european eye-witnesses of mexican ritual — diaz, his account of temples and gods__sahagun, his method — theories of the god huitzilopochtli — totemistic and other elements in his image and legend — illustrations from latin religion — “god-eating”— the calendar — other gods — their feasts and cruel ritual — their composite character — parallels from ancient classical peoples — moral aspects of aztec gods.
the religion of the mexicans was a compound of morality and cruelty so astonishing that its two aspects have been explained as the contributions of two separate races. the wild aztecs from the north are credited with having brought to a high pitch of organised ritual the ferocious customs of the red indians. the tortures which the tribes inflicted on captives taken in war were transmuted into the cannibal sacrifices and orgies of bloodshed with which the aztec temples reeked. the milder elements, again, the sense of sin which found relief in confession and prayer, are assigned to the influence of mayas, and especially of toltecs, a shadowy and perhaps an imaginary people. our ignorance of mexican history before the spanish conquest is too deep to make any such theory of the influence of race on religion in mexico more than merely plausible. the facts of ritual and of myth are better known, thanks to the observations of such an honest soldier as bernal diaz and such a learned missionary as sahagun. the author of the historia general de las cosas de nueva espa?a was a spanish franciscan, and one of the earliest missionaries (1529) in mexico. he himself describes the method by which he collected his information about the native religion. he summoned together the chief men of one of the provinces, who, in turn, chose twelve old men well seen in knowledge of the mexican practices and antiquities. several of them were also scholars in the european sense, and had been taught latin. the majority of the commission collected and presented “pictures which were the writings formerly in use among them,” and the “grammarians” or latin-learned aztecs wrote in european characters and in aztec the explanations of these designs. when sahagun changed his place of residence, these documents were again compared, re-edited and enlarged by the assistance of the native gentlemen in his new district, and finally the whole was passed through yet a third “sieve,” as sahagun says, in the city of mexico. the completed manuscript had many ups and downs of fortune, but sahagun’s book remains a source of almost undisputed authenticity.
probably no dead religion whose life was among a people ignorant of syllabaries or of the alphabet is presented to us in a more trustworthy form than the religion of mexico. it is necessary, however, to discount the theories of sahagun and his converts, who though they never heard of euhemerus, habitually applied the euhemeristic doctrine to their facts. they decided that the gods of the aztecs had once been living men and conjurors, worshipped after their decease. it is possible, too, that a strain of catholic piety has found its way into the long prayers of the heathen penitents, as reported by sahagun.1 sahagun gives us a full account of the mexican mythology. what the gods, as represented by idols and adored in ritual, were like, we learn from a gallant catholic soldier, bernal diaz.2 “above the altars,” he writes, “were two shapes like giants, wondrous for height and hugeness. the first on the right was huichilobos (huitzilopochtli), their god of war. he had a big head and trunk, his eyes great and terrible, and so inlaid with precious stones that all his head and body shone with stars thereof. great snakes of gold and fine stones were girdled about his flanks; in one hand he held a bow, and arrows in the other, and a little idol called his page stood by his side. . . . thereby also were braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and the savour of incense were the sacrifice. the walls of this oratory were black and dripping with gouts of blood, and likewise the floor that stank horribly.” such was the aspect of a mexican shrine before the spaniards introduced their faith.
