Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander

error—the persuading them that these children have to return thence to repeople the world after the third destruction which they suppose that it must undergo, for they believe that the world has already been twice destroyed." The belief in an infant paradise, with its Tree of Life whence the souls of babes draw nourishment, biding the day of their rebirth, is a pleasant relief from the nightmarelike quality of most Aztec notions—not less familiarly human than are the pious reflections of the good friar who records it.

      CHAPTER III

      MEXICO

      (Continued)

       Table of Contents

      I. COSMOGONY⁴⁷

       Table of Contents

      Mexican cosmogonies conform to a wide-spread American type. There is first an ancient creator, little important in cult, who is the remote giver and sustainer of the life of the universe; and next comes a generation of gods, magicians and transformers rather than true creators, who form and transform the beings of times primeval and eventually bring the world to its present condition. The earlier world-epochs, or "Suns," as the Mexicans called them, are commonly four in number, and each is terminated by the catastrophic destruction of its Sun and of its peoples, fire and flood overwhelming creation in successive cataclysms. Not all of this, in single completeness, is preserved in any one account, but from the various fragments and abridgements that are extant the whole may be reasonably reconstructed.

      One of the simpler tales (simple at least in its transmitted form) is of the Tarascan deity, Tucupacha. "They hold him to be creator of all things," says Herrera,⁴⁸ "that he gives life and death, good and evil fortune, and they call upon him in their tribulations, gazing toward the sky where they believe him to be." This deity first created heaven and earth and hell; then he formed a man and a woman of clay, but they were destroyed in bathing; again he made a human pair, using cinders and metals, and from these the world was peopled. But the god sent a flood, from which he preserved a certain priest, Texpi, and his wife, with seeds and with animals, floating in an ark-like log. Texpi discovered land by sending out birds, after the fashion of Noah, and it is quite possible that the legend as recounted is not altogether native.

      More primitive in type and more interesting in form is the Mixtec cosmogony narrated by Fray Gregorio García, which begins thus:⁴⁹ "In the year and in the day of obscurity and darkness, when there were as yet no days nor years, the world was a chaos sunk in darkness, while the earth was covered with water, on which scum and slime floated." This exordium, with its effort to describe the void by negation and the beginning of time by the absence of its denominations, is strikingly reminiscent of the creation-narrative in Genesis ii. and of the similar Babylonian cosmogony; the negative mode, employed in all three, is essentially true to that stage when human thought is first struggling to grapple with abstractions, seeking to define them rather by a process of denudation than by one of limitation of the field of thought. The Mixtec tale proceeds with a group of incidents. (1) The Deer-God and the Deer-Goddess (the deer is an emblem of fecundity)—known also as the Puma-Snake and the Jaguar-Snake, in which character they doubtless represent the tawny heaven of the day-sky and the starry vault of night—magically raised a cliff above the abyss of waters, on the summit of which they placed an axe, edge upward, upon which the heavens rested. (2) Here, at the Place-where-the-Heavens-stood, they lived many centuries, and here they reared their two boys, Wind-of-the-Nine-Serpents and Wind-of-the-Nine-Caves, who possessed the power of transforming themselves into eagles and serpents, and even of passing through solid bodies. The symbolism of these two boys as typifying the upper and the nether world is obvious; they can only be one more example of the demiurgic twins common in American cosmogony. (3) The brothers inaugurated sacrifice and penance, the cultivation of flowers and fruits; and with vows and prayers they besought their ancestral gods to let the light appear, to cause the water to be separated from the earth, and to permit the dry land to be freed from its covering. (4) The earth was peopled, but a flood destroyed this First People, and the world was restored by the "Creator of all Things."

