European eye-witnesses of Mexican ritual--Diaz, his account
of temples and Gods__Sahagun, his method--Theories of the
god Huitzilopochtli--Totemistic and other elements in his
image and legend--Illustrations from Latin religion--
"God-eating"--The calendar--Other gods--Their feasts and cruel
ritual--Their composite character--Parallels from ancient
classical peoples--Moral aspects of Aztec gods.
The religion of the Mexicans was a compound of morality and cruelty
so astonishing that its two aspects have been explained as the
contributions of two separate races. The wild Aztecs from the north are
credited with having brought to a high pitch of organised ritual the
ferocious customs of the Red Indians. The tortures which the tribes
inflicted on captives taken in war were transmuted into the cannibal
sacrifices and orgies of bloodshed with which the Aztec temples reeked.
The milder elements, again, the sense of sin which found relief in
confession and prayer, are assigned to the influence of Mayas, and
especially of Toltecs, a shadowy and perhaps an imaginary people. Our
ignorance of Mexican history before the Spanish conquest is too deep to
make any such theory of the influence of race on religion in Mexico more
than merely plausible. The facts of ritual and of myth are better known,
thanks to the observations of such an honest soldier as Bernal Diaz
and such a learned missionary as Sahagun. The author of the _Historia
General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana_ was a Spanish Franciscan, and one
of the earliest missionaries (1529) in Mexico. He himself describes the
method by which he collected his information about the native religion.
He summoned together the chief men of one of the provinces, who,
in turn, chose twelve old men well seen in knowledge of the Mexican
practices and antiquities. Several of them were also scholars in
the European sense, and had been taught Latin. The majority of the
commission collected and presented "pictures which were the writings
formerly in use among them," and the "grammarians" or Latin-learned
Aztecs wrote in European characters and in Aztec the explanations
of these designs. When Sahagun changed his place of residence, these
documents were again compared, re-edited and enlarged by the assistance
of the native gentlemen in his new district, and finally the whole was
passed through yet a third "sieve," as Sahagun says, in the city of
Mexico. The completed manuscript had many ups and downs of fortune, but
Sahagun's book remains a source of almost undisputed authenticity.
Probably no dead religion whose life was among a people ignorant of
syllabaries or of the alphabet is presented to us in a more trustworthy
form than the religion of Mexico. It is necessary, however, to discount
the _theories_ of Sahagun and his converts, who though they never heard
of Euhemerus, habitually applied the euhemeristic doctrine to their
facts. They decided that the gods of the Aztecs had once been living men
and conjurors, worshipped after their decease. It is possible, too, that
a strain of Catholic piety has found its way into the long prayers of
the heathen penitents, as reported by Sahagun.* Sahagun gives us a full
account of the Mexican mythology. What the gods, as represented by
idols and adored in ritual, were like, we learn from a gallant Catholic
soldier, Bernal Diaz.** "Above the altars," he writes, "were two shapes
like giants, wondrous for height and hugeness. The first on the right
was Huichilobos (Huitzilopochtli), their god of war. He had a big head
and trunk, his eyes great and terrible, and so inlaid with precious
stones that all his head and body shone with stars thereof. Great snakes
of gold and fine stones were girdled about his flanks; in one hand he
held a bow, and arrows in the other, and a little idol called his page
stood by his side.... Thereby also were braziers, wherein burned the
hearts of three Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the
smoke of them and the savour of incense were the sacrifice. The walls of
this oratory were black and dripping with gouts of blood, and likewise
the floor that stank horribly." Such was the aspect of a Mexican shrine
before the Spaniards introduced their faith.
* 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 Masson, 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 gods 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 gods, 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 gods 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 assembly. 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 gods,
and the gods 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 gods 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 multitude 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 god 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 god 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 _maerchen_ 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-god, 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. Mueller 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 woodpecker 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 woodpecker, "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 sanctity,
surrounded by images of the earlier gods. The woodpeckers, _pici_,
are known _Martio cognomine_, says Pliny (10, 18, 20, Sec. 40), and so
connected with the Roman war-god, _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 woodpecker,
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. Mueller sees, is the bird--the humming-bird in one case,
the woodpecker 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 classical legends of races that were guided
by a bird or beast to their ultimate seats. Mueller 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 woodpecker, _Picus_,
from whom they derived their name, and carried a woodpecker on their
banners. Thus we may connect both the Sabine war-gods and the bird of
the Mexican war-gods 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 woodpecker 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 woodpecker.**
* 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
god 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 god
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
woodpecker 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 gods of rain were frequently
propitiated, so was the goddess of maize, the mountain god, the mother
of the gods, 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 gods, of a woman for
each goddess. 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 god 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 Assyria 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 god 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 gods, and identity of god 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 gods 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 goddess, 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 Gods".
