Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander

To which Montezuma answered, true, but as for him, he must pray and make sacrifice in expiation of the sin he had committed in giving us access to his temple, which had had for consequence our presentation to his gods and the want of respect through which we had rendered ourselves culpable, blaspheming against them." So the Spaniards departed, leaving Montezuma to his expiatory prayers and no doubt bloody sacrifices.

      III. THE AZTEC PANTHEON²⁷

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      Within the precincts of the temple-pyramid, and not far from it, was a lesser building which Bernal Diaz describes, a house of idols, diabolisms, serpents, tools for carving the bodies of sacrificed victims, and pots and kettles to cook them for the cannibal repasts of the priests, the entrance being formed by gaping jaws "such as one pictures at the mouth of Inferno, showing great teeth for the devouring of poor souls." The place was foul with blood and black with smoke, "and for my part," says Diaz, "I was accustomed to call it 'Hell.'"

      It is indeed doubtful whether the human imagination has ever elsewhere conjured up such soul-satisfying devils as are the gods of the Aztec pantheon. Beside them Old World demons seem prankishly amiable sprites: the Mediaeval imagination at best (or worst) gives us but a somewhat deranged barnyard, while even Chinese devils modulate into pleasantly decorative motifs. But the Aztec gods, in their formal presentments, and seldom less in their material characters, ugly, ghastly, foul, afford unalloyed shudders which time cannot still nor custom stale. To be sure, the ensemble frequently shows a vigour of design which suggests decoration (though the decorative spirit is never sensitive, as it often is in Maya art); but this suggestion is too illusory to abide: it passes like a mist, and the imagination is gripped by the raw horror of the Thing. Aztec religious art seems, in fact, to move in a more primitively realistic atmosphere than that in which the religious art of other peoples has come to similarly adept expression; it shows little of that tendency—which Yucatan and Peru in America, as well as the ancient and Oriental nations, had all attained—to subordinate the idea to the expressional form, and to soften even the horrible with the suavity of aesthetic charm. The Aztec gods were as grimly business-like in form as the realities of their service were fearful.

      In number these divinities were myriad and in relations chaotic. There were clan and tribal, city and national gods, not only of the victorious race, but of their confederates and subjects, for the Aztec followed the custom of pagan conquerors, holding it safest to honour the deities native to the land; and several of their greatest divinities were assuredly inherited from vanquished peoples—Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc among them—though an odd and somewhat amusing fact is that a multitude of the godling idols of ravaged cities were kept in a kind of prison-house in the Aztec capital, where, it was assumed, they were incapable of assisting their former worshippers. There were gods of commerce and industries, headed by Tacatecutli, god of merchant-adventurers, whose "peaceful penetration" opened paths for the imperial armies; gods of potters and weavers and mat-makers, of workers in wood and stone and metal; gods of agriculture, of sowing and ripening and reaping; gods of fishermen; gods of the elements—earth, air, fire, and water; gods of mountains and volcanoes; creator-gods; animal-gods; gods of medicine, of disease and death, and of the underworld; deity patrons of drunkenness and of carnal vice, and deity protectors of the flowers which these strange peoples loved. The whole heterogeneous world was filled with divinities, reflecting the old fears of primitive man and the old tumults of history, each god jealous of his right and gluttonous of blood—a kind of horrid exteriorization of human passion and desire.

      However, this motley pantheon is not without certain principles of order. The regulations of an elaborate social system, divided by clan and caste and rank and guild, are reduplicated in it; for to every phase of Mexican life religious rites and divine tutelage were attached. Still more significant as a means of hierarchic classification is the relation of the divine beings to the divisions of time and space. A cult of the quarters of space and their tutelaries and of the powers of sky-realms above and of earth-realms below is almost universal among American Indian groups showing any advancement in culture; the gods of the quarters, for example, are bringers of wind and rain, upholders of heaven, animal chiefs; the gods above are storm-deities and rulers of the orbs and dominions of light, on the whole beneficent; the powers below, under the hegemony of the earth goddess, are spirits of vegetation and lords of death and things noxious. This is the most primitive stage in which the family of Heaven and Earth begin to assume form as an hierarchic pantheon. But the seasons, beginning with the diurnal alternation of the rule of light and darkness, and proceeding thence to the changing phases of the moon and the seasonal journeys of the sun, constantly shift the domination of the world from deity to deity and from group to group. Thus the lords of day are not the lords of night, nor are the fates of the mounting morn those of descending eve: the Sun himself changes his disposition with the hours. Similarly, the Moon's phases are tempers rather than forms; and the year, divided among the gods, runs the cycle of their influences.

      The Aztec and other pantheons of the civilized Mexicans evince all of these elements with complications. Both cosmography and calendar are more complex than among the more northerly Americans, and there is a veritable tangle of space-craft and time-craft, with astrological and necromantic conceptions, bound up with every human desire and every natural activity. Certainly the most curious feature of this lore is the influence of certain numbers—especially four (and five) and nine; and, again, six (and seven) and thirteen. These number-groups are primarily related to space-divisions. Thus four is the number of cardinal points, North, South, East, and West, to which a fifth point is added if the pou sto, or point of the observer, is included; by a process of reduplication, of which there are several instances in North America, the number of earth's cardinal points became the number of the sky-tiers above and of the earth-tiers below, so that the cosmos becomes a nine-storeyed structure, with earth its middle plane. Sometimes (this is characteristic of the Pueblo Indians) orientation is with reference to six points—the four directions and the Above and the Below (the pou sto, when added, becomes a seventh—a grouping which recalls to us the seven forms of Platonic locomotion—up, down, forward, backward, right, left, and axial). With these directions colours, jewels, herbs, and animals are symbolically associated, becoming emblems of the ruling powers of the quarters. The number-groups thus cosmographically formed react upon time-conceptions, especially where ritual is concerned. Thus the Pueblo Indians celebrate lesser festivals of five days (a day of preparation and four of ritual), and greater feasts of nine days (reduplicating the four) the whole, in some cases at least, being comprised in a longer period of twenty days. The rites of the year among the Zuñi and some others are divided into two six-month groups, and each month is dedicated to or associated with one of the six colour-symbols of the six directions; while the Hopi—a fact of especial interest—make use of thirteen points on the horizon for the determination of ceremonial dates.²⁸

      The cosmic and calendric orientation of the Mexicans is a complex, with elaborations, of both these number-groups (i.e. four, five, nine, and six, seven, thirteen). According to one conception there are nine heavens above and nine hells beneath. Ometecutli ("Twofold Lord") and Omeciuatl ("Twofold Lady") the male and female powers of generation, dwell in Omeyocan ("the Place of the Twofold") at the culmination of the universe; and it is from Omeyocan that the souls of babes, bringing the lots "assigned to them from the commencement of the world,"²⁹ descend to mortal birth; while in the opposite direction the souls of the dead, after four years of wandering, having passed the nine-fold stream of the underworld, go to find their rest in Chicunauhmictlan, the ninth pit. Nine "Lords of the Night" preside over its nine hours, and potently over the affairs of men. Mictlantecutli, the skeleton god of death, is lord of the midnight hour; the owl is his bird; his consort is Mictlanciuatl; and the place of their abode, windowless and lightless, is "huge enough to receive the whole world." Over the first hour of night and the first of morning (there are Lords of the Day, too) presides Xiuhtecutli, the fire-god, for the hearth of the universe, like the hearth of the house, is the world's centre.

      But the ninefold conception of the universe is not without rival. A second notion (of Toltec source, according to Sahagun) speaks of twelve heavens; or of thirteen, reckoning earth as one. The Toltec, says Sahagun, were the first