The Myths of Mexico & Peru

Lewis Spence

• Publisher: Librorium Editions
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783968581040
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In recent years a reawakening has taken place in the study of American archæology and antiquities, owing chiefly to the labours of a band of scholars in the United States and a few enthusiasts in the continent of Europe. For the greater part of the nineteenth century it appeared as if the last word had been written upon Mexican archæology. The lack of excavations and exploration had cramped the outlook of scholars, and there was nothing for them to work upon save what had been done in this respect before their own time. The writers on Central America who lived in the third quarter of the last century relied on the travels of Stephens and Norman, and never appeared to consider it essential that the country or the antiquities in which they specialised should be examined anew, or that fresh expeditions should be equipped to discover whether still further monuments existed relating to the ancient peoples who raised the teocallis of Mexico and the huacas of Peru. True, the middle of the century was not altogether without its Americanist explorers, but the researches of these were performed in a manner so perfunctory that but few additions to the science resulted from their labours.

CHAPTER I: THE CIVILISATION OF MEXICO

The Civilisations of the New World

There is now no question as to the indigenous origin of the civilisations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Upon few subjects, however, has so much mistaken erudition been lavished. The beginnings of the races who inhabited these regions, and the cultures which they severally created, have been referred to nearly every civilised or semi-civilised nation of antiquity, and wild if fascinating theories have been advanced with the intention of showing that civilisation was initiated upon American soil by Asiatic or European influence. These speculations were for the most part put forward by persons who possessed but a merely general acquaintance with the circumstances of American aboriginal civilisation, and who were struck by the superficial resemblances which undoubtedly exist between American and Asiatic peoples, customs, and art-forms, but which cease to be apparent to the Americanist, who perceives in them only such likenesses as inevitably occur in the work of men situated in similar environments and surrounded by similar social and religious conditions.

The Maya of Yucatan may be regarded as the most highly civilised of the peoples who occupied the American continent before the advent of Europeans, and it is usually their culture which we are asked to believe had its seat of origin in Asia. It is unnecessary to refute this theory in detail, as that has already been ably accomplished.1 But it may be remarked that the surest proof of the purely native origin of American civilisation is to be found in the unique nature of American art, the undoubted result of countless centuries of isolation. American language, arithmetic, and methods of time-reckoning, too, bear no resemblance to other systems, European or Asiatic, and we may be certain that had a civilising race entered America from Asia it would have left its indelible impress upon things so intensely associated with the life of a people as well as upon the art and architecture of the country, for they are as much the product of culture as is the ability to raise temples.

Evidence of Animal and Plant Life

It is impossible in this connection to ignore the evidence in favour of native advancement which can be adduced from the artificial production of food in America. Nearly all the domesticated animals and cultivated food-plants found on the continent at the period of the discovery were totally different from those known to the Old World. Maize, cocoa, tobacco, and the potato, with a host of useful plants, were new to the European conquerors, and the absence of such familiar animals as the horse, cow, and sheep, besides a score of lesser animals, is eloquent proof of the prolonged isolation which the American continent underwent subsequent to its original settlement by man.

Origin of American Man

An Asiatic origin is, of course, admitted for the aborigines of America, but it undoubtedly stretched back into that dim Tertiary Era when man was little more than beast, and language as yet was not, or at the best was only half formed. Later immigrants there certainly were, but these probably arrived by way of Behring Strait, and not by the land-bridge connecting Asia and America by which the first-comers found entrance. At a later geological period the general level of the North American continent was higher than at present, and a broad isthmus connected it with Asia. During this prolonged elevation vast littoral plains, now submerged, extended continuously from the American to the Asiatic shore, affording an easy route of migration to a type of man from whom both the Mongolian branches may have sprung. But this type, little removed from the animal as it undoubtedly was, carried with it none of the refinements of art or civilisation; and if any resemblances occur between the art-forms or polity of its equal descendants in Asia and America, they are due to the influence of a remote common ancestry, and not to any later influx of Asiatic civilisation to American shores.

Traditions of Intercourse with Asia

The few traditions of Asiatic intercourse with America are, alas! easily dissipated. It is a dismal business to be compelled to refute the dreams of others. How much more fascinating would American history have been had Asia sowed the seeds of her own peculiar civilisation in the western continent, which would then have become a newer and further East, a more glowing and golden Orient! But America possesses a fascination almost as intense when there falls to be considered the marvel of the evolution of her wondrous civilisations—the flowers of progress of a new, of an isolated world.

The idea that the “Fu-Sang” of the Chinese annals alluded to America was rendered illusory by Klaproth, who showed its identity with a Japanese island. It is not impossible that Chinese and Japanese vessels may have drifted on to the American coasts, but that they sailed thither of set purpose is highly improbable. Gomara, the Mexican historian, states that those who served with Coronado’s expedition in 1542 saw off the Pacific coast certain ships having their prows decorated with gold and silver, and laden with merchandise, and these they supposed to be of Cathay or China, “because they intimated by signs that they had been thirty days on their voyage.” Like most of these interesting stories, however, the tale has no foundation in fact, as the incident cannot be discovered in the original account of the expedition, published in 1838 in the travel-collection of Ternaux-Compans.

