Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 8

* For a brief account of Sahagun and the fortunes of his book, see Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States_, iii. 231, note 61. The references here to Sahagun's own work are to the translation by MM. Jourdanet and Simeon, published by Ma.s.son, Paris, 1880. Bernal Diaz is referred to in the French edition published by M. Lemerre in 1879.

** _Veridique Histoire_, chap, xcii.

As to the mythical habits of the Aztec Olympians in general, Sahagun observes that "they were friends of disguise, and changed themselves often into birds or savage beasts". Hence he, or his informants, infer that the G.o.ds have originally been necromancers or medicine-men, now worshipped after death; a natural inference, as magical feats of shape-shifting are commonly ascribed "everywhere to witches and warlocks". As a matter of fact, the Aztec G.o.ds, though bedizened with the attributes of mortal conjurors, and with the fur and feathers of totems, are, for the most part, the departmental deities of polytheism, each ruling over some province of nature or of human activity. Combined with these are deities who, in their origin, were probably ideal culture-heroes, like Yehl, or Qat, or Prometheus. The long and tedious myths of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca appear to contain memories of a struggle between the G.o.ds or culture-heroes of rival races. Such struggles were natural, and necessary, perhaps, before a kind of syncretism and a general tolerance could unite in peace the deities of a realm composed of many tribes originally hostile. In a cultivated people, made up out of various conquered and amalgamated tribes, we must expect polytheism, because their Olympus is a kind of divine representative a.s.sembly. Anything like monotheism, in such a state, must be the result of philosophic reflection. "A laughable matter it is,"

says Bernal Diaz, "that in each province the Indians have their G.o.ds, and the G.o.ds of one province or town are of no profit to the people of another. Thus have they an infinite number of idols, to each of which they sacrifice."*

* Bernal Diaz, chap. xcii.

He might have described, in the same words, the local G.o.ds of the Egyptian nomes, for a similar state of things preceded, and to some extent survived, the syncretic efforts of Egyptian priesthood.

Meanwhile, the _Teocallis_, or temples of Mexico, gave hospitable shelter to this mixed mult.i.tude of divinities. Hard by Huitzilopochtli was Tezcatlipoca (Tezcatepuca, Bernal calls him), whose chapel "stank worse than all the shambles of Castile". He had the face of a bear and shining eyes, made of mirrors called _Tezcut_. He was understood by Bernal to be the Mexican Hades, or warden of the dead. Not far off was an idol, half-human and half-lizard, "the G.o.d of fruits and harvest, I remember not his name," and all his chapel walls dripped blood.

In the medley of such a pantheon, it is difficult to arrange the deities on any principle of order. Beginning with Huitzilopochtli, as perhaps the most famous, it is to be observed that he indubitably became and was recognised as a G.o.d of battles, and that he was also the guide and protector who (according to the Aztec painted scriptures) led the wandering fathers through war and wilderness to the promised land of Mexico. His birth was one of those miraculous conceptions which we have seen so frequently in the myths and _marchen_ of the lower and the higher races. It was not by swallowing a berry, as in Finland, but by cherishing in her bosom a flying ball of feathers that the devout woman, Coatlicue, became the mother of Huitzilopochtli. All armed he sprang to the light, like Athene from the head of Zeus, and slew his brothers that had been born by natural generation. From that day he received names of dread, answering to _Deimos_ and _Phobos_.*

* Clavigero, _Staria Ant. del Mexico_, ii. 17, 19; Bancroft, iii. 290.

By another myth, euhemeristic in character, Huitziton (the name is connected with _huitzilin_, the humming-bird) was the leader of the Aztecs in their wanderings. On his death or translation, his skull gave oracles, like the head of Bran in the Welsh legend. Sahagun, in the first page of his work, also euhemerises Huitzilopochtli, and makes him out to have been a kind of Hercules _double_ with a medicine-man; but all this is mere conjecture. The position of Huitzilopochtli as a war-G.o.d, guardian and guide through the wilderness is perfectly established, and it is nearly as universally agreed that his name connects him with the humming-bird, which his statue wore on its left foot. He also carried a green bunch of plumage upon his head, shaped like the bill of a small bird Now, as J. G. Muller has pointed out, the legend and characteristics of Huitzilopochtli are reproduced, by a coincidence startling even in mythology, in the legend and characteristics of Picus in Latium. Just as Huitzilopochtli wore the humming-bird indicated by his name on his foot, so Picus was represented with the woodp.e.c.k.e.r of his name on his head.*

* J. G. Muller, _Uramerik. Rel_., p. 595.