as to the mythical habits of the aztec olympians in general, sahagun observes that “they were friends of disguise, and changed themselves often into birds or savage beasts”. hence he, or his informants, infer that the gods have originally been necromancers or medicine-men, now worshipped after death; a natural inference, as magical feats of shape-shifting are commonly ascribed “everywhere to witches and warlocks”. as a matter of fact, the aztec gods, though bedizened with the attributes of mortal conjurors, and with the fur and feathers of totems, are, for the most part, the departmental deities of polytheism, each ruling over some province of nature or of human activity. combined with these are deities who, in their origin, were probably ideal culture-heroes, like yehl, or qat, or prometheus. the long and tedious myths of quetzalcoatl and tezcatlipoca appear to contain memories of a struggle between the gods or culture-heroes of rival races. such struggles were natural, and necessary, perhaps, before a kind of syncretism and a general tolerance could unite in peace the deities of a realm composed of many tribes originally hostile. in a cultivated people, made up out of various conquered and amalgamated tribes, we must expect polytheism, because their olympus is a kind of divine representative assembly. anything like monotheism, in such a state, must be the result of philosophic reflection. “a laughable matter it is,” says bernal diaz, “that in each province the indians have their gods, and the gods of one province or town are of no profit to the people of another. thus have they an infinite number of idols, to each of which they sacrifice.”3
he might have described, in the same words, the local gods of the egyptian nomes, for a similar state of things preceded, and to some extent survived, the syncretic efforts of egyptian priesthood. meanwhile, the teocallis, or temples of mexico, gave hospitable shelter to this mixed multitude of divinities. hard by huitzilopochtli was tezcatlipoca (tezcatepuca, bernal calls him), whose chapel “stank worse than all the shambles of castile”. he had the face of a bear and shining eyes, made of mirrors called tezcut. he was understood by bernal to be the mexican hades, or warden of the dead. not far off was an idol, half-human and half-lizard, “the god of fruits and harvest, i remember not his name,” and all his chapel walls dripped blood.
in the medley of such a pantheon, it is difficult to arrange the deities on any principle of order. beginning with huitzilopochtli, as perhaps the most famous, it is to be observed that he indubitably became and was recognised as a god of battles, and that he was also the guide and protector who (according to the aztec painted scriptures) led the wandering fathers through war and wilderness to the promised land of mexico. his birth was one of those miraculous conceptions which we have seen so frequently in the myths and m?rchen of the lower and the higher races. it was not by swallowing a berry, as in finland, but by cherishing in her bosom a flying ball of feathers that the devout woman, coatlicue, became the mother of huitzilopochtli. all armed he sprang to the light, like athene from the head of zeus, and slew his brothers that had been born by natural generation. from that day he received names of dread, answering to deimos and phobos.4
by another myth, euhemeristic in character, huitziton (the name is connected with huitzilin, the humming-bird) was the leader of the aztecs in their wanderings. on his death or translation, his skull gave oracles, like the head of bran in the welsh legend. sahagun, in the first page of his work, also euhemerises huitzilopochtli, and makes him out to have been a kind of hercules doublé with a medicine-man; but all this is mere conjecture. the position of huitzilopochtli as a war-god, guardian and guide through the wilderness is perfectly established, and it is nearly as universally agreed that his name connects him with the humming-bird, which his statue wore on its left foot. he also carried a green bunch of plumage upon his head, shaped like the bill of a small bird now, as j. g. müller has pointed out, the legend and characteristics of huitzilopochtli are reproduced, by a coincidence startling even in mythology, in the legend and characteristics of picus in latium. just as huitzilopochtli wore the humming-bird indicated by his name on his foot, so picus was represented with the woodpecker of his name on his head.5
on the subject of picus one may consult ovid, metamorph, xiv. 314. here the story runs that circe loved picus, whom she met in the woods. he disdained her caresses, and she turned him into the woodpecker, “with his garnet head”. “et fulvo cervix pnecingitur auro.”
according to virgil (j. sn., vii. 187), the statue of this picus was settled in an old laurentian temple or palace of unusual sanctity, surrounded by images of the earlier gods. the woodpeckers, pici, are known martio cognomine, says pliny (10, 18, 20, § 40), and so connected with the roman war-god, picas martius.
in his romische mythologie, i. 336, 337, preller makes no use of these materials for comparison, though the conduct and character of the other beast of war, the wolf, as guide and protector of the hirpi (wolves), and worshipped by them with wolf-dances, is an obvious survival of totemism. the picini have their animal leader, picus, the woodpecker, the hirpi have their animal leader, the wolf, just as the humming-bird was the leader of the aztecs.
