One of the most interesting of coastal myths, quoted by Uhle,
tells how Pachacamac, having created a man and a woman,
failed to provide them with food; but when the man died, the
woman was aided by the Sun, who gave her a son and taught
the pair to live upon wild fruits. Angered at this interference,
Pachacamac killed the youth, from whose buried body sprang
maize and other cultivated plants; the Sun gave the woman
another son, Wichama, whereupon Pachacamac slew the
mother; while Wichama, in revenge, pursued Pachacamac,
driving him into the sea, and thereafter burning up the lands
in passion, transformed men into stones. This legend has
been interpreted as a symbol of the seasons, but it is evident
that its elements belong to wide-spread American cycles, for
the mother and son suggest the Chibcha goddess, Bachue,
while the formation of cultivated plants from the body of the
slain youth is a familiar element in myths of the tropical
forests and, indeed, in both Americas. From the story it is
clear that Pachacamac is a creator god, antagonistic (if not
superior) to the Sun, who seems to supplant him in power;
but surely it is anomalous that the Earth-Maker should find
his end by being driven into the sea unless, indeed, Pachaca-
mac, spouse of Mother Sea, be the embodied Father Heaven,
descending in fog and damp and driven seaward by the dis-
 226 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

pelling Sun. Such an interpretation would make Pachacamac
simply a local form of Viracocha; and this, certainly, is sug-
gested in the descriptions, by Garcilasso and others, of the
reverence paid to this divinity.

From Francisco de Avila’s account13 of the myths of the
Huarochiri, in the valley of the Rimac, we may infer that
Viracocha was known to the Chincha tribes, at one period
probably as a supreme god. An idol called Coniraya (mean-
ing according to Markham, “Pertaining to Heat”) they ad-
dressed as “Coniraya Viracocha,” saying, “Thou art Lord of
all; thine are the crops, and thine are all the people”; and in
every toil and difficulty they invoked this deity for aid.

One of the decorative designs that occurs and recurs on the
vases of both the Chimu and Chincha regions — in the char-
acteristic style of each — is the plumed serpent. What is
apparently a modification of this is the man-headed serpent,
or the warrior with a serpent’s or dragon’s tail, a further
modification representing the man or deity as holding the
serpent in one hand, while frequently, in the other hand, is a
symbolic staff or weapon that in certain forms is startlingly
like the classical thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. Another
step shows only the serpent’s head held in the one hand, while
the staff, or thunderbolt, is made prominent; and, finally, in
the style known as that of Tiahuanaco, from its resemblance
to the ancient art of the highlands, a squat deity, holding a
winged or snake-headed wand in each hand gives the counterfeit
presentment of the central figure on the Tiahuanaco arch and
the monolith of Chavin. In Central and North America the
plumed serpent is a sky-symbol, associated with rainbow,
lightning, rain, and weather; and it is not too much to follow
the guesses hitherto ventured that this cycle of images, ap-
pearing in various forms in the different periods of Yunca art,
is intimately associated with the ancient and nearly universal
Jovis Pater of America — Father Sky. As in the old world, the
eagle, so in South America the condor and the falcon are the
 
 PLATE XXXIII

Embroidered ‘figure from a Nasca robe in the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Nasca fabrics repre-
sent the highest achievement in textile art of aborig-
inal America. Figures of the type here shown are
repeated with minor variations, each, no doubt, of
symbolic significance, in a chequered or “all-over”
design. The deity represented may be totemic,
but obviously belongs to the same group as those
shown in such pottery paintings as are represented
in Plates XXXII and XXXIV.
 
 a

I
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

227

especial ministers of this deity; as also are the most powerful
of the beasts of prey known in the region — the puma, or moun-
tain lion; and, again, a fish, which we may suppose to typify
lordship over the waters, as the condor and lion symbolize
dominion over air and earth. Thus, as it were, through their
grotesque masks and gorgeous fantasies, the pots and jars of
the Yunca peoples mutely attest the universal reverence of
mankind for the great powers of Nature.

III. THE MYTHS OF THE CHINCHA

What were the tales which the Yunca peoples told of their
gods? The little that we know is almost wholly due to the
unfinished manuscript of Francisco de Avila,14 composed in
1608; but brief and fragmentary though this treatise be, ending
abruptly with the heading of a Chapter VIII, which was
never written, it throws a curiously suggestive light upon the
archaeological discoveries of our own day, with their revela-
tion of successive civilizations and successive cults in the
coastal valleys.

Avila’s narrative tells of a series of ages of the gods, each
marked by its new ruler, which he confesses he did not well
comprehend because of the contradictoriness of the legends.
At all events, however, in the most ancient period there were
“certain huacas, or idols, . . . supposed to have walked in the
form of men. These huacas were called Yananamca Intanamca;
and in a certain encounter they had with another huaca, called
Huallallo Caruincho, they were conquered and destroyed by the
said Huallallo, who remained as Lord and God of the land.
He ordered that no woman should bring forth more than two
children, of which one was to be sacrificed for him to eat,
and the other, — whichever of the two the parents chose, —
might be brought up. It was also a tradition that, in those
days, all who died were brought to life again on the fifth day;
and that what was sown in that land also sprouted, grew, and
 228

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

ripened on the fifth day; and that all these three provinces
[Huarochiri, Mama, Chaclla] were then a very hot country,
which the Indians call Yunca or Ande.” The last allusion
probably refers to some recollection of a migration from the
coast, for the Huarochiri region is in the highlands drained
by the Rimac and Lurin rivers.

The story goes on to record the overthrow of Huallallo by
another hero-god, Pariacaca; but before narrating this event,
Avila turns aside to tell the tale of Coniraya Viracocha, whom
he regards as certainly a great deity at one time, though
whether before or after the rise of Pariacaca is not evident.

In ancient times Coniraya appeared as a poor Indian,
clothed in rags and reviled by all. Nevertheless, he was the
creator of all things, at whose command terraces arose to
support the fields and channels were formed to irrigate them
— feats which he accomplished by merely hurling his hollow
cane. He was also all-wise with respect to gods and oracles,
and the thoughts of others were open to him. This Coniraya
fell in love with a certain virgin, Cavillaca; and as she sat
weaving beneath a lucma-tree, he dropped near her a ripe
fruit, containing his own generative seed. Eating the fruit
unsuspectingly, she became with child; and when the babe
was old enough to crawl, she assembled all “the huacas and
principal idols of the land,” determined to discover the child’s
father; but as, to her amazement and disgust, the infant
crawled to the beggar-like Coniraya, she snatched it up and
fled away toward the sea. “But Coniraya Viracocha desired
the friendship and favour of the goddess; so, when he saw
her take flight, he put on magnificent golden robes, and
leaving the astonished assembly of the gods, he ran after her,
crying out: ‘O my lady Cavillaca, turn your eyes and see how
handsome and gallant am I,’ with other loving and courteous
words; and they say that his splendour illuminated the whole
country.” But Cavillaca only increased her speed, and plun-
ging into the sea, mother and child were transformed into
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

229

two rocks, still to be seen. Coniraya, distanced, kept on his
quest. He met a condor, and the condor having promised
him success in his pursuit, he gave the condor the promise of
long life, power to traverse wildernesses and valleys, and the
right to prey; and upon those who should slay the condor he set
the curse of death. Next he met a fox, but the fox told him his
quest was vain; so he cursed the fox, telling it that it must hunt
at night and be slain by men. The lion next promised him well,
and he gave the lion power over prey and honour among men.
The falcon was similarly blessed for fair promises, and parrots
cursed for their ill omen. Arrived at the seaside, Coniraya
discovered the vanity of his pursuit, but he was easily con-
soled; for on the beach he met two daughters of Pachacamac.
In the absence of their mother, who was visiting Cavillaca
in the sea, they were guarded by a great serpent, but
Coniraya quieted the serpent by his wisdom. One of the
maidens flew away in the form of a dove, — whence their
mother was called Urpihuachac, “Mother of Doves”; but the
other was more complaisant. “In those days it is said that
there were no fishes in the sea, but that this Urpihuachac
reared a few in a small pond. Coniraya was enraged that
Urpihuachac should be absent in the sea, visiting Cavillaca;
so he emptied the fishes out of her pond into the sea, and
thence all the fishes now in the sea have been propagated.”
That Coniraya is a deity of sun or sky appears evident from
this tale; and he is, clearly, at the same time a demiurgic
transformer, with not a little of the mere trickster about him.
The condor, falcon, and lion are his servants and beneficiaries;
foxes and parrots are his antipathies; he has something to do
with the provision of fish, and he conquers the serpent of the
sea-goddess. Avila says that the tradition is rooted in the
customs of the province: the people venerate the condor,
which they never kill, as also the lion; they have a horror of
the fox, slaying it where they can; “as to the falcon, there is
scarcely a festival in which one does not appear on the heads
 230

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

of the dancers and singers; and we all know that they detest
the parrots, which is not wonderful considering the mischief
they do, though their chief reason is to comply with the tradi-
tion.”

Cataclysmic events which apparently followed the deeds of
the Demiurge were a five-day deluge, in which all men were
destroyed save one who was led by a speaking llama to a
mountain height where he was safe; and a five-day darkness,
during which stones knocked together, while both the stones
with which they ground grain and the animals of their herds
arose against their masters. It was after these cataclysms, in
the days when there were as yet no kings, that five eggs ap-
peared on a certain mountain, called Condor-coto: round them
a wind blew, for until that time there had been no wind. These
eggs were the birth-place of Pariacaca and his four brothers;
but before the hero had come forth from his egg, one of his
brothers, a great and rich lord, built his house on Anchicocha,
adorning it with the red and yellow feathers of certain birds.
This lord had llamas whose natural wool was of brilliant
colours — some red, some blue, some yellow — so that it was
unnecessary to dye it for weaving; but notwithstanding he
was very wise, and even pretended to be God, the Creator,
misfortune befell him in the form of a disgusting disease of
which he was unable to cure himself, though he sought aid
in every direction. Now at this time there was a poor and ill-
clad Indian named Huathiacuri, “who, they say, was a son of
Pariacaca and who learned many arts from his father,” whom,
in his egg, he visited in search of advice. This youth, having
fallen in love with a daughter of the rich man, one day over-
heard foxes conversing about the great lord’s illness. “The
real cause,” said a fox, “is that, when his wife was toasting a
little maize, one grain fell on her skirt, as happens every day.
She gave it to a man who ate it, and afterward she committed
adultery with him. This is the reason that the rich man is sick,
and a serpent is now hovering over his beautiful house to eat
 
 PLATE XXXIV

Vase from Nasca representing a deity with
serpentiform body. The commonest motive in
Nasca designs is the multiplication, in grotesque
forms, of human masks. The deity here represented
is commonly shown with a mask head-dress, masks
upon either cheek, with a girdle of masks or trophy
heads, and with masks elsewhere; while either the
body is shown as serpentiform or serpent-like wands
are wielded by the hands. It is probable that a
sky-god is represented, possibly a local form of
Viracocha. Compare Plates XXXI, XXXVI,
XXXVII. The vase pictured is in the American
Museum of Natural History.
 
 
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

231

it, while a toad with two heads is waiting under his grinding-
stone with the same object.” When Huathiacuri learned this,
he told the girl that he knew the cure for her parent’s malady;
and though she did not believe him, she informed her father,
who had the young man brought before him. Promised the
price he demanded — the maiden’s hand — the youth re-
vealed her mother’s iniquity and gave orders to kill two ser-
pents, which were found in the roof, as well as a two-headed
toad, which hopped forth when the grinding-stone was lifted.
After this the rich man became well, and Huathiacuri received
his bride. The sister of this girl, however, was married to a
man who, resenting so beggarly a person in the family as
Huathiacuri, challenged the latter to a series of contests —
first, to a drinking-bout; next, to a match in splendour of
costume, at which the youth appeared in a dress of snow;
then to a dance, in lions’ skins, wherein he won because of a
rainbow that appeared round the head of the magic lion’s
skin which he wore; and, finally, to a contest in house-build-
ing, wherein all the animals aided him at night. Thus having
vanquished his brother-in-law, Huathiacuri in turn issued a
challenge to a dance, ending it in a wild race during which he
transformed the brother-in-law into a deer and his wife into
rock. The deer lived for some time by devouring people, but
finally deer began to be eaten by men, not men by deer.
Subsequent to all this, Pariacaca and his brothers issued from
the eggs, causing a great tempest in which the rich man and
his house were swept into the sea. Pariacaca is also said to
have destroyed by a torrent a village of revellers who refused
him drink when he appeared among them as a thirsty beggar,
all but one girl who took pity upon him; and there is a story
of his love for Choque Suso, a maiden whom he found in tears
beside her withering maize-fields and for whom he opened
an irrigation-channel, converting the girl herself into a stone
which still guards the headwaters. After this, in Avila’s nar-
rative, comes a heading: “How the Indians of the Ayllu of
 232 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Copara still worship Choque Suso and this channel, a fact
which I know not only from their stories, but also from judi-
cial depositions which I have taken on the subject” — and
there the manuscript abruptly ends.

