Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 19

(2) Turner's Samoa, pp. 1-9.

Perhaps the cosmogonic myths of the less cultivated races have now been stated in sufficient number. As an example of the ideas which prevailed in an American race of higher culture, we may take the Quiche legend as given in the Popol Vuh, a post-Christian collection of the sacred myths of the nation, written down after the Spanish conquest, and published in French by the Abbe Bra.s.seur de Bourbourg.(1)

(1) See Popol Vuh in Mr. Max Muller's Chips from a German Workshop, with a discussion of its authenticity. In his Annals of the Cakchiquels, a nation bordering on the Quiches, Dr. Brinton expresses his belief in the genuine character of the text. Compare Bancroft, iii. p. 45. The ancient and original Popol Vuh, the native book in native characters, disappeared during the Spanish conquest.

The Quiches, like their neighbours the Cakchiquels, were a highly civilised race, possessing well-built towns, roads and the arts of life, and were great agriculturists. Maize, the staple of food among these advanced Americans, was almost as great a G.o.d as Soma among the Indo-Aryans. The Quiches were acquainted with a kind of picture-writing, and possessed records in which myth glided into history. The Popol Vuh, or book of the people, gives itself out as a post-Columbian copy of these traditions, and may doubtless contain European ideas. As we see in the Commentarias Reales of the half-blood Inca Garcila.s.so de la Vega, the conquered people were anxious to prove that their beliefs were by no means so irrational and so "devilish" as to Spanish critics they appeared. According to the Popol Vuh, there was in the beginning nothing but water and the feathered serpent, one of their chief divine beings; but there also existed somehow, "they that gave life". Their names mean "shooter of blow-pipe at coyote," "at opossum," and so forth. They said "Earth," and there WAS earth, and plants growing thereon. Animals followed, and the Givers of life said "Speak our names," but the animals could only cluck and croak. Then said the Givers, "Inasmuch as ye cannot praise us, ye shall be killed and eaten". They then made men out of clay; these men were weak and watery, and by water they were destroyed.

Next they made men of wood and women of the pith of trees. These puppets married and gave in marriage, and peopled earth with wooden mannikins.

This unsatisfactory race was destroyed by a rain of resin and by the wild beasts. The survivors developed into apes. Next came a period occupied by the wildest feats of the magnified non-natural race and of animals. The record is like the description of a supernatural pantomime--the nightmare of a G.o.d. The t.i.tans upset hills, are turned into stone, and behave like Heitsi Eibib in the Namaqua myths.

Last of all, men were made of yellow and white maize, and these gave more satisfaction, but their sight was contracted. These, however, survived, and became the parents of the present stock of humanity.

Here we have the conceptions of creation and of evolution combined. Men are MADE, but only the fittest survive; the rest are either destroyed or permitted to develop into lower species. A similar mixture of the same ideas will be found in one of the Brahmanas among the Aryans of India.

It is to be observed that the Quiche myths, as recorded in Popol Vuh, contain not only traces of belief in a creative word and power, but many hymns of a lofty and beautifully devotional character.

"Hail! O Creator, O Former! Thou that hearest and understandest us, abandon us not, forsake us not! O G.o.d, thou that art in heaven and on the earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth, give us descendants and posterity as long as the light endures."

This is an example of the prayers of the men made out of maize, made especially that they might "call on the name" of the G.o.d or G.o.ds.

Whether we are to attribute this and similar pa.s.sages to Christian influence (for Popol Vuh, as we have it, is but an attempt to collect the fragments of the lost book that remained in men's minds after the conquest), or whether the purer portions of the myth be due to untaught native reflection and piety, it is not possible to determine. It is improbable that the ideas of a hostile race would be introduced into religious hymns by their victims. Here, as elsewhere in the sacred legends of civilised peoples, various strata of mythical and religious thought coexist.