in these latin legends, as in the legends of huit-zilopochtli, the basis, as j. g. müller sees, is the bird — the humming-bird in one case, the woodpecker in the other. the bird is then euhemerised or brought into anthropomorphic form. it is fabled that he was originally a man (like picus before circe enchanted him to a bird’s shape), or, in mexico, a man named huitziton, who during the aztec migrations heard and pursued a little bird that cried “tinni,” that is, “follow, follow”.6 now we are all familiar with classical legends of races that were guided by a bird or beast to their ultimate seats. müller mentions battus and the raven, the chalcidians and the dove, the cretans and the dolphin, which was apollo, cadmus and the cow; the hirpi, or wolves, who followed the wolf. in the same way the picini followed the woodpecker, picus, from whom they derived their name, and carried a woodpecker on their banners. thus we may connect both the sabine war-gods and the bird of the mexican war-gods with the many guiding and protecting animals which occur in fable. now a guiding and protecting animal is almost a synonym for a totem. that the sabine woodpecker had been a totem may be pretty certainly established on the evidence of plutarch. the people called by his name (picini) declined, like totemists everywhere, to eat their holy bird, in this case the woodpecker.7
the inference is that the humming-bird whose name enters into that of huitzilopochtli, and whose feathers were worn on his heel, had been the totem of an aztec kindred before huitzilopochtli, like picus, was anthropomorphised. on the other hand, if huitzilopochtli was once the baiame of the aztecs, their guide in their wanderings, he might, in myth, be mixed up with a totem or other worshipful animal. “before this god was represented in human form, he was merely a little humming-bird, huitziton; but as the anthropomorphic processes advanced, the bird became an attribute, emblem, or symbol of the deity.”8 if huitzilopochtli is said to have given the aztecs fire, that boon is usually regarded by many races, from normandy to australia, as the present given to men by a bird; for example, the fire-crested wren.9 thus understood, the ornithological element in huitzilopochtli is purely totemic. while accepting the reduction of him to a hummingbird, m. reville ingeniously concludes that he was “a derivative form of the sun, and especially of the sun of the fair season”. if the bird was worshipped, it was not as a totem, but as “the divine messenger of the spring,” like “the plover among the latins”.10 attempts have been made, with no great success, to discover the cosmical character of the god from the nature of his feasts.
the mexican calendar, “the aztec year,” as described at considerable length by sahagun, was a succession of feasts, marked by minute and elaborate rites of a magical character. the gods of rain were frequently propitiated, so was the goddess of maize, the mountain god, the mother of the gods, and many other divinities. the general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a man for male gods, of a woman for each goddess. the latter victims were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in each case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice, and of both with the officiating priest. the connection was emphasised by the priest’s wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims, just as in greece, egypt and assyria the fawn-skin, or bull-hide, or goat-skin, or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated.11
from the special ritual of huitzilopochtli mr. tylor conjectures that this “inextricable compound parthenogenetic god may have been originally” a nature deity whose life and death were connected with the year”.12 this theory is based on the practice at the feast called panquetzaliztli.13 “his paste idol was shot through with an arrow,” says mr. tylor, “and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten; wherefore the ceremony was called teoqualo, or ‘god-eating,’ and this was associated with the winter solstice.” m. reville says that this feast coincided with our month of december, the beginning of the cold and dry season, huitzilopochtli would die with the verdure, the flowers and all the beauteous adornments of spring and summer; but like adonis, like osiris, and so many other solar deities, he only died to live and to return again. before identifying him with the sun, it may be remarked that the aztec feast of the return of the gods was celebrated in the twelfth month and the paste sacrifice of huitzilopochtli was in the fifteenth.
there were eighteen months in the aztec year, and the year began on the 2nd of february. the return of the gods was, therefore, in september, and the paste sacrifice of huitzilopochtli in december. clearly the god 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.14
but the mexican calendar is hard to deal with. müller places the feasts of huitzilopochtli in the middle of may, the middle of august, and the middle of december.15 he combines his facts with a legend which made huitzilopochtli to be the son of the goddess of vegetation. j. g. müller’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 god 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 goddess 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”.16
when müller 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 m?nnliche 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.17 we can hardly go farther, with safety, than the recognition of mingled aspects and elements in huitzilopochtli as the totem, the tribal god, the departmental war-god, and possibly he is the god of the year’s progress and renewal. his legend and ritual are a conglomerate of all these things, a mass of ideas from many stages of culture.
an abstract comparatively brief must suffice for the other aztec deities.
tezcatlipoca is a god 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.18 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 god, a maker of wars and discord.19 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.