Nevertheless, this fragment has given us enough to see, if
not the system, at least the character of Chincha mythology.
There are the generations of the elder gods, with transforma-
tions and cataclysms. There are the cosmic eggs — perhaps
earth’s centre and the four winds symbolized in the five of
them. There is the toad-symbol of the underworld, and the
serpent-symbol of the sky-world. The Rich Man, in his house
of red and yellow feathers, is surely a sky-being — perhaps
a sun-god, perhaps a lunar divinity whose ceaseless crescence
and senescence, to and from its glory, may be imaged in his
cureless disease. Pariacaca is clearly a deity of waters, prob-
ably a divine mountain, giving rain and irrigating streams,
and clothing his son in the snow and the rainbow; while the
women — Cavillaca, and the Mother of Doves, and Choque
Suso, the Nymph of the Channel — who were turned into
rocks speak again the hoary sanctity of these images of per-
durability.

IV. VIRACOCHA AND TONAPA

The Yunca peoples, both Chimu and Chincha, recalled a
time when their ancestors entered the coastal valleys to make
them their own, “destroying the former inhabitants, ... a
vile and feeble race,” as Chincha tradition has it. In the
uplands the followers of the Scyris of Quito were remembered
as coming from the littoral; but for the rest, highland legends
point almost uniformly to a southerly or south-easterly origin
— where, indeed, the tale is not of an autochthonous begin-
ning — and with general agreement it is to the plains about
Titicaca that the stories lead, as to the most ancient seat of
mankind. These traditions, coupled with the immemorial
and wonderful ruins of the sacred place at Tiahuanaco —
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

233

whether the precinct of a city or of a temple — give a special
fascination to this region as being plausibly the key to the
solution of the problem of central Andean civilization.

Certainly no more puzzling key was ever given for the un-
locking of a mystery, since the basin of Lake Titicaca is a
plateau, some thirteen to fourteen thousand feet above sea-
level, where cereals will not ripen, so that only potatoes and a
few other roots, along with droves of hardy llamas and alpacas,
form the reliance for subsistence of a population which at
best is sparse. Yet in the midst of this plateau are ruins
characterized by the use of enormous stones — only less than
the great monoliths of Egypt — and by a skill in stone-working
which implies an extraordinary development of the mason’s
art. It is the judgement of archaeologists who have visited
the scene that nothing less than the huge endeavour of a
dense population could have created the visible works; and
there is a tradition, derived from an Indian quifu-reader
and recorded by Oliva, that the real Tiahuanaco is a sub-
terranean city, in vastness far exceeding the one above the
ground. The apparent discrepancy between the capacity of
the region for the support of population and the effort re-
quired to produce the megalithic works has led Sir Clements
Markham to suggest that these structures may date from a
period when the plateau was several thousand feet lower
than at present (for the elevation of the Andes is geologically
recent); it would seem, however, in view of the huge tasks
which Inca engineers accomplished, and of the fact that
sacred cities in remote sites were venerated by the Andeans,
more reasonable to assume that the ruins of Tiahuanaco and
the islands represent, in part at least, the devotion of distant
princes, who here maintained another Delphi or Lhassa.

The speaking monument of this ancient shrine (and there is
no more remarkable monolith in the world) is the carved mon-
olithic gate, now broken. Above the portal (see Plate XXXV)
is the decoration, a broad band in low relief; while a central
 234

Besides the stories of the giants and the Cara, there is a
third legend of an ancient descent of seamen upon the equa-
torial coast. Balboa12 is the narrator of the tale of the coming
of Naymlap and his people to Lambeyeque, a few degrees
south of Cape Santa Elena, and the story which he tells is given
with a minuteness as to name and description that leaves
no doubt of its native origin. At a very remote period there
arrived from the north a great fleet of balsas, commanded by
a brave and renowned chieftain, Naymlap. His wife was
called Ceterni, and a list of court officers is given—Pitazofi,
the trumpeter; Ninacolla, warden of the chiefs litter and
throne; Ninagentue, the cup-bearer; Fongasigde, spreader of
shell-dust before the royal feet (a function which leads us to
suspect that the royal feet, for magic reasons, were never to
touch the earth); Ochocalo, chief of the cuisine; Xam, master
of face-paints; and Llapchilulli, charged with the care of
vestments and plumes. From this account of the entourage,
one readily infers that the chieftain is more than man, him-
self a divinity; and, indeed, Balboa goes on to say that im-
mediately after the new comers had landed, they built a
temple, named Chot, wherein they placed an idol which they
had brought and which, carved of green stone in the image
of the chief, was called Llampallec, or “figure of Naymlap.”
After a long reign Naymlap disappeared, leaving the report
that, given wings by his power, he had ascended to the skies;
and his followers, in their affliction, went everywhere in search
of their lord, while their children inhabited the territories which
had been acquired. Cium, the successor of Naymlap, at the
end of his reign, immured himself in a subterranean cham-
ber, where he perished of hunger in order that he might leave
the reputation of being immortal; and after Cium were nine
other kings, succeeded by Tempellec, who undertook to move
 THE ANDEAN NORTH

209

the statue of Naymlap. But when a demon, in the form of a
beautiful woman, had seduced him, it began to rain — a thing
hitherto unknown on that dry coast — and continued for
thirty days, this being followed by a year of famine, whereupon
the priests, binding Tempellec hand and foot, cast him into
the sea, after which the kindgom was changed into a republic.

This tale bears all the marks of authentic tradition. We may
well suppose that Naymlap and his successors were magic
kings, reigning during the period of their vigorous years and
then sacrificed to make way for a successor who should anew
incarnate the sacred life of Llampallec. Such rulers, as corn-
spirits and embodiments of the communal soul of their people,
have been made familiar by Sir James G. Frazer’s monu-
mental Golden Bough; and in this case it would appear that
the sacred king was regarded as a marine divinity, probably
as the son of Mother Sea. Certainly this would not merely
explain the shell-dust spread beneath his feet, but it might
also account for the punishment of Tempellec, who had brought
the cataclysm of water to the land and so was cast back to his
own element; while it is even possible that the worship of the
emerald, which all writers mention in connexion with this
coast, may have here received its especial impetus from the
colour and translucency of the stone, suggesting the green
waters of the ocean.
 CHAPTER VII

THE ANDEAN SOUTH

I.   THE EMPIRE OF THE INCAS1

IN this land of Peru,” wrote Cieza de Leon,2 “ are three desert
ranges where men can in no wise exist. One of these com-
prises the montana (forests) of the Andes, full of dense wilder-
nesses where men cannot live, nor ever have lived. The second
is the mountainous region, extending the whole length of the
Cordillera of the Andes, which is intensely cold, and its sum-
mits are covered with eternal snow, so that in no way can
people live in this region owing to the snow and the cold, and
also because there are no provisions, all things being destroyed
by the snow and the wind, which never ceases to blow. The
third range comprises the sandy deserts from Tumbez to the
other side of Tarapaca, in which there is nothing to be seen
but sand-hills and the fierce sun which dries them up, without
water, nor herb, nor tree, nor created thing, except birds which,
by the gift of their wings, wander wherever they list. This
kingdom, being so vast, has great deserts for the reasons I
have now given.

“The inhabited region is after this fashion. In parts of the
mountains of the Andes are ravines and dales, which open out
into deep valleys of such width as often to form great plains be-
tween the mountains; and although the snow falls, it all re-
mains on the higher part. As these valleys are closed in, they
are not molested by the winds, nor does the snow reach them,
and the land is so fruitful that all things which are sown yield
abundantly; and there are trees and many birds and animals.
The land being so fertile, is well peopled by the natives. They
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

211

make their villages with rows of stones roofed with straw, and
live healthily and in comfort. Thus the mountains of the Andes
form these dales and ravines in which there are populous vil-
lages, and rivers of excellent water flow near them, some of the
rivers send their waters to the South Sea, entering by the sandy
deserts which I have mentioned, and the humidity of their
water gives rise to very beautiful valleys with great rows of
trees. The valleys are two or three leagues broad, and great
quantities of algoroba trees [Prosopis horrida] grow in them,
which flourish even at great distances from any water.
Wherever there are groves of trees the land is free from
sand and very fertile and abundant. In ancient times these
valleys were very populous, and still there are Indians in them,
though not so many as in former days. As it never rains in
these sandy deserts and valleys of Peru, they do not roof their
houses as they do in the mountains, but build large houses of
adobes [sun-dried bricks] with pleasant terraced roofs of matting
to shade them from the sun, nor do the Spaniards use any other
roofing than these reed mats. To prepare their fields for sowing,
they lead channels from the rivers to irrigate the valleys, and
the channels are made so well and with so much regularity
that all the land is irrigated without any waste. This system
of irrigation makes the valleys very green and cheerful, and
they are full of fruit-trees both of Spain and of this country.
At all times they raise good harvests of maize and wheat, and
of everything that they sow. Thus, although I have described
Peru as being formed of three desert ridges, yet from them,
by the will of God, descend these valleys and rivers, without
which no man could live. This is the cause why the natives
were so easily conquered, for if they rebelled they would all
perish of cold and hunger. Except the land which they inhabit,
the whole country is full of snowy mountains, enormous and
very terrible.”

Cieza de Leon’s description brings vividly before the imagina-
tion the physical surroundings which made possible the evolu-
 212

.LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

tion and the long history of the greatest of native American
empires. Divided from one another by towering mountains
and inhospitable deserts, the tribes and clans that filtered into
this region at some remote period were compelled to develop in
relative isolation; while, further, the conditions of existence
were such that the inhabitants could not be nomadic huntsmen,
nor even fishermen. Along the shores are vestiges of ancient
shell-heaps, indicative of utterly primitive fisher-folk, and the
sea always remained an important source of food for the coastal
peoples; yet even here, as Cieza de Leon indicates, the growth
of population was dependent upon an intensive cultivation of
the narrow river-valleys rather than upon the conquest of new
territories. Thus, the whole environment of life in Peru, mon-
tane and littoral, is framed by the fact of more or less con-
stricted and protected valley centres, immensely productive in
response to toil, but yielding no idyllic fruits to unlaborious
ease. If the peoples who inhabited these valleys were not agri-
culturists when they entered them, they were compelled to
become such in order that they might live and increase; and
while the stupendous thrift of the aborigines, as evidenced by
their stone-terraced gardens, their elaborate aqueducts, and
their wonderful roads, still excites the astonishment of be-
holders, it is none the less intelligible as the inevitable conse-
quence of prolonged human habitation. It is certain that the
Peruvian peoples were the most accomplished of all Americans
in the working of the soil; and it is possible that they were the
originators of agriculture in America, for it was from Peru,
apparently, that the growing of maize spread throughout wide
regions of South America, Peru that developed the potato as a
food-crop, and in Peru that the cultivation of cotton and various
fruits and vegetables added greatest variety to the native farm-
ing. Peru, likewise, was the only American centre in which there
was a domestic animal more important than the dog; and the
antiquity of the taming of the llama and alpaca — useful not
only for food and wool, but also as beasts of burden — is shown
 
 PLATE XXX

Machu Picchu, in the valley of the Urubamba,
north of Cuzco. These ruins of an ancient Inca
city were discovered by Hiram Bingham, of the
Yale University and National Geographical Society
expedition, in 1911, and are by him identified with
the “Tampu-Tocco” of Inca tradition (see pages
216-18, and Plate XXXVIII). From photograph,
courtesy of Hiram Bingham, Director of the Yale
Peruvian Expedition.
 