From the special ritual of Huitzilopochtli Mr. Tylor conjectures
that this "inextricable compound parthenogenetic god 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 'god-eating,' and this
was associated 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 gods 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 gods was, therefore, in September,
and the paste sacrifice of Huitzilopochtli in December. Clearly the god
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. Mueller 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 goddess of vegetation. J. G.
Mueller'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 god 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 goddess 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 Mueller 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
_maennliche 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 god, the departmental war-god, and possibly he is
the god of the year's progress and renewal. His legend and ritual are
a conglomerate of all these things, a mass of ideas from many stages of
culture.
An abstract comparatively brief must suffice for the other Aztec
deities.
Tezcatlipoca is a god 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 god, 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-Gods," Rev. de l'Hist.
des Rel., vol. i. and chapter postea, on "Egyptian Divine
Myths".
**The name means "shining mirror". Acosta makes him the god
of famine and pestilence (p. 353).
*** Sahagun, i. 3.
He was one of the two gods 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 gods,
revived, and came back from the sky to earth. At a place called Tulla he
encountered another god 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 god
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 gods, with their ritual. It
will become manifest that the worship was a worship, on the whole,
of departmental gods 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 gods 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 gods to pour forth rain. Thus in Mexico the rain-god
(Tlaloc, god 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 god
of the maize, again (Cinteotl, son of the maize-goddess), had rites
resembling those of the Greek Pyanepsion and Eiresione. The Aztecs
used to make an image of the god, and offer it all manner of maize and
beans.** Curiously enough, the Greeks also regarded their Pyanepsion
as a bean-feast. A more remarkable analogy is that of the Peruvian Mama
Cora, the figure of a goddess 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 goddess, 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.
Children were sacrificed in Mexico to this deity. In the rites of a
goddess of harvest, as has been said, torches were borne by the dancers,
as in the Eleusinia; and in European and Oriental folk-lore.1 Demeter
was the Greek harvest goddess, in whose rites torches had a place. One
of her names is Demeter Erinnys. Mr. Max Mueller recognises Erinnys as
the dawn. Schwartz connects Demeter Erinnys with the thunderstorm. The
torch in the hand of Demeter is the lightning, according to Schwartz. It
is interesting, whether the torch be the torch of dawn, or of storm, or
neither, to see the prevalence of these torch festivals in rural rites
in Mexico, Greece and modern Europe. The idea of the peasants is that
the lights scare away evil spirits.** In the Mexican rite, a woman,
representing the goddess and dressed in her ornaments, was sacrificed.
The same horrid ceremony accompanied the feast of the mother of the
gods, Teteo Innan.*** In this rite the man who represented the son of
the goddess wore a mask of the skin from the thigh of the female
victim who had personated the goddess herself. The wearing of the skin
established a kinship between the man and the woman, as in the many
classical, ancient and savage rituals where the celebrants wear the
hides of the sacrificed beasts. There was a god of storm called "cloudy
serpent," Mixcoatl, whose rites were not more humane. The Mexican
Aphrodite was named _Tlacolteotl_,**** "the impure".
* Mannhardt, op. cit., ii. 263, i. 501, 502; Schwartz,
_Praehistorisch Anthropologische Studien_, p. 79.
** Compare the French _jour des brandons_.
***See Sahagun, ii. 30.
**** Ibid., i. 12.
About her character the Aztecs had no illusions. She listened to the
confessions of the most loathsome sinners, whom she perhaps first
tempted to err, and then forgave and absolved. Confession was usually
put off till people had ceased to be likely to sin. She is said to have
been the wife of Tlaloc, carried off by Tezcatlipoca. "She must
have been the aquatic vegetation of marshy lands," says M. Roville,
"possessed by the god of waters till the sun dries her up and she
disappears." This is an amusing example of modern ingenuity. It
resembles M. Reville's assertion that Tlaloc, the rain-god, "had but
one eye, which shows that he must be ultimately identified as an ancient
personification of the rainy sky, whose one eye is the sun". A rainy sky
has usually no "eye" at all, and, when it has, in this respect it does
not differ from a cloudless sky.
A less lovely set of Olympians than the Aztec gods it is difficult to
conceive. Yet, making every allowance for Catholic after-thoughts, there
can be no doubt that the prayers, penances and confessions described at
length by Sahagun indicate a firm Mexican belief that even these strange
deities "made for righteousness," loved good, and, in this world and the
next, punished evil. However it happened, whatever accidents of history
or of mixture of the races in the dim past caused it, the Aztecs carried
to extremes the religious and the mythical ideas. They were exceedingly
pious in their attitude of penitence and prayer; they were more fierce
and cruel in ritual, more fantastic in myth, than the wildest of tribes,
tameless and homeless, ignorant of agriculture or of any settled and
assured existence. Even the Inquisition of the Spanishof the sixteenth
century was an improvement on the unheard-of abominations of Mexican
ritual. As in all fully developed polytheisms of civilised races among
the Aztecs we lose sight of the moral primal Being of low savage races.
He is obscured by deities of a kind not yet evolved in the lowest
culture.