No American people reached such a pitch of civilisation as the Aztecs of Anahuac, whose capital was the city of Mexico. It is needless here to repeat the story of their grandeur and their fall. Obscure as their history, previous to the Spanish invasion, may be, it is certain that they possessed a highly organised society, fortified towns, established colleges or priesthoods, magnificent temples, an elaborate calendar, great wealth in the precious metals, the art of picture-writing in considerable perfection, and a despotic central government. The higher cla.s.ses in a society like this could not but develop speculative systems, and it is alleged that shortly before the reign of Montezuma attempts had been made to introduce a pure monotheistic religion. But the ritual of the Aztecs remained an example of the utmost barbarity.

Never was a more cruel faith, not even in Carthage. Nowhere did temples reek with such pools of human blood; nowhere else, not in Dahomey and Ashanti, were human sacrifice, cannibalism and torture so essential to the cult that secured the favour of the G.o.ds. In these dark fanes--reeking with gore, peopled by monstrous shapes of idols bird-headed or beast-headed, and adorned with the hideous carvings in which we still see the priest, under the mask of some less ravenous forest beast, tormenting the victim--in these abominable temples the Castilian conquerors might well believe that they saw the dwellings of devils.

Yet Mexican religion had its moral and beautiful aspect, and the G.o.ds, or certain of the G.o.ds, required from their wors.h.i.+ppers not only b.l.o.o.d.y hands, but clean hearts.

To the G.o.ds we return later. The myths of the origin of things may be studied without a knowledge of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our authorities, though numerous, lack complete originality and are occasionally confused. We have first the Aztec monuments and hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most part undeciphered. These merely attest the hideous and cruel character of the deities. Next we have the reports of early missionaries, like Sahagun and Mendieta, of conquerors, like Bernal Diaz, and of n.o.ble half-breeds, such as Ixtlilxochitl.(1)

(1) Bancroft's Native Races of Pacific Coast of North America, vol.

iii., contains an account of the sources, and, with Sahagun and Acosta, is mainly followed here. See also J. G. Muller, Ur. Amerik. Rel., p.

507. See chapter on the "Divine Myths of Mexico".

There are two elements in Mexican, as in Quiche, and Indo-Aryan, and Maori, and even Andaman cosmogonic myth. We find the purer religion and the really philosophic speculation concurrent with such crude and childish stories as usually satisfy the intellectual demands of Ahts, Cahrocs and Bushmen; but of the purer and more speculative opinions we know little. Many of the n.o.ble, learned and priestly cla.s.ses of Aztecs perished at the conquest. The survivors were more or less converted to Catholicism, and in their writings probably put the best face possible on the native religion. Like the Spanish clergy, their instructors, they were inclined to explain away their national G.o.ds by a system of euhemerism, by taking it for granted that the G.o.ds and culture-heroes had originally been ordinary men, wors.h.i.+pped after their decease. This is almost invariably the view adopted by Sahagun. Side by side with the confessions, as it were, of the clergy and cultivated cla.s.ses coexisted the popular beliefs, the myths of the people, partaking of the nature of folk-lore, but not rejected by the priesthood.

Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving cosmogonic myths of the Aztecs. Probably we may reckon in the first or learned and speculative cla.s.s of tales the account of a series of constructions and reconstructions of the world. This idea is not peculiar to the higher mythologies, the notion of a deluge and recreation or renewal of things is almost universal, and even among the untutored Australians there are memories of a flood and of an age of ruinous winds. But the theory of definite epochs, calculated in accordance with the Mexican calendar, of epochs in which things were made and re-made, answers closely to the Indo-Aryan conception of successive kalpas, and can only have been developed after the method of reckoning time had been carried to some perfection. "When heaven and earth were fas.h.i.+oned, they had already been four times created and destroyed," say the fragments of what is called the Chimalpopoca ma.n.u.script. Probably this theory of a series of kalpas is only one of the devices by which the human mind has tried to cheat itself into the belief that it can conceive a beginning of things. The earth stands on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and it is going too far to ask what the tortoise stands on. In the same way the world's beginning seems to become more intelligible or less puzzling when it is thrown back into a series of beginnings and endings. This method also was in harmony with those vague ideas of evolution and of the survival of the fittest which we have detected in myth. The various tentative human races of the Popol Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they did not fulfil the purposes for which they were made. In Brahmanic myth we shall see that type after type was condemned and perished because it was inadequate, or inadequately equipped--because it did not harmonise with its environment.(1) For these series of experimental creations and inefficient evolutions vast s.p.a.ces of time were required, according to the Aztec and Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that actual floods and great convulsions of nature may have been remembered in tradition, and may have lent colour and form to these somewhat philosophic myths of origins. From such sources probably comes the Mexican hypothesis of a water-age (ending in a deluge), an earth-age (ending in an earthquake), a wind-age (ending in hurricanes), and the present dispensation, to be destroyed by fire.