 I

i

i

0
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

213

by the fact that these animals show marked differentiation
from the wild guanaco from which they are derived. The de-
velopment of domestic species of this animal and, even more,
the development of maize from its ancestral grasses (if indeed
this were Peruvian) 3 imply many centuries of settled and in-
dustrious life, a consideration which adds strongly to the ar-
chaeological and legendary indications of a civilization that
must be reckoned in millennia.

The conditions which thus fostered local and intensive cul-
tural evolutions were scarcely less favourable — once the local
valleys had reached a certain complexity — to the formation
of extensive empires. As Cieza de Leon remarks, conquest was
easy where refuge was difficult; and the Inca conquerors them-
selves found that the most effective weapon they could employ
against the coastal cities was mastery of their aqueducts. The
town which lost control of its water, drawn from the hills,
could only surrender; and thus, the segregated valleys fell
an easy prey to a powerful and aggressive people, gifted with
engineering skill, such as the Inca race; while the empire won
was not difficult to hold. At the time of the Spanish conquest
that empire was truly immense. Tahuantinsuyu (“the Four
Quarters”) was the native name, and “the Quartered City”
(Cuzco), its capital, was regarded as the Navel of the World.
The four quarters, or provinces, were oriented from Cuzco:
the southerly was Collasuyu, stretching from the neighbour-
hood of Lake Titicaca southward; the eastern province was
Antisuyu, extending down the slopes of the Andes into the
regions of savagery; to the west lay Cuntisuyu, reaching to
the coast and to the lands of the Yunca peoples; while to the
north was Chinchasuyu, following the Andean valleys. Shortly
before the Conquest the Inca dominion had been imposed
upon the realm of the Scyris of Quito, so that the northern
boundary lay beyond the equator; while the extreme southerly
border had recently been extended over the Calchaqui tribes
and down the coast to the edges of Araucania in the neigh-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

bourhood of latitude 350 south. The imperial territories were
naturally narrowed to the Andean region, for the tropical
forests to the east offered no allurements to the mountain-
loving race which, indeed, could endure only temporarily the
heat of the western coast, so that Inca campaigners in this
direction resorted to frequent reliefs lest their men be de-
bilitated. On the other hand, the immense expanse north and
south, notwithstanding the perfection of the roads and for-
tresses built by astute rulers to facilitate communication,
caused a natural tension of the parts and a tendency to break
at the appearance of even the least weakness at the centre.
Such appears to have been the fatal defect underlying the
conflict of Huascar, at Cuzco, with Atahualpa, whose initial
strength lay in his possession of Quito, and whose career was
brought to an untimely end by the advent of Pizarro. Despite
the fact that Inca power had been clearly crescent within the
generation, it is by no means certain that the political con-
ditions which the Spaniards used to advantage might not,
if left to themselves, have disrupted the great empire.

There is reason to think that such a rupture had occurred
at least once before in the history of Andean civilization.
The list of more than a hundred Peruvian kings given by the
Licentiate Fernando Montesinos (writing about 1650)4 was
formerly viewed with much distrust, chiefly for the reason that
the kings of the pre-Inca dynasties recorded by Montesinos
are almost without exception unnamed by earlier and prime
authorities on Peruvian history (including Garcilasso de la
Vega and Cieza de Leon). Recent discoveries, however, both
scholarly and archaeological, have brought a new plausibility
to Montesinos’s lists, and it appears probable that he derived
them from the lost works of Bias Valera, one of the earliest
men in the field, known to have had exceptional opportuni-
ties for a study of native lore; while at the same time the
archaeological investigations of Max Uhle and the brilliant
achievements of the expeditions headed by Hiram Bingham
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH   215

have given a new definiteness to knowledge of pre-Inca
conditions.5

It has long been known that Inca civilization was only the
last in a series of Peruvian culture periods. Back of it, in the
highlands, lay the Megalithic Age, so called from the great
size of the stone blocks in its cyclopean masonry, the earliest
centre of this culture being supposed to have been about
Lake Titicaca, and especially Tiahuanaco, at the south of the
lake — a site remarkable not only for the most extraordinary
of all ancient American monuments, the monolithic gate and
the surrounding precincts, but also for the importance ascribed
to it in legend as a place of origin of nations. Other highland
centres, however, hark back to the same period, and Cuzco
itself, in old cyclopean walls, shows evidence of an age of
Megalithic greatness upon which the later Inca civilization
had supervened. Again, in the coastal region from lea to
Truxillo — the realms of the Yunca, according to the older
chroniclers — there were several successive culture periods;
and though it is possible that traditions such as that of Naym-
lap (see Chapter VI, Section V) indicate a foreign origin for
the Yunca peoples, in any case their differing environment
would account for much. The peoples of the littoral could
have no herds of llamas, since the animal was unable to live
in that region; and hence they looked mainly to cotton for
their fabrics, while the sea gave them fair compensation in
the matter of food. In the lesser arts, especially in that of
the potter, they surpassed the highlanders and, indeed, all
other Americans; but their building material was adobe, and
they have left no magnificent monuments, as have the stone-
workers of the hills. Nevertheless at some remote, pre-Inca
period the ideas of the coast and those of the highlands met
and interchanged: the art of Tiahuanaco is reflected in motive
at Truxillo, while the vases of Nasca repeat the bizarre decora-
tion of the monolith of Chavin de Huantar. The hoary sanctity
of the great temple of Pachacamac was such that its Inca
 216

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

conqueror adopted the god into his own pantheon; and it was
just here, at the Yunca shrine of Pachacamac, that Uhle
found evidence of a series of culture periods leading to a con-
siderable antiquity. The indigenous coastal art had already
passed its climax of expressive skill when the influence of
Tiahuanaco appeared; but this influence lasted long enough
to leave an enduring impress on the interregnum-like period
which followed, awaiting, as it were, the return of the hills’
influence, which came with the advent of the Inca. Such, in
brief, is the restoration, and it seems to fit remarkably with
Bingham’s discoveries and with Montesinos’s lists.

Of the one hundred and two kings in these lists, the last
ten form the Inca dynasty (a group with respect to which
Montesinos is in essential agreement with other chroniclers),
whose beginning is placed 1100-1200 a. d.; back of these are
the twenty-eight lords of Tampu-Tocco; and still earlier the
sixty-four rulers of the ancient empire, forty-six of them
forming the amauta (or priest-king) dynasty which followed
after the primal line of eighteen Sons of the Gods. Were this
scheme of regal succession followed out in extenso the begin-
nings of the Megalithic Empire of the highlands should fall
near the beginning of the first millenium before Christ, and that
of the Tampu Tocco dynasty in the early years of our Era.
Archaeological and other considerations lead, however, to esti-
mates somewhat more conservative, placing the culmination
of the early empire in the first centuries of the Christian era,
and the sojourn at Tampu Tocco from about 600-1100 a. d.6

The Inca dynasty, established at Cuzco toward 1200 a. d.,
was the creator of the great empire which the Spaniards found,
and its record is the traditional history of Peru, recounted by
Garcilasso and Cieza. According to the legend, the Inca tribes
had come to Cuzco from a place called Tampu-Tocco, a city
of refuge in an inaccessible valley, where for centuries their
ancestors had lived in seclusion, the cause of the retirement
being as follows: in past generations, it was said, the Amauta
 THE ANDEAN SOUTH

217

Oviedo’s description 3 of the tribes about the Gulf of Nicoya,
where the civilizations of the two Americas meet, indicates a
religion in which the great rites were human sacrifices of the
Mexican type and feasts of intoxication. Archaeological re-
searches in the same region have brought to light amulets and
ornaments, some anthropomorphic in character, but many
representing animal forms, usually highly conventionalized —
alligators, jaguars and pumas, frogs, parrots, vampires, denizens
of earth, air, and sea, all indicative of a populous pantheon of
talismanic powers; while cruciform, swastika, and other sym-
bolic ornamentation implies a development in the direction of
abstraction sustained by Oviedo’s mention of “folded books of
deerskin parchment,” which are probably the southern exten-
sion of the art of writing as known in the northern civilization.
The archaeology of the Guetare region, in central, and of the
Chiriqui region, in southern Costa Rica, disclose the same
fantasy of grotesque and conventionalized animals — saurians,
armadilloes, the cat-tribe, composites — indicative of a simi-
larly zoomorphic pantheon. Benzoni, speaking of the tribes
of this region, states that they worshipped idols in the forms
 
 PLATE XXVI

Jade pendant representing a Vampire. After
Hartman, Archaeological Researches on the Pacific
Coast of Costa Rica, Plate XLIV. For reference to
the significance of the bat, as a deity, see page 177
and page 364, note 6.
 
 
 THE ANDEAN NORTH

191

of animals, which they kept hidden in caves; while Andagoya
declares that the priests of the Cuna or Cueva (dwelling at the
juncture of the Isthmus and the southern continent) communed
with the devil and that Chipiripa, a rain-god, was one of their
most important deities; they are said, too, to have known of
the deluge. Of the neighbouring Indians, about Uraba, Cieza
de Leon gives us to know that “they certainly talk with the
devil and do him all the honour they can. . . . He appears
to them (as I have been told by one of themselves) in frightful
and terrible visions, which cause them much alarm.” Further-
more, “the devil gives them to understand that, in the place
to which they go [after death], they will come to life in another
kingdom which he has prepared for them, and that it is neces-
sary to take food with them for the journey. As if hell was so
very far off!”

Peter Martyr devotes the greater part of a book (the tenth of
the Seventh Decade)4 to a description of the rites and beliefs of
the Indians of the region where the Isthmus joins the continent.
Dabaiba, he says, was the name both of a river and of a divinity
whose sanctuary was about forty leagues from Darien; and
thither at certain seasons the caciques, even of the most dis-
tant countries, sent slaves to be strangled and burnt before the
idol. “When the Spaniards asked them to what divinity they
addressed their prayers, they responded that it is to the god
who created the heavens, the sun, the moon, and all existing
things; and from whom every good thing proceeds. They be-
lieve that Dabaiba, the divinity universally venerated in the
country, is the mother of this creator.” Their traditions told
of a great drought which, making the rivers dry, caused the
greater part of mankind to perish of thirst, while the survivors
emigrated from the mountains to the sea-coast; for this reason
they maintained priests and addressed prayers to their divinity,
who would seem to be a rain-goddess. Another legend recorded
by Peter Martyr tells of a frightful tempest which brought with
it two great birds, “similar to the harpies of the Strophades,”
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

having “the face, chin, month, nose, teeth, eyes, brows, and
physiognomy of a virgin.” One of these seized the people
and carried them off to the mountains to devour them, where-
fore, to slay the man-eating bird, certain heroes carved a human
figure on the end of a log, which they set in the ground so that
the figure alone was visible. The hunters concealed themselves
near by, and when the monster, mistaking the image for prey,
sunk its talons into the wood, falling upon it, they slew it
before it could release itself. “Those who killed the monster
were honoured as gods.” Interesting, too, is Martyr’s account
of the reason given for the sinfulness of incest: the dark spots
on the moon represent a man cast into that damp and freezing
planet to suffer perpetual cold in expiation of incest committed
with his sister — the very myth that is told in North Green-
land; and the belief that “only nobles have immortal souls” (or,
more likely, that they alone enjoy a paradise) is cited to explain
why numbers of servants gladly throw themselves into the
graves of their masters, since thus they gain the right to accom-
pany their lords into the afterworld of pleasure; all others,
apparently, go down to a gloomy hades, though there may be
truth in Martyr’s statement that it is pollution which brings
this fate.

The account of the religion of the Isthmian tribes in later
times, by W. M. Gabb andPittier de Fabrega,5 probably repre-
sents faithfully their earlier beliefs. There are deities who are
the protectors of game-animals, suggesting the Elders of the
Kinds so characteristic of North American lore; though they
appear to men in human form, taking vengeance on those who
only wound in the chase: “When thou shootest, do it to kill,
so that the poor beast doth not fall a prey to the worms,”
is the command of the King of the Tapirs to the unlucky hunter
who is punished for his faulty work by being stricken with
dumbness during the period in which a cane grows from a
sprout to its full height. The Isthmian peoples recognize (as do
most other Americans) a faineant supreme being, Sibu, in the
 THE ANDEAN NORTH

193

world above, with a host of lesser, but dangerous, powers in
the realm of environing nature; and there is a paradise, at
least for the noble dead, situated at the zenith, though the way
thither is beset by perils, monsters, and precipices. Las Casas
also mentions the belief in a supreme deity, Chicuna, Lord of
All Things, as extending from Darien to Nicaragua; and he
says that along with this god the Sun, the Moon, and the
Morning Star were worshipped, as well as divinities of wood
and stone which presided over the elements and the sowings
{sementeras).

