Latin-American Mythology (Illustrated Edition). Hartley Burr Alexander

      November 17, 1919.

      INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

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

      Were the divisions in a treatment of American Indian myth to follow the rationale of pre-Columbian ethnography,² the key-group would be found in the series of civilized or semi-civilized peoples of the mainly mountainous and plateau regions of the western continental ridge, roughly from Cancer to Capricorn, or with outlying spurs from about 35º North (Zuñi and Hopi) to near 35º South (Calchaqui-Diaguité). Within this region native American agriculture originated; and along with agriculture were developed the arts of civilization in the forms characteristic of America; while from the several centres of the key-group agriculture and attendant arts passed on into the plains and forests regions and the great alluvial valleys of the two continents and into the archipelago which lies between them. In each continent there is a region—the Boreal and the Austral—beyond the boundaries of the native agriculture, and untouched by the arts of the central civilizations, yet showing an unmistakable community of ideas, of which (primitive and vague as they are) recurrent instances are to be found among the intervening groups. Thus the plat and configuration of autochthonous America divides into cultural zones that are almost those of the hemispherical projection, and into altitudes that are curiously parallel to the continental altitudes: the higher civilizations of the plateaux, the more or less barbarous cultures of the unstable tribes of the great river basins, and the primitive development of the wandering hordes of the frigid coasts. The primitive stage may be assumed to be the foundational one throughout both continents, and it is virtually repeated in the least advanced groups of all regions; the intermediate stage (except in such enigmatical groups as that of the North-West Coast Indians of North America) appears to owe much to definite acculturation as a consequence of the spread of the arts and industries developed by the most advanced peoples. Moreover, the outer unities of mode of life are reflected by inner communities of thought; for there are unmistakable kinships of idea, not only throughout the civilized group, but also in the whole range of the regions affected by its arts; while underlying these and outcropping at the poles, there is a definable stratum of virtually identical primitive thought. Nevertheless, these unities are cut across by differences, partly environmental and partly historical in origin, which give, as said above, distinctive character to the parallel groups of the two continents. One might, indeed, say that the cultural division is twinned, north and south,—with a certain primacy, as of elder birth and clear superiority in the northern groups; for, on the whole, the Maya is superior to the Inca, just as the Iroquois and Sioux are superior to Carib and Araucanian, and the Eskimo to the Fuegian.

      Such, in loose form, is the native configuration of American culture and hence of native American thought, and without question a desirable mode of treating the latter would be to follow this natural chart. Nevertheless, there are reasons which fully justify, in the study of native ideas, the bringing together in a single treatment of all the materials relating to the peoples of Latin America. The most obvious of these reasons is the unity of the descriptive literature, in its earlier and primary works almost wholly Spanish. It is not merely that such writers as Las Casas, Acosta, Herrera, and Gómara pass ubiquitously from region to region of the Spanish conquests, now north, now south, in the course of their narratives; it is rather that a certain colouristic harmony is derived from what might be termed the linguistic prejudices of their tongue, which, therefore, they share with those Spanish chroniclers whose field of description is limited to some one region. The mere fact that the ideas of an Indian nation are first described by a sixteenth century Spaniard—friar, bishop, or cavalier—gives to them the flavour of their translation and context, and thus establishes a sort of community between all groups of ideas so described. Nor need this be matter for regret: primitive thought, with its burning concreteness and its lack of relational expression, is as truly untranslatable into analytical languages as poetry is untranslatable; and it is, on the whole, good fortune to have, as it were, but one linguistic colour cast upon so large a body of aboriginal ideas.

      Further—what may not be to the liking of the ethnologist, but is certainly of high zest to the lover of romance—the Spanish colour is quite as much in the nature of imagination as in the hue of expression. No book on Latin American mythology could be complete without description of those truly Latinian fables which the discoverers brought with them to the New World, and there, wedding them to native traditions (ill-heard and fabulously repeated), soon created such a realm of gorgeous marvel as glamoured the age with fantasy and set the coolest heads to mad adventure. In such names as Antilles, Brazil, the Amazon, Old World myths are fixed in New World geography; and beyond these there is the whole series of fantastic tales with which the Spaniard, in a sort of imaginative munificence, has enriched the literature and the romantic resources of this world of ours. The Fountain of Eternal Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Island of the Amazons and the marvellous virtues of the Amazon Stone, El Dorado ("the Gilded Man"), the treasure cities of Manoa and Omagua, the lost empire of the Gran Moxo and the Gran Paytiti, Patagonian giants, and "men whose heads do grow between their shoulders," and finally, most wide-spread of all, the miracles of the robed and bearded white man who, long ago, had come to teach the Indian a new way of life and a purer worship and had left the cross to be his sign, in whom no pious mind could see other than the blessed Saint Thomas: all these were in part a freight of the caravels, and they represent collectively a chapter second to none in mythopoesy. There is no match for this cargo of imported fantasy in the parts of America colonized by the English and the French. This, however, need not be accredited merely to cooler blood and calmer race: the North American colonies belong to the seventeenth century, a good hundred years after the Spaniards had completed their most golden conquests, and for the Spaniard, no less than for the others, the hour of intoxication and extravagance had by then gone by—leaving its flamboyant tones to warm the colours of succeeding times. Thus it is that Latin American myth is in no faint degree truly Latinian.

      But while there is a certain Old World seasoning in Latin American myth, native traditions are, of course, the substantial material of the study. This material is striking and various. It embraces the usual substrata of demoniac beliefs and animistic credulities, and above these such elaborate formations as the Aztec and Maya pantheons, with their amazing astral and calendric interpretations, or the enigmatic and fervid religion of Peru. Many of the stories are little more than vocal superstitions; others, such as the conquering of death in the Popul Vuh, the Brazilian tale of the release of the imprisoned night, or the superb Surinam legend of Maconaura and Anuanaïtu, will compare, both for dramatic power and subtle suggestion, with the best that the world can show. There is, of course, the constant