(1) As an example of a dim evolutionary idea, note the myths of the various ages as reported by Mendieta, according to which there were five earlier ages "or suns" of bad quality, so that the contemporary human beings were unable to live on the fruits of the earth.

The less philosophic and more popular Aztec legend of the commencement of the world is mainly remarkable for the importance given in it to objects of stone. For some reason, stones play a much greater part in American than in other mythologies. An emerald was wors.h.i.+pped in the temple of Pachacamac, who was, according to Garcila.s.so, the supreme and spiritual deity of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala(1) makes much of a mysterious, primeval and animated obsidian stone. In the Iroquois myths(2) stones are the leading characters. Nor did Aztec myth escape this influence.

(1) Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels.

(2) Erminie Smith, Bureau of Ethnol. Report, ii.

There was a G.o.d in heaven named Citlalatonac, and a G.o.ddess, Citlalicue.

When we speak of "heaven" we must probably think of some such world of ordinary terrestrial nature above the sky as that from which Ataentsic fell in the Huron story. The G.o.ddess gave birth to a flint-knife, and flung the flint down to earth. This abnormal birth partly answers to that of the youngest of the Adityas, the rejected abortion in the Veda, and to the similar birth and rejection of Maui in New Zealand. From the fallen flint-knife sprang our old friends the magnified non-natural beings with human characteristics, "the G.o.ds," to the number of 1600.

The G.o.ds sent up the hawk (who in India and Australia generally comes to the front on these occasions), and asked their mother, or rather grandmother, to help them to make men, to be their servants. Citlalicue rather jeered at her unconsidered offspring. She advised them to go to the lord of the homes of the departed, Mictlanteuctli, and borrow a bone or some ashes of the dead who are with him. We must never ask for consistency from myths. This statement implies that men had already been in existence, though they were not yet created. Perhaps they had perished in one of the four great destructions. With difficulty and danger the G.o.ds stole a bone from Hades, placed it in a bowl, and smeared it with their own blood, as in Chaldea and elsewhere. Finally, a boy and a girl were born out of the bowl. From this pair sprang men, and certain of the G.o.ds, jumping into a furnace, became sun and moon. To the sun they then, in Aztec fas.h.i.+on, sacrificed themselves, and there, one might think, was an end of them. But they afterwards appeared in wondrous fas.h.i.+ons to their wors.h.i.+ppers, and ordained the ritual of religion. According to another legend, man and woman (as in African myths) struggled out of a hole in the ground.(1)

(1) Authorities: Ixtlil.; Kingsborough, ix. pp. 205, 206; Sahagun, Hist.

Gen., i. 3, vii. 2; J. G. Muller, p. 510, where Muller compares the Delphic conception of ages of the world; Bancroft, iii. pp. 60, 65.

The myths of the peoples under the empire of the Incas in Peru are extremely interesting, because almost all mythical formations are found existing together, while we have historical evidence as to the order and manner of their development. The Peru of the Incas covered the modern state of the same name, and included Ecuador, with parts of Chili and Bolivia. M. Reville calculates that the empire was about 2500 miles in length, four times as long as France, and that its breadth was from 250 to 500 miles. The country, contained three different climatic regions, and was peopled by races of many different degrees of culture, all more or less subject to the dominion of the Children of the Sun. The three regions were the dry strip along the coast, the fertile and cultivated land about the spurs of the Cordilleras, and the inland mountain regions, inhabited by the wildest races. Near Cuzco, the Inca capital, was the Lake of t.i.ticaca, the Mediterranean, as it were, of Peru, for on the sh.o.r.es of this inland sea was developed the chief civilisation of the new world.