The allusion to deities of the sementeras is interesting in
connexion with the Bribri and Brunka (or Boruca) myths,
published byPittier de Fabrega. According to these tribes of
Indians, men and animal kinds were originally born of seeds
kept in baskets which Sibu entrusted to the lesser gods; but
the evil powers were constantly hunting for these seeds, en-
deavouring to destroy them. One tale relates that after Sura,
the good deity to whom the seed had been committed, had
gone to his field of maize, Jaburu, the evil divinity, stole and
ate the seed; and when Sura returned, killed and buried him,
a cacao-tree and a calabash-tree growing from the grave.
Sibu, the almighty one, resolving to punish Jaburu and de-
manding of him a drink of chocolate, the wives of the
wicked deity roasted the cacao, and made a drinking-vessel of
the calabash. “Then Sibu, the almighty god, willed — and
whatever he wills has to be: ‘May the first cup come to me!’
and as it so came to pass, he said, ‘My uncle, I present this
cup to thee, so that thou drink!’ Jaburu swallowed the
chocolate at once, with such delight that his throat resounded,
tshaaa! And he said, ‘My uncle! I have drunk Sura’s first
fruit!’ But just at this moment he began to swell, and he
swelled and swelled until he blew up. Then Sibu, the almighty
god, picked up again the seed of our kin, which was in Jaburu’s
body, and willed, ‘Let Sura wake up again!’ And as it so
happened he gave him back the basket with the seed of our kin
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

to keep.” In another tale a duel between Sibu and Jaburu, in
which each should throw two cacao-pods at the other, and
he should lose in whose hand a pod first broke, was the pre-
liminary for the creation of men, which Sibu desired and Jaburu
opposed. The almighty god chose green pods, the evil one ripe
pods; and at the third throw the pod broke in Jaburu’s hand,
mankind being then born from the seed. A third legend, of a
man-stealing eagle who devoured his prey in company with a
jaguar (who is no true jaguar, but a bad spirit, having the form
of a stone until his prey approaches), is evidently a version of
the story of the bird-monster told by Peter Martyr.

III. EL DORADO

Not the quest of the Golden Fleece itself and the adventures
of the Argonauts with clashing rocks and Amazonian women
are so filled with extravagance and peril as is the search for El
Dorado.6 The legend of the Gilded Man and of his treasure
city sprang from the soil of the New World in the very dawn of
its discovery — whether wholly in the imaginations of con-
quistadores dazzled with dreams of gold, or partly from some
custom, tale, or myth of the American Indians it is now im-
possible to say. In its earlier form it told of a priest, or king,
or priest-king, who once a year smeared his. body with oil,
powdered himself with gold dust, and in gilded splendour, ac-
companied by nobles, floated to the centre of a lake, where, as
the onlookers from the shore sang and danced, he first made
offering of treasure to the waters .and then himself leaped in to
wash the gold from his body. Later, fostered by the readiness
of the aborigines to rid themselves of the plague of white men
by means of tales of treasure cities farther on, the story grew
into pictures of the golden empire of Omagua, or Manoa,
or Paytiti, or Enim, on the shores of a distant lake. Expedi-
tion after expedition journeyed in quest of the fabled capital.
As early as 1530, Ambros von Alfinger, a German knight, set
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195

out from the coast of Venezuela in search of a golden city,
chaining his enslaved native carriers to one another by means
of neck-rings and cutting off the heads of those who succumbed
to fatigue to save the trouble of unlinking them; Alfinger him-
self was wounded in the neck by an arrow and died of the
wound. In 1531 Diego de Ordaz conducted an expedition guided
by a lieutenant who claimed to have been entertained in the
city of Omoa by El Dorado himself; in 1536-38 George of
Spires, afterward governor of Venezuela, made a journey of
fifteen hundred miles into the interior; and another German, the
red-bearded Nicholas Federman, departed upon the same quest.
On the plains of Bogota in 1539 they met Quesada and Belal-
cazar, who, coming from the north and from the south respec-
tively, had subdued the Chibcha realm. Hernan Perez de
Quesada, brother of the conqueror, led an unlucky expedi-
tion, behaving with such cruelty that his death from lightning
was regarded as a divine retribution; while the expeditions of
the chivalrous Philip von Hutten (1540-41) and of Orellana
down the Amazon (1540-41) were followed by others, down to
the time of Sir Walter Raleigh’s quest in 1595, — all enlarging
the geographical knowledge of South America and accumulating
fables of cities of gold and nations of warlike women. Of all
these adventures, however, the most amazing was the “ jornada
de Omagua y Dorado” which set out from Peru in 1559 under
the leadership of Don Pedro de Ursua, a knight of Navarre.
Ursua was a gentleman, worthy of his knighthood, but his
company was crowded with cut-throats, of whom he himself
was an early victim. Hernando de Guzman made himself
master of the mutineers, and renouncing allegiance to the
King of Castile, proclaimed himself Prince and King of all
Tierra Firme; but he, in turn fell before his tyrant successor,
Lope de Aguirre, whose fantastic and blood-thirsty insanity
caused half the continent to shudder at his name, which
is still remembered in Venezuelan folk-lore, where the phos-
phorescence of the swamp is called fuego de Aguirre in the
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

196

belief that under such form the tortured soul of the tyrant
wanders abroad.

The true provenance of the story of the Gilded Man (if not
of the treasure city) seems certainly to be the region about Bo-
gota in the realm of the Chibcha. Possibly the myth may refer
to the practices of one of the nations conquered by the Muyscan
Zipas before the coming of the Spaniards, and legendary even
at that time; for as the tale is told, it seems to describe a cere-
mony in honour of such a water-spirit as we are everywhere
told the Colombian nations venerated; and it may actually
be that the Gilded Man was himself a sacrifice to or a persona-
tion of the deity. Whatever the origin, the legends of El Dorado
have their node in the lands of the Chibcha — a circumstance
not without its own poetic warrant, for from no other American
people have jewelleries of cunningly wrought gold come in
more abundance.

The Zipa of Bogota, at the period of the conquest, was the
most considerable of the native rulers in what is now Colombia,
having an empire only less in extent than those of the Peruvian
Incas and of the Aztec Kings. He also was a recent lord, en-
gaged at the very time of the coming of the whites in extend-
ing his power over neighbouring rulers; it is probable that
Guatavita, east of Bogota had fallen to the Zipa’ not many
decades before the conquest and this Guatavita is supposed
to have been the scene of the rite of El Dorado; in any case
it had remained a famous shrine. Tunja was another power
to the east of Bogota declining before the rising power of
the Zipas, its Zaque (as the Tunjan caciques were called)
being saved from the Zipa’s forces by the arrival of the
Spaniards.

Besides these—the Chibcha proper7—there were in Colom-
bia in the sixteenth century other civilized peoples, akin in
culture and language, whose chief centres were in the elongated
Cauca valley paralleling the Pacific coast. Farthest north were
the tribes in the neighbourhood of Antioquia—the Tamahi and
 
 PLATE XXVII

(A)

Colombian gold work. Ornaments in the forms
of human and monstrous beings, doubtless mytho-
logical subjects. The originals are in the American
Museum of Natural History.

m

Colombian gold work. The human figure ap-
parently holds a staff or wand and may represent
Bochica or similar personage. The originals are in
the American Museum of Natural History.
 
 
 
 
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197

Nutabi; south of these, about Cartago, were the most famous
of gold-workers, the Quimbaya; while near the borders of what
is now Ecuador dwelt the Coconuco and their kindred. All
these peoples possessed skill in pottery, metal-working, and
weaving; and the inhabitants of the Cauca valley were the
most advanced of the Colombians in these arts. Indeed, the
case of Peru seems to be in a measure repeated; for the Chibcha
surpassed their neighbours in the strength of their military
and political organization rather than in their knowledge of
the arts. It is even possible that the Chibcha had been driven
eastward by the western tribes, for the inhabitants of the
Cauca valley possessed traditions of a northern origin, claim-
ing to be immigrants; while the Chibcha still regarded certain
spots in the territories of their western enemies, the Muzo, as
sacred. Little is known of the mythic systems of any of these
peoples save the Chibcha. The Antioquians preserved a deluge-
myth (as doubtless did all the other Colombians); and they
recognized a creator-god, Abira, a spirit of evil, Canicuba,
and a goddess, Dabeciba, who was the same as Dabaiba, the
Darien Mother of the Creator. Cieza de Leon says 8 that the
Antioquians “carve the likeness of a devil, very fierce and in
human form, with other images and figures of cats which they
worship; when they require water or sunshine for their crops,
they seek aid from these idols.” Of the Quimbaya Cieza tells
how there appeared to a group of women making salt beside
a spring the apparition of a disembowelled man who prophesied
a pestilence that soon came. “Many women and boys affirmed
that they saw the dead with their own eyes walking again.
These people well understand that there is something in man
besides the mortal body, though they do not hold that it is a
soul, but rather some kind of transfiguration.” The Sun, the
Moon, and the Rainbow were important divinities with all
these tribes, and they made offerings of gold and jewels and
children to water-spirits in rivers and in springs. Human
sacrifice was probably universal, and too many of the Indians,
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

198

as Cieza puts it, “not content with natural food, turned their
bellies into tombs of their neighbours.”

IV. MYTHS OF THE CHIBCHA9

Fray Pedro Simon wrote his Noticias Historiales in 1623,
some four score years from the conquest, giving in his fourth
Noticia an account of the myths and rites of the Chibcha which
is our primary source for the beliefs of these tribes. Like other
American peoples the Chibcha recognized a Creator, apparently
the Heaven Father, but like most others their active cults
centred about lesser powers: the Sun (to whom human sacri-
fices were made), the Moon, the Rainbow, spirits of lakes and
other genii locorum, culture deities, male and female, and the
manes of ancestors. Idols of gold and copper, of wood and clay
and cotton, represented gods and fetishes, and to them offer-
ings were made, especially of emeralds and golden ornaments.
Fray Pedro says that thePijaos aborigines and some of those of
Tunja had in their sanctuaries images having three heads or
three faces on a single body which, the natives said, represented
three persons with one heart; and he also records their use of
crosses to mark the graves of those dead of snake-bite, as well
as their belief that the souls of the dead fared to the centre of
the earth, crossing the Stygian river on balsas made of spiders’
webs, for which reason spiders were never killed. Like the
Aztec they held that the lot of men slain in battle and of women
dying in child-birth was especially delectable in the other
world.

The worship of mountains, serpents, and lakes was implied in
many of the Chibcha rites. Slaves were sacrificed, and their
bodies were buried on hill-tops; children, who were the par-
ticular offering to the Sun, were sometimes taken to mountain-
tops to be slain, their bodies being supposed to be consumed by
the Sun; and an interesting case of the surrogate for human
victims was the practice of sacrificing parrots which had been
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199

taught to speak. In masked dances, addressed to the Sun,
tears were represented on the masks as a supplication for pity;
and another curious rite, apparently solar, was performed at
Tunja, where twelve men in red, presumably typifying the
moons of the year, danced about a blue man, who was doubtless
the sky-god. The ceremony of El Dorado is only one of many
rites in which the divinities of the sacred lakes were propitiated;
and it is probable that these water-spirits were conceived in the
form of snakes, as when, at Lake Guatavita, a huge serpent
was supposed to issue from the depths to secure offerings left
upon the bank.

been made butts of ridicule. The brothers angrily issued their
challenge, and the Xibalbans invited them to seats on the
throne of honour; but this proved to be a heated stone, and when
they burned themselves, the princes of Xibalba could scarcely
contain their merriment. The brothers were then given torches
and conducted to the House of Gloom, with injunctions to
keep the lights undiminished until the dawn; but the torches
were speedily consumed, and when, next day, they were brought
before Hun-Came and Vukub-Came who demanded the lights,
they could only reply, “They are consumed, Lords.” There-
upon, at the command of the underworld-gods, the brothers
were sacrificed, and their bodies were buried; only, the head of
Hunhun-Ahpu was placed in a fruit-tree, where it was im-
mediately transformed so as to be indistinguishable from the
gourd-like fruits which the tree bore.