      It is probable that this Mixtec Creator-of-All-Things was the same deity as he who was known to their Zapotec kindred as Coqui-Xèe or Coqui-Cilla ("Lord of the Beginning"), of whom it was said that "he was the creator of all things and was himself uncreated." Seler is of opinion that Coqui-Xèe is a spirit of "the beginning" in the sense of dawn and the east and the rising sun, and that since he is also known as Piye-Tào, or "the Great Wind," he is none other than the Zapotec Quetzalcoatl, who also is an increate creator. Coqui-Xèe, however, is "merely the principle, the essence of the creative deity or of deity in general without reference to the act of creating the world and human beings"; for that act is rather to be ascribed to the primeval pair (equivalent to the Deer-God and Deer-Goddess of the Mixtec), Cozaana ("Creator, the Maker of all Beasts") and Huichaana ("Creator, the Maker of Men and Fishes").

      The ideas of the Nahuatlan tribes were similar. Of the Chichimec Sahagun⁵⁰ says that "they had only a single god, Mixcoatl, whose image they possessed; but they believed in another invisible god, not represented by any image, called Yoalli Ehecatl, that is to say, God invisible, impalpable, beneficent, protector, omnipotent, by whose strength alone the whole world lives, and who, by his sole knowledge, rules voluntarily all things." Mixcoatl ("Cloud-Snake"), the tribal god of the Chichimec and Otomi, is certainly an analogue of Quetzalcoatl or of Huitzilopochtli, like them figuring as demiurge; and Yoalli Ehecatl ("Wind and Night," or "Night-Wind") is an epithet applied to Tezcatlipoca, who also is addressed as "Creator of Heaven and Earth."

      All of these gods are of the sky and atmosphere, and all of them appear as creative powers, though mainly in the demiurgic rôle. Back of and above them is the ancient Twofold One, the Male-Female or Male and Female principle of generation, which not only first created the world, but maintains it fecund. This being, sometimes called Tloque Nauaque, or "Lord of the By," i.e. the Omnipresent, is represented as a divine pair, known under several names. Sahagun commonly speaks of them as Ometecutli and Omeciuatl ("Twi-Lord," "Twi-Lady"), and in his account of the Toltec he states that they reign over the twelve heavens and the earth; the existence of all things depends upon them, and from them proceeds the "influence and warmth whereby infants are engendered in the wombs of their mothers." Tonacatecutli and Tonacaciutl ("Lord of Our Flesh," "Lady of Our Flesh") is another pair of names, used with reference to the creation of the human body out of maize and to its support thereby.⁵¹ A third pair of terms, appearing in Mendieta and in the Annals of Quauhtitlan, is Citlallatonac and Citlalicue ("Lord" and "Lady of the Starry Zones"). In the Annals Quetzalcoatl, as high-priest of the Toltec, is said to have dedicated a cult to "Citlalicue Citlallatonac, Tonacaciuatl Tonacatecutli ... who is clothed in charcoal, clothed in blood, who giveth food to the earth; and he cried aloft, to the Omeyocan, to the heaven lying above the nine that are bound together." Nevertheless, these deities—or rather deity, for Tloque Nauaque seems to be, like the Zuñi Awonawilona, bisexual in nature—received little recognition in the formal cult; and it was said that they desired none.

      PLATE XII.

      Figures representing the heavenly bodies. The upper figure, from Codex Vaticanus B, represents the conflict of light and darkness. The Eagle is either the Morning Star or the Sun; the Plumed Serpent is the symbol of the Cosmic Waters, from whose throat the Hare, perhaps the Earth or Moon, is being snatched by the Eagle. Similar figures appear in other codices, the Serpent being in one instance represented as torn by the Eagle's talons.

      The lower figure, from Codex Borgia, portrays Sun, Moon, and Morning Star. The Sun-god is within the rayed disk; he holds a bundle of spears in one hand, a spear-thrower in the other; a stream of blood, apparently from a sacrifice offered by the Morning Star, which has the form of an ocelot, nourishes the Sun. The Moon appears as a Hare upon the face of the crescent, which is filled with water and set upon a background of dark sky.

      In