As to the inst.i.tutions, myths and religion of the empire, we have copious if contradictory information. There are the narratives of the Spanish conquerors, especially of Pizarro's chaplain, Valverde, an ignorant bigoted fanatic. Then we have somewhat later travellers and missionaries, of whom Cieza de Leon (his book was published thirty years after the conquest, in 1553) is one of the most trustworthy. The "Royal Commentaries" of Garcila.s.so de la Vega, son of an Inca lady and a Spanish conqueror, have often already been quoted. The critical spirit and sound sense of Garcila.s.so are in remarkable contrast to the stupid orthodoxy of the Spaniards, but some allowance must be made for his fervent Peruvian patriotism. He had heard the Inca traditions repeated in boyhood, and very early in life collected all the information which his mother and maternal uncle had to give him, or which could be extracted from the quipus (the records of knotted cord), and from the commemorative pictures of his ancestors. Garcila.s.so had access, moreover, to the "torn papers" of Blas Valera, an early Spanish missionary of unusual sense and acuteness. Christoval de Moluna is also an excellent authority, and much may be learned from the volume of Rites and Laws of the Yncas.(1)

(1) A more complete list of authorities, including the garrulous Acosta, is published by M. Reville in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 136, 137.

Garcila.s.so, Cieza de Leon, Christoval de Moluna, Acosta and the Rites and Laws have all been translated by Mr. Clements Markham, and are published, with the editor's learned and ingenious notes, in the collection of the Hakluyt Society. Care must be taken to discriminate between what is reported about the Indians of the various provinces, who were in very different grades of culture, and what is told about the Incas themselves.

The political and religious condition of the Peruvian empire is very clearly conceived and stated by Garcila.s.so. Without making due allowance for that mysterious earlier civilisation, older than the Incas, whose cyclopean buildings are the wonder of travellers, Garcila.s.so attributes the introduction of civilisation to his own ancestors. Allowing for what is confessedly mythical in his narrative, it must be admitted that he has a firm grasp of what the actual history must have been. He recognises a period of savagery before the Incas, a condition of the rudest barbarism, which still existed on the fringes and mountain recesses of the empire. The religion of that period was mere magic and totemism. From all manner of natural objects, but chiefly from beasts and birds, the various savage stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they revered and offered sacrifice to their totemic ancestors.(1) Garcila.s.so adds, what is almost incredible, that the Indians tamely permitted themselves to be eaten by their totems, when these were carnivorous animals. They did this with the less reluctance as they were cannibals, and accustomed to breed children for the purposes of the cuisine from captive women taken in war.(2) Among the huacas or idols, totems, fetishes and other adorable objects of the Indians, wors.h.i.+pped before and retained after the introduction of the Inca sun-totem and solar cult, Garcila.s.so names trees, hills, rocks, caves, fountains, emeralds, pieces of jasper, tigers, lions, bears, foxes, monkeys, condors, owls, lizards, toads, frogs, sheep, maize, the sea, "for want of larger G.o.ds, crabs" and bats. The bat was also the totem of the Zotzil, the chief family of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, and the most high G.o.d of the Cakchiquels was wors.h.i.+pped in the shape of a bat. We are reminded of religion as it exists in Samoa. The explanation of Blas Valera was that in each totem (pacarissa) the Indians adored the devil.

(1) Com. Real., vol. i., chap. ix., x. xi. pp. 47-53.

(2) Cieza de Leon, xii., xv., xix., xxi., xxiii., xxvi., xxviii., x.x.xii.

Cieza is speaking of people in the valley of Cauca, in New Granada.

Athwart this early religion of totems and fetishes came, in Garcila.s.so's narrative, the purer religion of the Incas, with what he regards as a philosophic development of a belief in a Supreme Being. According to him, the Inca sun-wors.h.i.+p was really a totemism of a loftier character. The Incas "knew how to choose G.o.ds better than the Indians".