The Xibalbans were prohibited from approaching this tree,
but a certain maiden, Xquiq (“Princess Blood”), having heard
of it, said to herself: “Why should I not go to see this tree; in
sooth, its fruits should be sweet, according to what I hear said
of it.” She approached the tree in admiration: “Are such the
fruits of this tree? And should I die were I to pluck one?”
Then the head in the midst said: “Do you indeed desire it?
These round lumps among the branches of the tree are only
death’s-heads!” Nevertheless, Xquiq was insistent, where-
upon Hunhun-Ahpu’s head demanded that she stretch forth her
hand, and, by a violent effort, he spat into it, saying: “This
saliva and foam which I give thee is my posterity. Behold, my
head will cease to speak, for it is only a death’s-head, with no
longer any flesh. So it is also with the head of even the greatest
of princes; for it is the flesh alone that adometh the visage,
whence cometh the horror which besetteth men at the moment
of death.” He then directed the maiden to flee to the upper
world, knowing that she would be pursued by the underworld-
powers; and these, indeed, when they heard that Xquiq was
enceinte, demanded that she be sacrificed, sending Owl-Men
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

to execute their doom. But the princess beguiled the Owls,
inducing them to substitute for her heart the coagulated sap of
the bloodwort, the odour of which they took to be the scent of
blood, while she herself fled to the protection of the mother of
Hunbatz and Hunchouen. The latter demanded proof that
the new comer was indeed her daughter-in-law and sent Xquiq
into the field for maize. There was but one hill in the field,
whereupon the maiden appealed for aid to the gods, by whose
miraculous help she was enabled to gather a full burden
without disturbing the single hill. This miracle satisfied the
mother-in-law; who said: “It is a sign that thou art indeed my
daughter-in-law, and that those whom thou dost carry will
be wise ”; and shortly after this, Xquiq gave birth to the twins,
Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The new comers were welcomed by all excepting Hunbatz
and Hunchouen, who regarded their half-brothers as rivals
and plotted their death; but Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who
from birth had shown their prowess as magicians, transformed
the two flute-players into monkeys, condemning them to live
in the trees. Hunbatz and Hunchouen, says the chronicler,
“were invoked by musicians and singers aforetime, and also
by painters and sculptors; but they were changed into beasts
and became monkeys because of their pride and their mal-
treatment of their brothers.” It is probable that the two were
monkey-form gods of the arts, though it is also possible that
the transformation is associated with that of the primeval age
which ended with the metamorphosis of men into monkeys.

The next episode in the career of the two youths was the
clearing of a field by means of magic tools which felled trees
and dug the soil while their owners amused themselves at the
chase; but at night the animals restored the vegetation. Ac-
cordingly the brothers concealed themselves to watch for the
undoers of their work; and when by night the lion (puma) and
the tiger (jaguar), the hare and the opossum, the deer, the
coyote, the porcupine, and the peccary, together with the birds,
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173

appeared and called to the felled trees to raise themselves, the
brothers attempted to trap them. They succeeded only in
seizing the tails of the deer and the rabbit (which, of course,
explains the present decurtate state of these animals), but
finally they captured the rat, which, to save its life, revealed
to them the hiding-place of the rings and gloves and rubber
ball with which their fathers had played tlachtli, and which
their grandmother had concealed from them lest they, too,
become lost through the fatal lure of the game. By a ruse
the twins succeeded in getting possession of the apparatus,
and like their fathers became passionately devoted to the
sport.

When the Lords of Xibalba learned of this, they said: “Who,
then, are these that begin again to play above our heads, shak-
ing the earth without fear? Are not Hunhun-Ahpu and Vukub-
Hunahpu dead, who wished to exalt themselves before us?”
Forthwith they dispatched a challenge to the new champions
which the twins accepted; but before they departed for the
underworld, each planted a reed in the house of their grand-
mother, saying that if any ill befell either of them, his reed
would wither and die. They passed the underworld rivers,
and coming to the four roads (here named black, white, red, and
green), they set out upon the black path, though they took the
precaution to send in advance an animal called Xan, with in-
structions to prick the leg of each lord in the realm below. The
first two throned beings made no response, being manikins of
wood; but the third uttered a cry, and his neighbour said:
“What is it, Hun-Came? What has pricked you ? ” The same
thing happened to Vukub-Came, Xiqiripat, Ahalpuh, Cuchuma-
quiq, Chamiabak, Ahalcana, Chamiaholom, Patan, Quiqxic,
Quiqrixgag, and Quiqre (for such were the names of these
princes): “it is thus that they revealed themselves, calling
one another by name,” each in turn. When the hero twins
came, refusing to salute the wooden men, they addressed the
Lords of Xibalba each by his title, much to the chagrin of
 174

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

these; and, further, they declined a place on the heated stone,
saying, “It is not our seat.”

In succeeding episodes Hunahpu and Xbalanque underwent
the ordeals of the houses of the underworld. The House of
Gloom was first; but the twins substituted red paint for the
fire on the torches given them and thus preserved these un-
diminished. “Whence indeed, are you come?” cried the as-
tonished Xibalbans; “who are you?” “Who can say whence
we are,” they answered; “we ourselves do not know.” So they
refused to reveal themselves and in the game of ball which
followed they altogether defeated the Xibalbans; but since
this only augmented the desire of the latter for the lives of the
pair, the underworld lords demanded of the two heroes that
they bring them four vases of flowers. Accordingly they sent
the youths under guard to the House of Lances; but the
brothers overcame the demons of this abode by promising them
the flesh of all animals, while at the same time they persuaded
the ants to bring the needed flowers from the gardens of Hun-
Came and Vukub-Came. Having failed with this test, the
Xibalbans then dispatched their guests to the House of Cold,
which they survived by kindling pine-knots. The next trial
was the House of Tigers, but its ferocious denizens were diverted
by bones which the brothers cast to them. The House of Fire
was also harmless to them; but in the sixth, the House of Bats,
or House of Camazotz, as its lord was called* they met their
first discomfiture. All night the heroes lay prone, longing for
the dawn; but at last Hunahpu for a moment raised his head,
which was instantly shorn off by the vigilant Camazotz.
Xbalanque, in desperation, summoned the animals to his
assistance; and the turtle, chancing to touch the bleeding neck
of Hunahpu and becoming attached to it, was transformed
into a head with the magic aid of the animals. The real head
the Lords of Xibalba had suspended in the ball court, where
they were reviling it when Xbalanque and Hunahpu, with his
turtle’s head, appeared for the last round at the game; and
 CENTRAL AMERICA

175

with the assistance of the animals Xbalanque succeeded in
winning the victory once more, and recovering Hunahpu’s
head, he restored it in place of the turtle’s.

Having now metthe ordeals set by the Xibalbans, the brothers
undertook to show their own prowess, and, first of all, their
contempt of death. Anticipating the action of the Lords of
Xibalba in condemning them to death, they sought the counsel
of two magicians, Xulu and Pacam, with whom they arranged
for their resurrection; after which, sentenced to be burned,
they mounted the funeral pyre and met their death, whereat
all the Xibalbans were filled with joy, crying, “We have tri-
umphed, indeed; and none too soon!” The bones, ground to
powder at the advice of the two magicians, were cast upon the
underworld waters; wherein on the fifth day two fish-men
were to be seen, while the next day a pair of wretched beggars,
poor and miserable, appeared among the Xibalbans. These
beggars, however, were wonder-workers: they burned houses
and immediately restored them; they even sacrificed and then
resuscitated one another. Their fame soon reached the ears
of Hun-Came and Vukub-Came, and when the mendicant-
magicians were brought before these lords, they were implored
by the Xibalban kings to perform their miracles. Thereupon
the beggars began their “dances”: they killed and revivified
the dog of the underworld princes; they burned and restored
the royal palace; they sacrificed and brought to life a man —
each deed at the command of Hun-Came and Vukub-Came.
Finally, overcome with excitement, the Lords of Xibalba
cried, “Do likewise with us; immolate us also!” “Can death
exist for you ?” asked the beggars ironically. “Nevertheless, it is
your right that we amuse you.” But when they had sacrificed
Hun-Came and Vukub-Came, they restored them no more to
life. “Then fled all the princes of Xibalba, seeing their kings
dead, and their bodies laid open; but in a moment they them-
selves were sacrificed, two by two, a chastisement which was
their due.” A single prince escaped, begging for pity, while the
 176 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

host of their vassals prostrated themselves before their con-
querors.

Then the heroes revealed themselves, disclosing their names
and the names of their fathers, saying, “We are the avengers
of the sufferings of our sires; harken, now to your doom, ye
of Xibalba! Since your fame and your power are no more, and
ye merit no clemency, your race shall have little rule, and never
again shall ye play the Game of Ball. Yours it shall be to make
objects of burnt clay, pots and pans, and maize-grinders; and
the animals that live in the brushwood and in solitude shall be
your share. All the happy, all the cultivated, shall cease to be
yours; the bees alone will continue to reproduce before your
eyes. Ye, perverse, cruel, sad, wretched, who have done ill,
now lament it! ” Thus were degraded those who had been of
bad faith, hypocritical, tyrannical; thus their power was
ruined.

Meanwhile, in the upper world, the grandmother of the
twins watching the two reeds, had mourned and rejoiced in
turn, twice seeing them wither and twice revive. “ The Living
Reeds, the Level Earth, the Centre of the House, shall be the
names of this place,” she said. The twins talked with the
heads of their father and uncle, paying them funeral honours
and elevating them to the sky, the one to become the sun, the
other the moon; and they raised up also the four hundred
youths buried by Zipacna, to become stars in heaven, saying:
“Henceforth ye shall be invoked by civilized peoples; ye shall
be adored; and your names shall not perish.”

Such, in its general character, is the mythic portion of the
Popul Vuh. It is built up of elements found far and wide in
North America and it reflects ideas practically universal among
the civilized Nahuatlan and Mayan tribes; but it possesses
one great distinction — that of presenting these concepts with
an imaginative intensity unmatched by any other version, a
quality which in some measure argues that the whole cycle is
original with the Mayan stock. The myth certainly gives a
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177

broad view of the south Mayan pantheons; and most of the
elements in the proper names which can be interpreted are
indicative of the cosmic nature of the personalities. Accord-
ing to Brasseur de Bourbourg, Hun signifies “one,” Vukub is
the word for “seven”; Hunahpu is “One Blowgun-Shooter,”
and it is quite likely that the blowgun was associated with
celestial phenomena, as the game of tlachtli certainly is; Hun-
batz is “One Monkey”; Hun-Came is “One Dead,” and so on.
Vukub-Cakix (“Seven Macaws”), Vukub-Hunahpu (“Seven
One-Blowgun-Shooter”), and Vukub-Came (“Seven Dead”)
are clearly corresponding, or complementary, cosmic powers.
The Abbe believes that Hurakan (from which comes our word
“hurricane”) and Cabrakan (“Earthquake”) are deities im-
ported from the Antilles. Camazotz (“Ruler of Bats,” —
Brasseur; “Death Bat,” — Seler) is clearly the Elder of the
Bats — the bat-god known to have been a dread and potent
deity among the Maya, and, as the vampire, feared and
propitiated far into South America.6 Balam means “tiger”
— that is, the jaguar, which, perhaps because of its spots, is
symbol of the star-studded night and of the west. The four
Quiche ancestors are clearly cosmic deities — Balam-Quitze
(“Smiling Tiger”) perhaps of the east; Balam-Agab (“Night
Tiger”) of the west; Iqi-Balam (“Moon Tiger”); and Mahuca-
tah (“Renowned Name,” an epithet, in the Abbe’s opinion).
The Hero Brothers are, of course, familiar figures everywhere
in American myth.

IV.   THE ANNALS OF THE CAKCHIQUEL7

The Cakchiquel Annals do not, like the Popul Vuh, form a
work of primarily literary or historical intent, but are, both in
form and in content, part of a brief, the purpose of which is to
establish certain territorial rights of members of the family of
Xahila, thus falling into the class of native titulos, written in
Spanish, several of which have been published. From its
nature the composition has not, therefore, the dramatic char-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

acter of a mythic narrative; nevertheless its very purpose,
as founding a title to lands anciently held, leads to the effort
to establish this by the right of first occupation, and hence to
stories of the first comers. That such accounts are reproduced
more or less exactly from mythic narratives there can be no
manner of doubt, internal traits showing near affinity with
the tales of the Popul Vuh and kindred cycles.