On the subject of Picus one may consult Ovid, _Metamorph_, xiv. 314.

Here the story runs that Circe loved Picus, whom she met in the woods.

He disdained her caresses, and she turned him into the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, "with his garnet head". "Et fulvo cervix pnecingitur auro."

According to Virgil (J. Sn., vii. 187), the statue of this Picus was settled in an old Laurentian temple or palace of unusual sanct.i.ty, surrounded by images of the earlier G.o.ds. The woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, _pici_, are known _Martio cognomine_, says Pliny (10, 18, 20, -- 40), and so connected with the Roman war-G.o.d, _Picas Martius_.

In his Romische Mythologie, i. 336, 337, Preller makes no use of these materials for comparison, though the conduct and character of the other beast of war, the wolf, as guide and protector of the Hirpi (wolves), and worshipped by them with wolf-dances, is an obvious survival of totemism. The Picini have their animal leader, Picus, the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the Hirpi have their animal leader, the wolf, just as the humming-bird was the leader of the Aztecs.

In these Latin legends, as in the legends of Huit-zilopochtli, the basis, as J. G. Muller sees, is the bird--the humming-bird in one case, the woodp.e.c.k.e.r in the other. The bird is then euhemerised or brought into anthropomorphic form. It is fabled that he was originally a man (like Picus before Circe enchanted him to a bird's shape), or, in Mexico, a man named Huitziton, who during the Aztec migrations heard and pursued a little bird that cried "Tinni," that is, "Follow, follow".*

Now we are all familiar with cla.s.sical legends of races that were guided by a bird or beast to their ultimate seats. Muller mentions Battus and the raven, the Chalcidians and the dove, the Cretans and the dolphin, which was Apollo, Cadmus and the cow; the Hirpi, or wolves, who followed the wolf. In the same way the Picini followed the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, _Picus_, from whom they derived their name, and carried a woodp.e.c.k.e.r on their banners. Thus we may connect both the Sabine war-G.o.ds and the bird of the Mexican war-G.o.ds with the many guiding and protecting animals which occur in fable. Now a guiding and protecting animal is almost a synonym for a totem. That the Sabine woodp.e.c.k.e.r had been a totem may be pretty certainly established on the evidence of Plutarch. The people called by his name (Picini) declined, like totemists everywhere, to eat their holy bird, in this case the woodp.e.c.k.e.r.**

* Bancroft, iii. 69, note, quoting Torquemada.

** Quoest. Rom., xxi.

The inference is that the humming-bird whose name enters into that of Huitzilopochtli, and whose feathers were worn on his heel, had been the totem of an Aztec kindred before Huitzilopochtli, like Picus, was anthropomorphised. On the other hand, if Huitzilopochtli was once the Baiame of the Aztecs, their Guide in their wanderings, he might, in myth, be mixed up with a totem or other worshipful animal. "Before this G.o.d was represented in human form, he was merely a little humming-bird, Huitziton; but as the anthropomorphic processes advanced, the bird became an attribute, emblem, or symbol of the deity."* If Huitzilopochtli is said to have given the Aztecs fire, that boon is usually regarded by many races, from Normandy to Australia, as the present given to men by a bird; for example, the fire-crested wren.**

Thus understood, the ornithological element in Huitzilopochtli is purely totemic. While accepting the reduction of him to a hummingbird, M.

Reville ingeniously concludes that he was "a derivative form of the sun, and especially of the sun of the fair season". If the bird was worshipped, it was not as a totem, but as "the divine messenger of the spring," like "the plover among the Latins".*** Attempts have been made, with no great success, to discover the cosmical character of the G.o.d from the nature of his feasts.

* J. G. Muller, op. cit. i. p. 596.

** Bosquet, La Normandie Merveilleuse, Paris, 1845; Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i.; Kuhn, Herabkunft, p. 109; Journal Anthrop. Inst., November, 1884; Sproat, Savage Life (the cuttlefish), p. 178; Bancroft, iii. 100.

*** Hibbert Lectures, 1884, English trans., pp. 54, 55. The woodp.e.c.k.e.r seems a better Latin example than the plover.

