Volume II Part 8 (2/2)

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 ”s.h.i.+ning 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+p was a wors.h.i.+p, 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 wors.h.i.+p, 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.

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