The narrative begins with a record of “the sayings of our
earliest fathers and ancestors, Gagavitz the name of one,
Zactecauh the name of the other ... as we came from the
other side of the sea, from the land of Tulan, where we were
brought forth and begotten . . .

“These are the very words which Gagavitz and Zactecauh
spake: ‘Four men came from Tulan; one Tulan is at the sunrise,
and one is at Xibalbay, and one is at the sunset; and we came
from this one at the sunset; and one is where is God. There-
fore there are four Tulans, they say, O our sons; from the sun-
set we came; from Tulan from beyond the sea; and it was at
Tulan that, arriving, we were brought forth; coming, we were
produced, as they say, by our fathers and our mothers.

“‘And now the Obsidian Stone is brought forth by the pre-
cious Xibalbay, the glorious Xibalbay; and man is made by
the Maker, the Creator. The Obsidian Stone was his sustainer
when man was made in misery and when man was formed; he
was fed with wood, he was fed with leaves; he wished only the
earth; he could not speak, he could not walk; he had no
blood, he had no flesh; so say our fathers, our ancestors, 0 ye
my sons. Nothing was found to feed him; at length something
was found to feed him. Two brutes knew that there was
food in the place called Paxil, where these creatures were, the
Coyote and the Crow by name. Even in the refuse of maize
it was found when the creature Coyote was killed as he was
separating his maize and was searching for bread to knead,
killed by the creature named Tiuh Tiuh; and from within the
sea, by means of Tiuh Tiuh, was brought the blood of the ser-
 
 PLATE XXV

Monumental stela, Piedras Negras. This superb
relief shows a divinity with quetzal-plume crest to
whom a priest is presenting the group of bound cap-
tives, shown at the base. After photograph in the
Peabody Museum.
 
 
 CENTRAL AMERICA

179

pent and of the tapir with which the maize was to be kneaded;
the flesh of man was formed of it by the Maker, the Creator;
and well did they, the Maker and the Creator, know him who
was born, him who was begotten; they made man as he was
made, they formed man as they made him; so they tell. There
were thirteen men, fourteen women; they, talked, they walked;
they had blood, they had flesh. They married, and one had
two wives. They brought forth daughters, they brought forth
sons, those first men. Thus men were made, and thus the Obsi-
dian Stone was made, for the enclosure of Tulan; thus we came
to where the Zotzils were at the gates of Tulan; arriving, we
were born; coming, we were produced; coming, we gave the
tribute in the darkness, in the night, 0 our sons.’ Thus spake
Gagavitz and Zactecauh, 0 my sons; and what they said hath
not been forgotten. They are our great ancestors; these are
the words with which they encouraged us of old.”

These extracts indicate the style of the Annals, full of rep-
etition and almost without relational expressions, but now
and again lighted with passages of extraordinary vividness.
The Obsidian Stone, Chay Abah, represented an important
civic fetish or oracular talisman, if we may credit the descrip-
tion of Iximche, the Cakchiquel capital, transmitted by Fuentes
y Guzman and quoted by Brinton.8 On the summit of a small
hill overlooking the town — so goes the account — “is a
circular wall, not unlike the curb of a well, about a full fathom
in height. The floor within is paved with cement, as the city
streets. In the centre is placed a socle or pedestal of a glittering
substance, like glass, but of what composition is not known.
This circular structure was the tribunal or consistory of the
Cakchiquel Indians, where not only was public hearing given
to causes, but also the sentences were carried out. Seated
around this wall, the judges heard the pleas and pronounced
the sentences, in both civil and criminal cases. After this
public decision, however, there remained an appeal for its
revocation or confirmation. Three messengers were chosen
 i8o

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

these well-nigh inconceivable periods all the smaller units may
be regarded as coming at last to a more or less exact close.
What matter a few score years one way or the other in this
virtual eternity? Finally, on the last page of the manuscript,
is depicted the Destruction of the World, for which the highest
numbers have paved the way. Here we see the rain serpent,
stretching across the sky, belching forth torrents of water.
Great streams of water gush from the sun and moon. The old
goddess, she of the tiger claws and forbidding aspect, the
malevolent patronness of floods and cloudbursts, overturns
the bowl of the heavenly waters. The crossbones, dread em-
blem of death, decorate her skirt, and a writhing snake crowns
her head. Below with downward-pointed spears, symbolic of
the universal destruction, the black god stalks abroad, a
screeching owl raging on his fearsome head. Here, indeed, is
portrayed with graphic touch the final all-engulfing cataclysm.”

In their sculpture the Maya far surpassed the artistic ex-
pression of all other Americans, attaining not only decorative
power, but such idealization of the human countenance as is
possible only among people whose aesthetic sensibilities have
an intellectual background and guidance. No more con-
vincing evidence of this mental power could be forthcoming
than is shown in their mathematical and astronomical learn-
ing, at once a testimony to the antiquity of their culture and
to the force of .their native genius.

VI.   THE CREATION

Just as the notion of great astronomical cycles shadowed
forth eschatological cataclysms, so it reverted to cyclic aeons
of the past in which the world came to its present form. There
is no such wealth of creation myth preserved from the ancient
Maya as from the Nahua, but enough is recorded to make it
clear that the ideas of the two peoples were essentially one:
indeed, they clearly belong to a group of cosmogonical con-
 
 PLATE XXII

Final page from the Codex Desdensis showing
“Serpent Numbers” and typifying the cataclysms
destroying the world. See pages 151-52 for de-
scription, and compare Plates XII, XIII, XIV.
 
 
 YUCATAN

153

ceptions extending as far to the north as the Pueblos of the
United States, and not without influence beyond, into the
prairie country. Possibly the whole complex conception had
its first telling with the Maya; it is with them, at least, that
the numerical and calendric ideas with which it is logically
associated received the greatest development and give the
most natural raison d’etre to the mythic lore.

Something of the nature of the Maya conception is intimated
by Cogolludo and Landa, as noted in a preceding paragraph.
More is given in Tozzer’s account of Maya religion as it is to-
day.25 According to information obtained from Mayas of
Valladolid, the world is now in the fourth period of its exist-
ence. In the first, there lived the Saiyamkoob, “the Ad-
justers,” the primitive race of Yucatan, who were dwarfs and
built the cities now in ruins. Their work was done in darkness,
when as yet there was no sun. When the sun appeared they
were turned into stone, and their images are to be found to-
day in the ruins. In this period there was a living rope ex-
tending from earth to sky, by which food was brought down to
the builders. Blood was in this rope; but the rope was cut,
the blood flowed out, and earth and sky were parted. Water-
over-the-earth ended this period. It was followed by the age
of the Tsolob, “the Offenders”; and these, too, were de-
stroyed by a flood. The third age was that in which the Maya
reigned, but their day likewise passed amid waters of destruc-
tion, to give place to the present age peopled by a mixture of
all the races that have previously dwelt in Yucatan.

It is easy to align these notions with what we know of
Mexican myth, though it is evident that history rather than
genesis is its present significance. But purely cosmogonic is
the fragment from the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel
published by Martinez Hernandez26 with its suggestion of the
Thirteen Lords of the Day captured by the Nine of the Night
as the first great act:

“During the 11 ahau, Ahmucen-cab come [came] to cover
 iS4

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the faces of Oxlahun-ti-ku (thirteen gods); his names were
unknown except those of his sister and of his children: and they
said that the faces also were equally not visible; then, when the
world was made, they knew not that they would be entirely
cast away; and Oxlahun-ti-ku was captured by Bolon-ti-ku
(nine gods); then he brought down fire; then he brought down
salt; then he brought down the stones and trees and came to
play with the stones and trees; and Oxlahun-ti-ku was caught
and they broke his head and buffeted him, and also carried
him on their backs; and they despoiled him of his dragon and
his tizne [black paint or soot]; and they took fresh shoots of
yaxum and white beans, tuberous roots cut up small, and the
heart of small calabash seeds and of large calabash seeds cut
up small, and of black beans cut up small. This first Bolon-
tsac-cab (nine orders of the world) made a thick covering of
seeds and went away to the thirteenth heaven, and the sur-
face of the earth remained formed, and the peaks of the rocks
of the world.

“And the heart of Oxlahun-ti-ku went away, the hearts of
the tuberous roots refusing to go. And there came women
without-fathers, with those who have hard work, the without-
husbands, who, although living have no heart; and wrapped
in dog’s grass, they were buried in the sea.

“All at once came the water after the dragon was carried
away. The heaven was broken up; it fell upon the earth; and
they say that Cantul-ti-ku (four gods), the four Bacab, were
those who destroyed it. Then, when the universal destruc-
tion was past, they placed as dweller Kan-xib-yui, to order it
anew. And the tree, the white ymix, was placed standing in
the north; and he placed the supporting poles of the heaven;
and it was said that this tree was the symbol of the universal
destruction.” Four other trees, each of a different colour, each
symbol of a destruction of the world, were planted at the re-
maining quarters and the centre; and the form of the world
was then complete. “‘The whole world,’ said Ah-uuc-chek-
 YUCATAN

155

nale (he who seven times makes fruitful), ‘proceeded from the
seven bosoms of the earth.’ And he descended to make fruit-
ful Itzam-kab-ain (the female whale with alligator feet), when
he came down from the central angle of the heavenly region.
The four lights, the four regions of the stars, revolved. As
yet there was no light; absolutely there was no sun; absolutely
there was no night; absolutely there was no moon. They
awoke; and from then began the world. At that instant the
world began. Thirteen numeral orders, with seven, is the
period since the beginning of the world.”
 CHAPTER V

CENTRAL AMERICA

I.   QUICHE AND CAKCHIQUEL1

BY some accident of history the most significant literary
records of the Mayan peoples — and, in their way, of any
American stock — are not preserved to us from the builders of
the monumental cities, the Maya themselves, but from two
closely related tribes belonging to the southernmost group of
the Mayan race. The Quiche (frequently, Kiche) and the Cak-
chiquel (or Kakchiquel) dwelt in the mountains of Guatemala
overlooking the Pacific, where, except for the Nahuatlan Pipil,
to the east of them, their neighbours were other Mayan tribes
— the Tzental, the Mame, and their kindred to the west; the
Pokonchi, the Kekchi, and others to the north; and the Chorti
to the east. It is in the lands of these groups, mountain valleys
draining toward the Gulf and the Carribbean, that the ruins of
the monumental cities chiefly lie. At the time of the Conquest
their sites had long been abandoned, though it must not be sup-
posed that the tribes occupying the land were savage. On the
contrary, they lived in well-built, fortified towns, with fine
residences for the chiefs and pyramid temples for the service of
the gods; but the remains of the cities of the Conquest era have
yielded no such wealth of art as has been revealed by the ex-
ploration of the homes of the ancestral Maya, nor do the tradi-
tions of the tribes who inhabited the region at the coming of the
Spaniards throw any light upon the builders of the ancient
cities which, indeed, they seem scarcely to have known. Rather,
when the Quiche and their kindred entered the land, it appears
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157

to have been long deserted: “Only rabbits and birds were here,
they say, when they took possession of the hills and the plains,
they, our fathers and ancestors from Tulan, O my children,” —
so runs the beginning of the Cakchiquel Annals.2 These Annals,
like the Popul Vuh, or “ Sacred Book,” of the kindred Quiche,
profess to give a migration-legend of the ancestors of the tribe
and an account of the historic chiefs, but neither the one record
nor the other runs to a remote period; both point to a com-
paratively recent entrance into an abandoned country, the date
of which Brin ton would set at less than two centuries anterior
to the Conquest; nor is there any certain clue which would
associate the Quiche-Cakchiquel histories with those of the
contemporary Maya.

The relationship of the two centres of Mayan culture, Yucatec
and Guatemalan, is, however, more than merely linguistic and
racial. When the Maya of the later days of the Old Empire
were pushing northward into the peninsula, exploring and es-
tablishing cities, others of their kindred were penetrating the
mountains to the south, and the last town of the south to rise
and fall (as shown by its dated monuments) was at Quen Santo
in the Guatemalan province of Huehuetenango. Whether or
not something of the old culture was transmitted through these
groups or their descendants, whom, indeed, the Quiche and
Cakchiquel may have been, identities of mythic reference make
it certain that all Maya groups had some primitive community of
experience. Moreover, the southern tribes clearly shared with
the northern their literary and artistic bent. The story of the
defeat of the Quiche, in the Cakchiquel Annals,3 tells how the
latter slew “the son of the chief jeweller, the treasurer, the
secretary, and the chief engraver” of the Quiche monarch —
officers whose very character gives the picture of an accom-
plished society; and it may well be assumed that the literary
taste and historic feeling manifest in the Annals and the Popul
Vuh are but evidences, literary rather than graphic in char-
acter, of the genius which marks the whole Mayan race. Bras-
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158

seur de Bourbourg says4 of the Popul Fuh that “it is composed
in a Quiche of great elegance, and its author must have been
one of the princes of the royal family,” while of the Annals
(which he names Memorial de Tecpan-Atitlan, and which was
indeed, in greater part written by a noble, Don Francisco Er-
nandez Arana Xahila) he declares that “the style is varied and
picturesque and frequently contains passages of high anima-
tion.” The translations of both documents quite sustain these
opinions of their literary excellence.