The Mexican calendar, "the Aztec year," as described at considerable length by Sahagun, was a succession of feasts, marked by minute and elaborate rites of a magical character. The G.o.ds of rain were frequently propitiated, so was the G.o.ddess of maize, the mountain G.o.d, the mother of the G.o.ds, and many other divinities. The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a man for male G.o.ds, of a woman for each G.o.ddess. The latter victims were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in each case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the G.o.d with the sacrifice, and of both with the officiating priest. The connection was emphasised by the priest's wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims, just as in Greece, Egypt and a.s.syria the fawn-skin, or bull-hide, or goat-skin, or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an image of the G.o.d was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated.*

* Copious details as to the sacraments, human sacrifices, paste figures of G.o.ds, and ident.i.ty of G.o.d and victim, will be found in Sahagun's second and third books. The _magical_ character of the ritual deserves particular attention. See many examples of G.o.ds made of flour and eaten in Liebrecht's _Zur Volkskunde_, "Der aufgegessene Gott," p. 436. It will be noted that the feasts of the corn G.o.ddess, like the rites of Demeter, were celebrated with torch-dances. The ritual of the month Quecholli (iii. 33, 144) is a mere medicine hunt, as Tanner and the Red Indians call it, a procuring of magical virtue for the arrows, as in the Zuni mysteries to- day. Compare _Report of Bureau of Ethnology_, vol. ii., "Zuni Prey G.o.ds".

From the special ritual of Huitzilopochtli Mr. Tylor conjectures that this "inextricable compound parthenogenetic G.o.d may have been originally" a nature deity whose life and death were connected with the year".* This theory is based on the practice at the feast called Panquetzaliztli.** "His paste idol was shot through with an arrow," says Mr. Tylor, "and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten; wherefore the ceremony was called _Teoqualo_, or 'G.o.d-eating,' and this was a.s.sociated with the winter solstice." M. Reville says that this feast coincided with our month of December, the beginning of the cold and dry season, Huitzilopochtli would die with the verdure, the flowers and all the beauteous adornments of spring and summer; but like Adonis, like Osiris, and so many other solar deities, he only died to live and to return again. Before identifying him with the sun, it may be remarked that the Aztec feast of the return of the G.o.ds was celebrated in the twelfth month and the paste sacrifice of Huitzilopochtli was in the fifteenth.

There were eighteen months in the Aztec year, and the year began on the 2nd of February. The return of the G.o.ds was, therefore, in September, and the paste sacrifice of Huitzilopochtli in December. Clearly the G.o.d who dies in the winter solstice cannot be thought to "return" late in September. Huitzilopochtli had another feast on the first day of the ninth month, that is, between June and July, when much use was made of floral decorations, and "they offered him the first flowers of the year," although flowers were used two months earlier, in the seventh month and in the fourth month.***

* _Primitive Culture_, ii. 307; Clavigero, _Messico_, ii.

17, 81.

** Sahagun, ii. 15, and Appendix, iii. 2, 3.

*** Ibid. i. ii 9.

But the Mexican calendar is hard to deal with. Muller places the feasts of Huitzilopochtli in the middle of May, the middle of August, and the middle of December.* He combines his facts with a legend which made Huitzilopochtli to be the son of the G.o.ddess of vegetation. J. G.

Muller's whole argument is learned and acute, but errs probably in attempting to extract a consecutive symbolical sense out of the chaos of myth. Thus he writes: "When the myth makes the G.o.d the son of the mother of plants, it divides his essence from that of his mother, and thus Huitzilopochtli, however closely akin to the plant world, is not the plant world itself ". This is to consider more curiously than the myth-makers. The name of the patron G.o.ddess of the flower-wearers in feasts was Coatlicue or Coatlan, which is also the name of the mother of Huitzilopochtli; its meaning is "serpent petticoated".**

* Uramerik. Rel. v. p. 602.

** Sahagun, ii. 8

When Muller goes on to identify Huitzilopochtli with the bunch of feathers that fell into his mother's breast before his birth, and that again with the humming-bird, and that again with the honey-sucking bird as the "means of fructifying the plants," and, finally, with the _mannliche befrwchtende Naturkraft_, we have left myth far behind, and are in a region of symbolism and abstract thought, where one conjecture is as good as another. The hypothesis is that men, feeling a sense of religious reverence for the germinal force in Nature, took the humming-bird for its emblem, and so evolved the myth of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, who at once fructifies and is born from the bosom of vernal Nature. It would be rash and wrong to deny that such ideas are mixed in the medley of myth. But, as a rule, the sacred animal (as the humming-bird) is sacred first in itself, probably as a totem or as a guide and protector, and the symbolical sense is a forced interpretation put later on the facts.* We can hardly go farther, with safety, than the recognition of mingled aspects and elements in Huitzilopochtli as the totem, the tribal G.o.d, the departmental war-G.o.d, and possibly he is the G.o.d of the year's progress and renewal. His legend and ritual are a conglomerate of all these things, a ma.s.s of ideas from many stages of culture.

