named the country “the Land of Birds and
Game” because of the abundant life of the region; and thence
the Votanides ascended the Usumacinta valley, ultimately
founding their capital at Palenque, whose older and perhaps
original name was Nachan, or “House of Snakes.” Shortly
 132

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

afterward, no less astonishing to the Votanides than had been
their own apparition to the rude aboriginal, came other boat-
loads of long-robed strangers, the first Nahuatlans; but these
were peaceably amalgamated into the new empire. Votan ruled
many years, and, among other works, composed a narrative of
the origin of the Indian nations, of which Ordonez y Aguiar
gives a summary. The chief argument of the work, he says,
aims to show that Votan was descended from Imos (one of the
genii, or guardians, of the days), that he was of the race of
Chan, the Serpent, and that he took his origin from Chivim.
Being the first man whom God had sent to this region, which
we call America, to people and divide the lands, he made
known the route which he had followed, and after he had es-
tablished his seat, he made divers journeys to Valum-Chivim.
These were four in number: in the first he related that having
departed from Valum-Votan, he set out toward the House of
Thirteen Serpents and then went to Valum-Chivim, whence he
passed by the city where he beheld the House of God being
built. He next visited the ruins of the ancient edifice which
men had erected at the command of their common ancestor in
order to climb to the sky; and he declared that those with whom
he there conversed assured him that that was the place where
God had given to each tribe its own particular tongue. He
affirmed that on his return from the House of God he went forth
a second time to examine all the subterranean regions which he
had passed, and the signs to be found there, adding that he was
made to traverse a subterranean road which, leading beneath
the Earth and terminating at the roots of the Sky, was none
other than the hole of a snake; and this he entered because he
was “the Son of the Serpent.”

Ordonez would like to see in this legend (which he has obvi-
ously accommodated to his desire) a record of historical wander-
ings in and from Old World lands and out of Biblical times.
Yet the narrative, even in its garbled form, is clearly a cos-
mologic myth — at the least a tale of the sun’s journey, and
 YUCATAN

133

probably this tale set in the general context of Ages of the
World (the four journeys of Votan?) analogous to those of
Nahuatlan myth and of the Popul Vuh. When it is added that
Votan was known by the epithet “Heart of the People,” that
his successor was called Canam-Lum (“Serpent of the Earth”),
and that both of these were venerated as gods at the time of the
Conquest, no word need be added to emphasize the naturalistic
character of the myth; although there may be truth in a legend
of Votanides, or Votan-worshippers, as founders of Palenque
and possibly as institutors of Mayan civilization.

Zamna (Itzamna, Yzamna, “House of the Dews,” or “Lap
of the Dews”) 11 was the reputed bringer of civilization into
the peninsula and the traditional founder of Mayapan, which
he was said to have made a centre of feudal rule. Like Votan
he was supposed to have been the first to name the localities
of the land, to have invented writing, and to have instructed the
barbarous aborigines in the arts. “With the populations
which came from the East,” Cogolludo writes, “was a man,
called Zamna, who was as their priest, and who, they say, was
the one who gave the names by which they now distinguish, in
their language, all the seaports, hills, estuaries, coasts, moun-
tains, and other parts of the country, which assuredly is an
admirable thing if he thus made a division of every part of the
land, of which scarcely an inch has not its proper appellation
in their tongue.” After having lived to a great age, Zamna is
said to have been buried at Izamal, where his tomb-temple
became a centre for pilgrimage. In fact, Izamal is but a modifi-
cation of a name of Itzamna, since its older form is Itzmatul,
which means, says the Abbe Brasseur, “He who asks or obtains
the dew or the frost.” The ancients of Izamal, Lizana declares,
possessed a renowned idol, Ytzmatul, which “had no other
name . . . although it was said that he was a powerful king
in this region, to whom obedience was given as to the son
of the gods. When he was asked how he was named and
how he should be addressed, he answered only, Ytzen caan,
 134 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

ytzen muyal, £I am the dew, the substance, of the sky and
clouds.’”