Las Casas, who was as familiar as any man with the general
character of native American culture, and especially with that
of Guatemala of which he was bishop, gives a general charac-
terization of native learning in his chapter (Apologetica His-
toria, ccxxxv) on “the books and religious traditions of Guate-
mala.” In the kingdoms and republics of New Spain, he says,
“among other offices and officials, were those who acted as
chroniclers and historians. They possessed knowledge of the
origin of all things relative to religion and to the gods and their
cult, as well as of the founders of their cities, of the beginnings
of their kings and lords and seignories, of the manner of their
election and succession, of how many and what lords and
princes had passed away, of their works and actions and memo-
rable deeds, good and bad, and of whatever they had governed
well or ill; also, of their great men and good, and of strong and
valorous captains, of the wars that they had made, and of how
they had distinguished themselves. Moreover, of the first
customs and the first comers, of how they had since changed
for good or ill, and of all that pertains to history, in order that
they might have understanding and remembrance of past
events.” Furthermore, he adds, these chroniclers kept count
of the days, months, and years, and “although they had no
writing similar to ours, nevertheless they had figures and char-
acters representing all that they needed to designate, and, by
means of these, great books of such clever and ingenious art
that we may say that our letters were of no great advantage to
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159

them.” The office of chronicler, it is added, was hereditary,
or belonged to certain families.

After the Conquest many of the natives who had acquired the
alphabet adapted it to their own tongue and recorded their
histories in the new characters. Numbers of such books were
known to the Spanish writers of the sixteenth century, and it is
from these that the Popul Fuh and the Cakchiquel Annals have
survived.

II.   THE POPUL VUH5

The Popul Fuh is the most striking and instructive of the
myth-records of primitive America. Other legends are as com-
prehensive in scope, as varied in material, and as dramatic in
form; but no other, in anything like the measure of this docu-
ment, combines with these qualities the element of critical
consciousness, giving the flavour of philosophic reflection
which lifts the narrative from the level of mere tale-telling into
that of literature. Something of this character is clearly due
to the fact that it was written down after the introduction of
Christianity by an author, or authors, professing the new faith;
yet it is equally clear to a reader of our day that this is not the
whole cause, that there is in the aboriginal material itself such
an element of deliberate reflection as appears in the Aztec
rituals recorded by Sahagun and in some of the Incaic frag-
ments, though scarcely to be found elsewhere in the New World,
at least in the myths as they have been preserved to us.

The work is divided into four parts, consciously literary in
arrangement. The first recounts the creation of the earth and
of the First Peoples, together with the conflicts of the Hero
Brothers with Titan-like Earth-giants. The second part de-
picts the duel of the upper-world heroes with the nether-world
demonic powers: an elder pair of Hero Brothers are defeated,
later to be avenged by the younger Hero Brothers — the
slayers of the Earth-giants — who overcome Death in his own
lair and by his own wile. This incident of “the harrowing of
 i6o

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Hell” belongs in mythic chronology to a cycle of events earlier
in part than the gigantomachy, and it is obviously for dramatic
reasons that the longest book of the Popul Vuh is devoted to it.
With the third part the original narrative is resumed, narrating
the creation of the ancestors of the present race of men and the
rise of the Sun which now rules the world; while the fourth and
last part continues the tale, giving myths of cult origins, tribal
wars, and finally records of historic rulers, thus satisfying the
feeling for consecutiveness and completeness.

“Admirable is the account” — so the narrative opens —
“admirable is the account of the time in which it came to pass
that all was formed in heaven and upon earth, the quartering of
their signs, their measure and alignment, and the establishment
of parallels to the skies and upon the earth to the four quarters
thereof, as was spoken by the Creator and Maker, the Mother,
the Father of life and of all existence, that one by whom all
move and breathe, father and sustainer of the peace of peoples,
by whose wisdom was premeditated the excellence of all that
doth exist in the heavens, upon the earth, in lake and sea.

“Lo, all was in suspense, all was calm and silent; all was mo-
tionless, all was quiet, and wide was the immensity of the
skies.

“Lo, the first word and the first discourse. There was not
yet a man, not an animal; there were no birds nor fish nor cray-
fish; there was no wood, no stone, no bog, no ravine, neither
vegetation nor marsh; only the sky existed.

“The face of the earth was not yet to be seen; only the peace-
ful sea and the expanse of the heavens.

“Nothing was yet formed into a body; nothing was joined to
another thing; naught held itself poised; there was not a rustle,
not a sound beneath the sky. There was naught that stood
upright; there were only the quiet waters of the sea, solitary
within its bounds; for as yet naught existed.

“There were only immobility and silence in the darkness and
in the night. Alone was the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, the
 f
 PLATE XXIII

Ceremonial precinct or plaza, Quirigua. An
altar and three stelae of the Old Empire Maya type
are shown. Other monuments are still in situ on
this site, among them the “Quirigua Dragon,”
Plate I (frontispiece). After photograph by Cornell,
Lincoln.
 
 
 CENTRAL AMERICA

161

Lord, and Gucumatz, the Plumed Serpent, those who engender,
those who give being, alone upon the waters like a growing
light.

“They are enveloped in green and azure, whence is the name
Gucumatz, and their being is great wisdom. Lo, how the sky
existeth, how the Heart of the Sky existeth — for such is the
name of God, as He doth name Himself!

“ It is then that the word came to Tepeu and to Gucumatz,
in the shadows and in the night, and spake with Tepeu and
with Gucumatz. And they spake and consulted and meditated,
and they joined their words and their counsels.

“Then light came while they consulted together; and at the
moment of dawn man appeared while they planned concerning
the production and increase of the groves and of the climbing
vines, there in the shade and in the night, through that one who
is the Heart of the Sky, whose name is Hurakan.

“The Lightning is the first sign of Hurakan; the second is
the Streak of Lightning; the third is the Thunderbolt which
striketh; and these three are the Heart of the Sky.

“Then they came to Tepeu, to Gucumatz, and held counsel
touching civilized life: how seed should be formed, how light
should be produced, how the sustainer and nourisher of all.

“‘Let it be thus done. Let the waters retire and cease to
obstruct, to the end that earth exist here, that it harden itself
and show its surface, to the end that it be sown, and that the
light of day shine in the heavens and upon the earth; for we
shall receive neither glory nor honour from all that we have
created and formed until human beings exist, endowed with
sentience.’ Thus they spake while the earth was formed by
them. It is thus, veritably, that creation took place, and the
earth existed. ‘Earth,’ they said, and immediately it was
formed, i

“Like a fog or a cloud was its formation into the material
state, when, like great lobsters, the mountains appeared upon
the waters, and in an instant there were great mountains. Only

All this is plain euhemerism, for Itzamna was a deity of rain
and fertility; Yucatan, it is said, was without moisture when
he came to it; he rose from the sea; and his temples and his
tomb were by the seaside. His festival, according to Landa,
fell in Mac (March), when he was worshipped in company
with the gods of abundance. He caused the dead to rise and
cured the sick; while in his honour a temple was built with
four doors leading to the four extremities of the country, as far
as Guatemala, Tabasco, and Chiapas, this shrine being called
Kab-ul, or “the Potent Hand,” — a striking image of the sky-
deity reaching down from heaven, of which there are analogues
in Egypt and Peru. Both Landa and Lizana state that he was
the son of Hunab-Ku (“the Holy One”), “the one living and
true God, who, they said, is the greatest of the gods, and who
cannot be figured or represented because he is incorporeal. . . .
From him everything proceeds, . . . and he has a son whom
they name Hun Ytzamna.” All this indicates a deity of the
descending rains and dews, son of Father Heaven, and, through
his association with the East, giver of life, light, and knowledge.
Students of the codices believe that he is represented by “God
D ” — the aged divinity with the Roman nose and toothless
mouth, associated (as is Tlaloc) with the double-headed ser-
pent, which is clearly a sky-symbol. Perhaps, as Seler suggests,
he is the “Grandfather Above,” the Lord of life, analogous to
the Mexican Tonacatecutli.12

As has been indicated, the worship of Kukulcan,13 to whom
tradition ascribed the latest appearance of the three culture
heroes, was especially associated with Chichen Itza and
Mayapan, and perhaps with Nahua immigrations. His name,
like that of the Quiche demiurge Gucumatz, means “Plumed
Serpent” and is a precise equivalent of “Quetzalcoad” — the
first element referring directly to the long and iridescent plumes
of the quetzal. The frequency of bird-serpent symbols in Maya
 YUCATAN

135

art, regarded as emblematic of this deity, as well as images,
both in the codices and on the monuments, of the long-nosed
god himself, indicate a deep-seated and fervent worship, so
that it may indeed be an open question as to whether Kukulcan
is the pattern or the copy of Quetzalcoatl, with the probabilities
favoring the Maya source. Certainly it is significant that, as
Tozzer tells us, his name still survives among the Yucatec
Maya, while to the Lacandones he is a many-headed snake
which dwells with the great father, Nohochakyum: “ this snake
is killed and eaten only at the time of great national peril, as
during an eclipse of the moon and especially that of the sun.”
The importance of Kukulcan in the peninsula is indicated by
Landa’s description of his festival, which occurred on the
sixteenth day of Xul (October 24). Upon Kukulcan’s depart-
ure, says Landa (who clearly regarded the god as an historical
personage), there were some Indians who believed that he had
ascended into heaven, and regarding him as a god, they built
temples in his honour. After the destruction of Mayapan,
however, his feasts were kept only in the province of Mani,
“but the other districts, turn by turn, in recognition of what
was due to Kukulcan, presented each year at Mani sometimes
four, sometimes five, magnificent feather banners with which
they celebrated the fete” This festival was observed in the
following manner: After fasts and abstinences, the lords and
priests of Mani assembled before the multitude; and on the
evening of the festal day, together with a great number of mum-
mers, they issued from the palace of the prince, proceeding
slowly to the temple of Kukulcan, which had been properly
adorned. When they had reached it and had prayed, they
erected their banners, setting forth their idols on a carpet of
leafage; and having lighted a new fire, they burned incense
in many places, making oblations of meat cooked without
seasoning and of drink made from beans and the seeds of
gourds. The lords and all who had observed the fast remained
there five days and five nights, praying, burning copal, and
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

136

performing sacred dances, during which period the mummers
went from the house of one noble to that of another, performing
their acts and receiving the gifts offered them. At the end
of five days they carried their donations to the temple, where
they shared all with the lords, the singers, the priests, and the
dancers; and after this the banners and idols (doubtless house-
hold gods) were taken again to the palace of the prince, whence
each returned to his own house. “They say and hold for certain
that Kukulcan descended from the sky the last day of the feast
and personally received the sacrifices, the penitences, and the
offerings made in his honour.”

III.   YUCATEC DEITIES

For the names of the Maya gods we are mainly indebted to
sparse notices in the works of Landa and Lizana, who, in ob-
literating native writings, destroyed far more than they pre-
served. Landa14 gives a general picture of the aboriginal
religion, indicating a ritual not less elaborate than the Mexican,
though with far less human bloodshed. “They had,” he says,
“a great number of idols and of sumptuous temples. Besides
the ordinary shrines, princes, priests, and chief men had ora-
tories with household idols, where they made special prayers
and offerings. They had as much devotion for Cozumel and
the wells of the Chichen Itza as we for pilgrimages to Rome and
Jerusalem; and they went to visit them and make offerings
as we go to holy places. . . . They had such a number of idols
that their gods did not suffice them; for there was not an animal
nor a reptile of which they did not make images, and they
formed them also in the likeness of their gods and goddesses.
They had some idols of stone, but in small number, and others,
of lesser size, of wood, though not so many as of earthenware.
The idols in wood were esteemed to such a degree as to be
counted for inheritances, and in them they had the greatest
confidence. They were not at all ignorant that their idols were
 M
 PLATE XX

W

Tablet of the Foliated Cross, Palenque. This
cross, like that shown in Plate XX (B), rests upon a
monstrous head, doubtless representing the Under-
world, and is surmounted by the quetzal, the symbol
of rain and vegetation. It is possible that the
greater of the two human figures represents a deity,
the lesser a priest, or that both are divinities as in
the analogous figures of the codices (cf. Plate IX,
upper figure). After drawing in Maudsley [c],
Vol. IV.