he was one of the two gods whose extraordinary birth, and death by “happy despatch,” that their vitality might animate the motionless sun, have already been described.20 tezcatlipoca, like most of the other gods, revived, and came back from the sky to earth. at a place called tulla he encountered another god 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.21 his statues, if we may believe acosta, did him little credit. “in cholula, which is a commonwealth of mexico, they worship a famous idol, which was the god 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.”22
a ready way of getting a view of the mexican pantheon is to study sahagun’s two books on the feasts of the gods, with their ritual. it will become manifest that the worship was a worship, on the whole, of departmental gods of the elements, of harvest, of various human activities, such as love and commerce, and war and agriculture. the nature of the worship, again, was highly practical. the ceremonies, when not mere offerings of human flesh, were commonly representations on earth of desirable things which the gods 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 gods to pour forth rain. thus in mexico the rain-god (tlaloc, god 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.”23 the god of the maize, again (cinteotl, son of the maize-goddess), had rites resembling those of the greek pyanepsion and eiresione. the aztecs used to make an image of the god, and offer it all manner of maize and beans.24 curiously enough, the greeks also regarded their pyanepsion as a bean-feast. a more remarkable analogy is that of the peruvian mama cora, the figure of a goddess 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”.25 this corn image of the corn goddess, preserved through all the year and replaced in the next year by a fresh image, is the attic [greek], 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.”26
children were sacrificed in mexico to this deity. in the rites of a goddess of harvest, as has been said, torches were borne by the dancers, as in the eleusinia; and in european and oriental folk-lore.27 demeter was the greek harvest goddess, in whose rites torches had a place. one of her names is demeter erinnys. mr. max müller recognises erinnys as the dawn. schwartz connects demeter erinnys with the thunderstorm. the torch in the hand of demeter is the lightning, according to schwartz. it is interesting, whether the torch be the torch of dawn, or of storm, or neither, to see the prevalence of these torch festivals in rural rites in mexico, greece and modern europe. the idea of the peasants is that the lights scare away evil spirits.28 in the mexican rite, a woman, representing the goddess and dressed in her ornaments, was sacrificed. the same horrid ceremony accompanied the feast of the mother of the gods, teteo innan.29 in this rite the man who represented the son of the goddess wore a mask of the skin from the thigh of the female victim who had personated the goddess herself. the wearing of the skin established a kinship between the man and the woman, as in the many classical, ancient and savage rituals where the celebrants wear the hides of the sacrificed beasts. there was a god of storm called “cloudy serpent,” mixcoatl, whose rites were not more humane. the mexican aphrodite was named tla?olteotl,30 “the impure”.
about her character the aztecs had no illusions. she listened to the confessions of the most loathsome sinners, whom she perhaps first tempted to err, and then forgave and absolved. confession was usually put off till people had ceased to be likely to sin. she is said to have been the wife of tlaloc, carried off by tezcatlipoca. “she must have been the aquatic vegetation of marshy lands,” says m. roville, “possessed by the god of waters till the sun dries her up and she disappears.” this is an amusing example of modern ingenuity. it resembles m. reville’s assertion that tlaloc, the rain-god, “had but one eye, which shows that he must be ultimately identified as an ancient personification of the rainy sky, whose one eye is the sun”. a rainy sky has usually no “eye” at all, and, when it has, in this respect it does not differ from a cloudless sky.
a less lovely set of olympians than the aztec gods it is difficult to conceive. yet, making every allowance for catholic after-thoughts, there can be no doubt that the prayers, penances and confessions described at length by sahagun indicate a firm mexican belief that even these strange deities “made for righteousness,” loved good, and, in this world and the next, punished evil. however it happened, whatever accidents of history or of mixture of the races in the dim past caused it, the aztecs carried to extremes the religious and the mythical ideas. they were exceedingly pious in their attitude of penitence and prayer; they were more fierce and cruel in ritual, more fantastic in myth, than the wildest of tribes, tameless and homeless, ignorant of agriculture or of any settled and assured existence. even the inquisition of the spanishof the sixteenth century was an improvement on the unheard-of abominations of mexican ritual. as in all fully developed polytheisms of civilised races among the aztecs we lose sight of the moral primal being of low savage races. he is obscured by deities of a kind not yet evolved in the lowest culture.