Garcila.s.so's theory is that the earlier totems were selected chiefly as distinguis.h.i.+ng marks by the various stocks, though, of course, this does not explain why the animals or other objects of each family were wors.h.i.+pped or were regarded as ancestors, and the blood-connections of the men who adored them. The Incas, disdaining crabs, lizards, bats and even serpents and lions, "chose" the sun. Then, just like the other totemic tribes, they feigned to be of the blood and lineage of the sun.

This fable is, in brief, the Inca myth of the origin of civilisation and of man, or at least of their breed of men. As M. Reville well remarks, it is obvious that the Inca claim is an adaptation of the local myth of Lake t.i.ticaca, the inland sea of Peru. According to that myth, the Children of the Sun, the ancestors of the Incas, came out of the earth (as in Greek and African legends) at Lake t.i.ticaca, or reached its sh.o.r.es after wandering from the hole or cave whence they first emerged.

The myth, as adapted by the Incas, takes for granted the previous existence of mankind, and, in some of its forms, the Inca period is preceded by the deluge.

Of the Peruvian myth concerning the origin of things, the following account is given by a Spanish priest, Christoval de Moluna, in a report to the Bishop of Cuzco in 1570.(1) The story was collected from the lips of ancient Peruvians and old native priests, who again drew their information in part from the painted records reserved in the temple of the sun near Cuzco. The legend begins with a deluge myth; a cataclysm ended a period of human existence. All mankind perished except a man and woman, who floated in a box to a distance of several hundred miles from Cuzco. There the creator commanded them to settle, and there, like Pund-jel in Australia, he made clay images of men of all races, attired in their national dress, and then animated them. They were all fas.h.i.+oned and painted as correct models, and were provided with their national songs and with seed-corn. They then were put into the earth, and emerged all over the world at the proper places, some (as in Africa and Greece) coming out of fountains, some out of trees, some out of caves. For this reason they made huacas (wors.h.i.+pful objects or fetishes) of the trees, caves and fountains. Some of the earliest men were changed into stones, others into falcons, condors and other creatures which we know were totems in Peru. Probably this myth of metamorphosis was invented to account for the reverence paid to totems or pacarissas as the Peruvians called them. In Tiahuanaco, where the creation, or rather manufacture of men took place, the creator turned many sinners into stones. The sun was made in the shape of a man, and, as he soared into heaven, he called out in a friendly fas.h.i.+on to Manco Ccapac, the Ideal first Inca, "Look upon me as thy father, and wors.h.i.+p me as thy father". In these fables the creator is called Pachyachachi, "Teacher of the world". According to Christoval, the creator and his sons were "eternal and unchangeable".

Among the Canaris men descend from the survivor of the deluge, and a beautiful bird with the face of a woman, a siren in fact, but known better to ornithologists as a macaw. "The chief cause," says the good Christoval, "of these fables was ignorance of G.o.d."

(1) Rites and Laws of the Yncas, p. 4, Hakluyt Society, 1873.

The story, as told by Cieza de Leon, runs thus:(1) A white man of great stature (in fact, "a magnified non-natural man") came into the world, and gave life to beasts and human beings. His name was Ticiviracocha, and he was called the Father of the Sun.(2) There are likenesses of him in the temple, and he was regarded as a moral teacher. It was owing apparently to this benevolent being that four mysterious brothers and sisters emerged from a cave--Children of the Sun, fathers of the Incas, teachers of savage men. Their own conduct, however, was not exemplary, and they shut up in a hole in the earth the brother of whom they were jealous. This incident is even more common in the marchen or household tales than in the regular tribal or national myths of the world.(3) The buried brother emerged again with wings, and "without doubt he must have been some devil," says honest Cieza de Leon. This brother was Manco Ccapac, the heroic ancestor of the Incas, and he turned his jealous brethren into stones. The whole tale is in the spirit ill.u.s.trated by the wilder romances of the Popol Vuh.

(1) Second Part of the Chronicles of Peru, p 5.

(2) See Making of Religion, pp. 265-270. Name and G.o.d are much disputed.