MEXICAN MYTHS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3442, 2 March 1920, Page 65

MEXICAN MYTHS.

By Jessie Mackay. (Concluded.) The grisly gods worshipped by the later Nahuans, and especially by the conquering Aztecs, speak of that dark, indigenous American culture which had evolved, nevertheless, a certain stern morality of its own. The old Mexican priesthood is described by Lewis Spence as an institution reflecting the most sanguinary S3'Stem of sacrifice .probably on earth, but not representing a luxurious or light-living body of men. Their days and nights were spent in strict discipline and dutiful diligence. Outside the dark, racial idea of man's existence, here and hereafter, depending on continual human sacrifice, their influence was good; justice and morality were inculcated ; the priests educated the boys of the community, and holy- women like the teaching nuns of the west instructed the girls. But round the later life and faith of Mexico there ever clings the evil odours of a charnel house. The student turns from this all-too-well-attested record of blood and battle to that legendary time ever linked with the name of the Fair God, Queizalcoatl. Nowhere now can we ever hope to find any authentic testimony regarding a figure so attractive and so elusive. Should we know very much more if we possessed that last treasure of the Nahua, the Teo-Amoxtli, or Divine Book? In this book, if it ever existed, was pictured, not written, the journeyings of the Nabua from their first home to the Valley of Mexico, with all their laws, beliefs, and social customs. The Teo-Amoxtli was by many ascribed to the Toltecs. Ixtlilxochitl is faithful to his mother's royal race when he affirms that it was written by a sage of Tezcuco some time towards the ends of the seventh century, ox about the time Columbus was building up the mission at lona. A German scholar assured the public as late as 1838 that he had the book, and other attempts have been made to identify it with an important Mayan manuscript. Later scholarship does not denv the possible existence of such a book, but expresses strong doubt that it was' ever seen by a European. 'Failing the last Koran of the Toltecs, we have to seek for Quefzalcoatl's record amid the shifting sands of Mexican legend and the symbolism of Mexican picturewriting. It is a curious kaleidoscopic image that we thus obtain, an image only to be understood by remembering the huge area and many peoples of Mexico, each tribe retaining its own impression of that legendary wise and merciful stranger from the East who had taught the early Nahua the arts and government of which only comparative fragments were passed on to the later tribes who dominated Mexico. Some regarded him as the "Father of the Toltecs," investing him with a noble, but(

earthly, parentage, and the insignia of ..an earthly king, however, uplifted from the common lot by his virtue, his magic, and his powers of prophesy. In this connection he is strangely like an Arthur without a. Guinevere, going down at last before a magic as evil as his own was good. Some regarded him as the god of the sun, saying that- he came from no land on earth, but descended as a bird, being caught in the fowler's net of a Toltec hero. A wealth of beautiful legends and titles is lavished on this aspect of the god. He is sometimes the Son of the Sun, or one of those divine Men of the Sun who figure in Central American and Peruvian mythology. Sometimes he is master of the wide vault of heaven, the God of the Air, the Lord of the Four Winds, the Lord of the Light of the Dawn. The latter title commemorates another version of his ending as a Toltec King : instead of sailing back to Tlapallan when worsted by the war gods, he mounted a funeral pyre. Prom his ashes sprang a flock of birds brilliant as the rainbow; from his heart, soaring to the blue' heavens, came the Morning Star. Like Osiris, like Adonis, and like Balder, he goes to the underworld, though but for the short space of eight days, after which the Morning Star broke in all its beauty upon the gaze of men, and Quetzalcoatl achieved resurrection and perfect divinity. His name, it may here be said, signifies "Feathered Serpent," thus combining the cults of the heavenly bird and the master serpent of wisdom. Many rejected this apotheosis, and clung to the human hope of a divine or semi-divine return of The Hetoer of old Anahuac. This was the hops that upheld the subject races of- the empire, hating the harsh rule of the Aztecs: this was the error that laid Mexico bare to the white Spaniard's weapon. Montezuma himself was possessed ai first by the idea that Quetzalcoatl had returned to claim the throne that once was his, and the hardy Tlascalaxis, first to make alliance with the white strangers, saw in Cortes some stern reflection.of the deliverer so often invoked in the darkened davs that followed the fall of Tollan and the people who had made Mexico a garden of plenty and of art. On their side, some of the Spaniards saw in this culture-hero or prophet-king of a nobler era no less a person than the Apostle Thomas, gone thus far afield to seek his Indians and bring them to the Christian fold.

Like the solar heroes of the north, who found their apotheosis in the glorious figure of Sigurd the Volsung, Quetzalcoatl leaves behind him buried treasures of gold and silver, not, indeed, to be the magnet for wars, conspiracies, and massacres, or to be flung in a Western Rhine, but, like the VolsuUg hoard, never to be put to earthly use. Like Demeter when her child was reft to' the underworld, the broken king retards or destroys the fruitage and growth of the Valley of Anahuac when he is forced to leave the scene of former peace and dominion. Like Arthur, he is pledged to return in the hour of his country's need, and takes the seaway of mystery with a sad and high resignation. It is left for German and American savants, with our own veteran, Sir Clements Markham, to do for Quetzalcoatl what Max Muller has done for Krishna, Balder, Hercules, Sigurd, and Achilles, the solar heroes of the Old World. Dr Brinton, a high American airtbority, sees him as a dawn hero, fitly pictured as of fair complexion, and robed in flowing garments of white. That his fall followed the draught of pulque given by the false physician means that the solar hero was . A-anouished by the wind or spirit of might (Teseallipoca). Other teachers see in his departure from Tlapallan, the Tabasco of later hiriory, simply the destined retirement of the Man of the Sun to his celestial home, once his mission is over among men.

Coming down from these heights of poetic myth the historian is hound to confess that even the worship of Quetzalcoatl is not found wholly free from human sacrifice. But it may well he srro'posed that these horrid rites, when found, had been grafted in owing to the long ascendency of barbarians, whose savage worship on all sides pressed in noon the pure cult of a neaecful advanced people whose origin and fate must ever now remain one of the sealed, mysteries of earth. Not in the "warrior cities of Mexico and Tezcuco did Quetzalcoatl receive his meed of homage. It was in the rich and sacred city of Chohela that the Spaniards saw the mighty Temple of Quetzalcoatl crowning the height, and the giant image of the god in his waving plumes, soon to go down in a holocaust of fire before the invader. But if not always free of blood in these later days, the fact remains that Quetzalooatl's worship affords America's highest native testimony to that Eden, that age of plenteous peace and even justice to which almost all nations look back. Why is it that, while the Lake-born legends of far less advanced tribes of Indians found a lasting shrine in "Hiawatha." no American poet has immortalised the stately and haunting cvcle of tales that cluster round the mystic form of Quttzalcoatl ? But if not the treasure of the people, as the "Hiawatha" stories are, the broken but maiestic tales of Quetzalcoatl cast for scholar and moralist a softened light on the. gloomy pantheon of Mexico, and bridge the ocean that senar-ated America from the solar heroes of the Old World.