An abstract comparatively brief must suffice for the other Aztec deities.

Tezcatlipoca is a G.o.d with considerable pretensions to an abstract and lofty divinity. His appearance was not prepossessing; his image, as Bernal has described it, wore the head of a bear, and was covered with tiny mirrors.** Various attributes, especially the mirror and a golden ear, showed him forth as the beholder of the conduct of men and the hearer of prayer. He was said, while he lived on earth, to have been a kind of Ares in the least amiable aspect of the G.o.d, a maker of wars and discord.*** Wealth and power were in his gift. He was credited with ability to destroy the world when he chose. Seats were consecrated to him in the streets and the public places; on these might no man sit down.

* Compare Maspero on "Egyptian Beast-G.o.ds," Rev. de l'Hist.

des Rel., vol. i. and chapter postea, on "Egyptian Divine Myths".

**The name means "shining mirror". Acosta makes him the G.o.d of famine and pestilence (p. 353).

*** Sahagun, i. 3.

He was one of the two G.o.ds whose extraordinary birth, and death by "happy despatch," that their vitality might animate the motionless sun, have already been described.* Tezcatlipoca, like most of the other G.o.ds, revived, and came back from the sky to earth. At a place called Tulla he encountered another G.o.d or medicine-man, Quetzalcoatl, and their legends become inextricably entangled in tales of trickery, animal metamorphosis, and perhaps in vague memories of tribal migrations.

Throughout Tezcatlipoca brought grief on the people called Toltecs, of whom Quetzalcoatl was the divine culture-hero.** His statues, if we may believe Acosta, did him little credit. "In Cholula, which is a commonwealth of Mexico, they worship a famous idol, which was the G.o.d of merchandise.... It had the forme of a man, but the visage of a little bird with a red bill and above a combe full of wartes."***

* _Antea_, "Myths of the Origins of Things ".

** Sahagnn, iii. 5, 6.

*** Acosta, _Nalurall and Morall Historic of the East and West Indies_, London, 1604.

A ready way of getting a view of the Mexican Pantheon is to study Sahagun's two books on the feasts of the G.o.ds, with their ritual. It will become manifest that the worship was a worship, on the whole, of departmental G.o.ds of the elements, of harvest, of various human activities, such as love and commerce, and war and agriculture. The nature of the worship, again, was highly practical. The ceremonies, when not mere offerings of human flesh, were commonly representations on earth of desirable things which the G.o.ds were expected to produce in the heavenly sphere. The common type of all such magical ceremonies, whereby like is expected to produce like, has been discussed in the remarks on magic (chapter iv.). The black smoke of sacrifice generates clouds; the pouring forth of water from a pitcher (as in the Attic Thesmophoria) induces the G.o.ds to pour forth rain. Thus in Mexico the rain-G.o.d (Tlaloc, G.o.d of waters) was propitiated with sacrifices of children.

"If the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be abundant."* The G.o.d of the maize, again (Cinteotl, son of the maize-G.o.ddess), had rites resembling those of the Greek Pyanepsion and Eiresione. The Aztecs used to make an image of the G.o.d, and offer it all manner of maize and beans.** Curiously enough, the Greeks also regarded their Pyanepsion as a bean-feast. A more remarkable a.n.a.logy is that of the Peruvian Mama Cora, the figure of a G.o.ddess made of maize, which was asked "if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the next year," and of which the purpose was, "that the seed of the maize may not perish".*** This corn image of the corn G.o.ddess, preserved through all the year and replaced in the next year by a fresh image, is the Attic (--------), a branch of olive hung with a loaf and with all the fruits of the season, and set up to stand for all the year in front of each house. "And it remains for a year, and when it is dry and withered next year they make a fresh one."****

* Sahagun. ii. 2, 3.

** Ibid., ii. 4, 24.

*** Acosta, Hist Nat., 1604, p. 413.

**** See Schol. in Aristoph. Plut., 1054, and other texts, quoted by Mannhardt, _Arntike Waldund Feld Cultus_, ii. 221, note 3.