Legends of European Intercourse

We shall find the traditions, one might almost call them legends, of early European intercourse with America little more satisfactory than those which recount its ancient connection with Asia. We may dismiss the sagas of the discovery of America by the Norsemen, which are by no means mere tradition, and pass on to those in which the basis of fact is weaker and the legendary interest more strong. We are told that when the Norsemen drove forth those Irish monks who had settled in Iceland, the fugitives voyaged to “Great Ireland,” by which many antiquarians of the older school imagine the author of the myth to have meant America. The Irish Book of Lismore recounts the voyage of St. Brandan, Abbot of Cluainfert, in Ireland, to an island in the ocean which Providence had intended as the abode of saints. It gives a glowing account of his seven years’ cruise in western waters, and tells of numerous discoveries, among them a hill of fire and an endless island, which he quitted after an unavailing journey of forty days, loading his ships with its fruits, and returning home. Many Norse legends exist regarding this “Greater Ireland,” or “Huitramanna Land” (White Man’s Land), among them one concerning a Norseman who was cast away on its shores, and who found there a race of white men who went to worship their gods bearing banners, and “shouting with a loud voice.” There is, of course, the bare possibility that the roving Norsemen may have on occasions drifted or have been cast away as far south as Mexico, and such an occurrence becomes the more easy of belief when we remember that they certainly reached the shores of North America.

The Legend of Madoc

A much more interesting because more probable story is that which tells of the discovery of distant lands across the western ocean by Madoc, a princeling of North Wales, in the year 1170. It is recorded in Hakluyt’s English Voyages and Powel’s History of Wales. Madoc, the son of Owen Gwyneth, disgusted by the strife of his brothers for the principality of their dead father, resolved to quit such an uncongenial atmosphere, and, fitting out ships with men and munition, sought adventure by sea, sailing west, and leaving the coast of Ireland so far north that he came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. “This land,” says Hakluyt, “must needs be some part of that country of which the Spaniards affirme themselves to be the first finders since Hanno’s time,” and through this allusion we are enabled to see how these legends relating to mythical lands came to be associated with the American continent. Concerning the land discovered by Madoc many tales were current in Wales in mediæval times. Madoc on his return declared that it was pleasant and fruitful, but uninhabited. He succeeded in persuading a large number of people to accompany him to this delectable region, and, as he never returned, Hakluyt concludes that the descendants of the folk he took with him composed the greater part of the population of the America of the seventeenth century, a conclusion in which he has been supported by more than one modern antiquarian. Indeed, the wildest fancies have been based upon this legend, and stories of Welsh-speaking Indians who were able to converse with Cymric immigrants to the American colonies have been received with complacency by the older school of American historians as the strongest confirmation of the saga. It is notable, however, that Henry VII of England, the son of a Welshman, may have been influenced in his patronage of the early American explorers by this legend of Madoc, as it is known that he employed one Guttyn Owen, a Welsh historiographer, to draw up his paternal pedigree, and that this same Guttyn included the story in his works. Such legends as those relating to Atlantis and Antilia scarcely fall within the scope of American myth, as they undoubtedly relate to early communication with the Canaries and Azores.

American Myths of the Discovery

But what were the speculations of the Red Men on the other side of the Atlantic? Were there no rumours there, no legends of an Eastern world? Immediately prior to the discovery there was in America a widely disseminated belief that at a relatively remote period strangers from the east had visited American soil, eventually returning to their own abodes in the Land of Sunrise. Such, for example, was the Mexican legend of Quetzalcoatl, to which we shall revert later in its more essentially mythical connection. He landed with several companions at Vera Cruz, and speedily brought to bear the power of a civilising agency upon native opinion. In the ancient Mexican pinturas, or paintings, he is represented as being habited in a long black gown, fringed with white crosses. After sojourning with the Mexicans for a number of years, during which time he initiated them into the arts of life and civilisation, he departed from their land on a magic raft, promising, however, to return. His second advent was anxiously looked for, and when Cortés and his companions arrived at Vera Cruz, the identical spot at which Quetzalcoatl was supposed to have set out on his homeward journey, the Mexicans fully believed him to be the returned hero. Of course Montezuma, their monarch, was not altogether taken by surprise at the coming of the white man, as he had been informed of the arrival of mysterious strangers in Yucatan and elsewhere in Central America; but in the eyes of the commonalty the Spanish leader was a “hero-god” indeed. In this interestin...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I: THE CIVILISATION OF MEXICO
• CHAPTER II: MEXICAN MYTHOLOGY
• CHAPTER III: MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE ANCIENT MEXICANS
• CHAPTER IV: THE MAYA RACE AND MYTHOLOGY
• CHAPTER V: MYTHS OF THE MAYA
• CHAPTER VI: THE CIVILISATION OF OLD PERU
• CHAPTER VII: THE MYTHOLOGY OF PERU
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX AND GLOSSARY
• Table of Contents