(B)

Tablet of the Cross, Palenque. The cross was
encountered as an object of worship on the Island
of Cozumel by the first-coming Spaniards. Cruci-
form figures of several types are of frequent occur-
rence as cosmic symbols in Mexican and Mayan
art. With this plate and with Plate XX (A) should
be compared Plates VI and IX. After drawing in
Maudsley [c], Vol. IV.

(O

Tablet of the Sun, Palenque. The two cary-
atid-like figures beneath the solar symbol doubtless
represent the upbearers of the heavens (cf. Plate
IX, lower figure). After drawing in Maudsley [c],
Vol. IV.
 
 I
 
 (
 
 
 YUCATAN

137

only the work of their own hands, dead things and without
divinity, but they venerated them for the sake of what they
represented and because of the rites with which they had
consecrated them.”

Among the deities mentioned by Landa are the Chacs, or
“gods of abundance,” whose feasts were held in the spring of
the year in connexion with the four Bacab, or deities of the
Quarters; and again in association with Itzamna at the great
March festival designed to obtain water for the crops, when the
hearts of every kind of wild animal and reptile were offered in
sacrifice. The Chacs were evidently rain-gods, like the Mexi-
can Tlaloque, with a ruler, Chac, corresponding to Tlaloc. The
name was likewise applied to four old men annually chosen to
assist the priests in the festivals, and from Landa’s descrip-
tions of the parts played by them it is clear that they repre-
sented the genii of the Quarters.

Other divinities who are named include Ekchuah (also men-
tioned by Cogolludo and Las Casas), to whom travellers prayed
and burned copal: “At night, wherever they rested, they
erected three small stones, depositing upon each of these some
grains of their incense, while before them they placed three
other flat stones on which they put more incense, entreating
the god which they name Ekchuah that he would deign to
bring them safely home.” There were, again, medicine-gods,
Cit-Bolon-Tum and Ahau-Chamahez, names which Brasseur de
Bourbourg15 interprets as meaning respectively “Boar-with-
the-Nine-Tusks” and “ Lord-of-the-Magic-Tooth.” There
were gods of the chase; gods of fisher folk; gods of maize, as
Yum Kaax (“Lord of Harvests”), of cocoa; and no doubt of
all other food plants. Of the annual feasts, the most signifi-
cant appear to have been the New Year’s consecration of the
idols in the month Pop (July); the great medicine festival, with
devotion to hunters’ and fishermen’s gods, in Zip (September);
the festival of Kukulcan in Xul (October); the fabrication of
new idols in Mol (December); the Ocna, or renovation of the
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138

temple in honour of the gods of the fields, in Yax (January);
the interesting expiation for bloodshed — “for they regarded
as abominable all shedding of blood apart from sacrifice” — in
Zac (February); the rain-prayer to Itzamna and the Chacs,
in March (mentioned above); and the Pax (May) festival in
which the Nacon, or war-chief, was honoured, and at which
the Holkan-Okot, or “Dance of the Warriors,” was probably
the notable feature. The war-god is represented in the codices
with a black line upon his face, supposed to represent war-
paint, and is often shown as presiding over the body of a sacri-
ficial victim; while with him is associated not only the death-
god, Ahpuch, but another grim deity, the “Black Captain,”
Ek Ahau.

Celestial divinities were probably numerous in the Maya
pantheon, as was almost inevitable in view of the extraordi-
nary development of astronomical observation. Xaman Ek
was the North Star, while Venus was Noh Ek, the Great Star.
The Sun, according to Lizana,16 was worshipped at Izamal as
Kinich-Kakmo, the “Fiery-Visaged Sun”; and the macaw was
his symbol, for, they said, “the Sun descends at midday to
consume the sacrifice as the macaw descends in plumage of
many colours.” In view of all the fire thus came at noon upon
the altars, after which the priest prophesied what should come
to pass, especially by way of pestilence, famine, and death.
“The Yucatec have an excessive fear of death,” says Landa,
“ as may be seen in all their rites with which they honour their
gods, which have no other end than to obtain health and life
and their daily bread”; and he continues with a description of
the abode of blessed souls, a land of food, drink, and sweet
savours, where “there is a tree which they call Yaxche, of an
admirable freshness under the shady branches of which they
will enjoy eternal pleasure. . . . The pains of a wicked-life
consist in a descent to a place still lower which they call Mit-
nal, there to be tormented by demons and to suffer the tortures
of hunger, cold, famine, and sorrow.” The lord of this hell is
 YUCATAN

139

Hanhau; and the future life, good or bad, is eternal, for the
life of souls has no end. “They hold it as certain that the souls
of those who hang themselves go to paradise, there to be re-
ceived by Ixtab, goddess of the hanged”; and many ended
their lives in this manner for but light reason such as a disap-
pointment or an illness.

The image of Ixtab, with body limp and head in a loop, as if
hanged, is one of those recognized in the codices; for in default
of mythic tales, few of which are preserved concerning the
Yucatec gods, these codex drawings and the monumental
images furnish our main clues to the Maya pantheon. Follow-
ing the suggestion of Schellhas,17 it is customary to designate
the codical deities (nameless, or uncertainly named) by letters.
Thus, God A is represented with visible vertebrae and skull
head, and is therefore identified as the death-god, named
Hanhau in Landa’s account, Ahpuch by Hernandez, and Yum
Cimil (“Lord of Death”) by the Yucatec of today. Death is
occasionally shown as an owl-headed deity, and is also asso-
ciated with the moan-bird (a kind of screech-owl), with the god
of war, and with a being that is dubiously identified as a
divinity of frost and of sin. God B, whose image occurs most
frequently of all in the codices, and who is represented with
protruding teeth, a pendulous nose, and lolling tongue, is
closely connected with the serpent and with symbols of the
meteorological elements and of the cardinal points; and is re-
garded as representing Kukulcan. God C, the “god with the
ornamented face,” is a sky-deity, tentatively identified with
the North Star, or perhaps with the constellation of the Little
Bear. God D, the old divinity with the Roman nose and the
toothless jaws, is regarded by Schellhas as a god of the moon
or of the night, although in him other scholars see Itzamna, re-
garded as a sun-deity. God E is the maize-god, probably Yum
Kaax, or “Lord of Harvests”; God F is the deity of war; and
with him is sometimes associated God M, the “black god
with the red lips,” perhaps Ekchuah, the divinity of merchants
 140

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

and travellers, for war and commerce are connected in the New
World as in the Old.

These seven deities are those of most frequent occurrence
in the codices, though the full list, which surely gives a general
picture of the Maya pantheon, includes also God G, the sun-god
God H, the Chicchan-god (or serpent-deity); God I, a water-
goddess; God K, the “god with the ornamented nose”; God L,
the “old black god,” perhaps related to M; God N, the “god
of the end of the year”; God O, a goddess with the face of an
old woman; and God P, a frog-god. Others are animal deities,
— the dog, jaguar, vulture, tortoise, and, in differing shapes
of representation, the panther, deer, peccary, bat, and many
forms of birds and animals.

Not a few of these ancient deities hold among the Maya of
today something of their ancient dignity: they are slightly
degraded, not utterly overthrown by the intervention of
Catholic Christianity. At least this is the picture given by
Tozzer as result of his researches among the Yucatac villagers.
According to them, he says,18 there are seven heavens above
the earth, each pierced by a hole at its center. A giant ceiba,
growing in the exact center of the earth, rears its branches
through the holes of the heavens until it reaches the seventh,
where lives El Gran Dios of the Spaniards; and it is by means
of this tree that the spirits of the dead ascend from heaven to
heaven. Below this topmost Christianized heaven, dwell the
spirits, under the rule of El Gran Dios, which are none other than
the ancient Maya gods. In the sixth heaven are the bearded
old men, the Nukuchyumchakob, or Yumchakob, white-haired
and very fond of smoking, who are the lords of rain and the
protectors of human beings — apparently the Chacs of the
earlier chroniclers, though the description of them would seem
to imply that Kukulcan is of their number; perhaps originally
he was their lord; now they receive their orders from El Gran
Dios.

In the fifth heaven above dwell the protecting spirits of the
 YUCATAN

141

fields and the forests; in the fourth the protectors of animals;
in the third the spirits ill-disposed toward men; in the second
the lords of the four winds; while in the first above the earth
reside the Yumbalamob, for the special protection of Christians.
These latter are invisible during the day, but at night they sit
beside the crosses reared at the entrances of the pueblos, one
for each of the cardinal points, protecting the villagers from
the dangers of the forest. With obsidian knives they cut
through the wind, and make sounds by which they signal to
their comrades stationed at other entrances to the town.
Truly, this description answers astonishingly to the Aztec
lord of the crossroads, Tezcatlipoca.

Below the earth is Kisin, the earthquake, the evil one, who
resents the chill rains sent down by the Yumchakob, and raises
a wind to clear the sky. The spirits of suicides dwell here also,
and all souls excepting those of war-slain men and women dead
of child-birth (which go directly to heaven) are doomed for a
time to this underworld realm.

Other diminished deities are Ahkinshok, the owner of the
days; the guardians of the bees; the spirit of newfire; Ahkushtal,
of birth; Ahmakiq, who locks up the crop-destroying winds;
patrons of medicine; and a crowd of workers of ill to men,
among them the Shtabai, serpentiform demons who issue from
their cavernous abodes and in female form snare men to ruin.
Paqok, on the other hand, wanders abroad at night and attacks
women. The Yoyolche are also night-walkers; their step is
half a league, and they shake the house as they pass.

Tozzer makes the interesting observation that in many cases,
where among the Maya is found a class of spirits, the purely
heathen Lacandones recognize a single god. Thus, to the
Nukuchyumchakob of the Maya corresponds the Lacandone
Nohochakyum, who is the Great Father and chief god of their
religion, having as his servants the spirits of the east, the con-
stellations, and the thunder. At the end of the world he will
wear around his body the serpent Hapikem, who will draw
 142

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

people to him by his breath and slay them. Nohochakyum is
one of four brothers, apparently lords of the four quarters. As
is usual in such groups, he of the east is pre-eminent. Usukun,
one of the brothers, is a cave-dweller, having the earthquake for
his servant; he is regarded with dread, and his image is set
apart from the other gods. There are a number of other gods
and goddesses of the Lacandones, several of which are clearly
identifiable as the same as the Maya deities described by Landa
and other early writers. As a whole, the pantheon is a humane
one; it lacks that quality of terror which makes hideous the
congregation of the Aztec deities. Most of the gods, Maya and
Lacandone, are kindly-disposed toward men, and doubtless it
was this kindliness reflected back which kept the Maya altars
relatively free of human blood.

IV.   RITES AND SYMBOLS

No region in America appears to have furnished so many or
such striking analogies to Christian ritual and symbolism as
did the Mayan. It was here, on the island of Cozumel, that
the cross was an object of veneration even at the first coming
of the Spaniard; and when the rites of the natives were studied
by the missionaries, they were found to include many that
seemed to be Christian in inspiration. Bishop Landa 19 de-
scribes at length the Yucatec baptism, which was designated
by a name equivalent, he says, to renascor—“for in the Yucatec
tongue zihil means to be reborn” — and which was celebrated
in a complex festival, godfather and all. The name of the rite
was Em-Ku, or “Descent of God”; and, he adds, “They be-
lieve that they receive therefrom a disposition inclined to good
conduct and that it guarantees them from all temptations of
the devil with respect to temporal things, while by means of
this rite and a good life they hope to secure salvation.” Sacra-
ments of various sorts, confession of sins, penitence, penance,
and pilgrimages to holy shrines were other ritual similarities
 YUCATAN

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.
 
 
 MEXICO

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
 YUCATAN

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.

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
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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
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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
 MEXICO

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