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surmise which we naturally make that Huitzilopochtli is not the original name of the Mexican God, but only a sobriquet or pet-name by which the people described him, in terms of his symbolic image. Dr. Réville does not mention this analogy; and it would be interesting to know how he would explain it. He is wont to insist strongly that parallels in mythology do not mean borrowing; and in this case I believe it would be right to say so. But the explanation, as I regard it, is somewhat curious. A War-God, specially known as such, is not a primary conception: what happens is that a particular God comes to be the God of war. Now, we know, that Mars was originally a sylvan deity, concerned with vegetation and flocks and herds. How came he to preside over war? Simply because, I take it, he was the God of the season at which war was usually made. Campaigns were begun in spring; and so the God of the Spring season, who was specially invoked, became War-God. Mars was just Martius, March; and he lent himself the better to the conception, because March is a blowy and blusterous month. Mars, you remember, retains these characteristics, being a blusterous rather than a great or dignified God in both the Greek and Roman mythologies. As in Italy, so in Mexico. The God of the war-season became the God of War; and the one deity like the other retained, as War-God, the symbol of the little bird which was held to be his forerunner in nature. Picus means speckled,3 coloured; and the speckled woodpecker might figure the coming of speckled spring, as the humming-bird would do the colour-time in Mexico. Perhaps there may be a similar natural explanation for the coincidence that Huitzilopochtli is born of a mother, Coatlicue, who is abnormally impregnated by being touched by a ball of bright-coloured feathers, while Juno bears Mars also virginally, being impregnated by the touch of a flower.6

But a great difference arises between the cults of Mars and Huitzilopochtli in respect of development. The Roman God remained subordinate, warlike though the Romans were; the Mexican became one of the two leading deities, and received the more assiduous worship. Whence the divergence? Mainly, I take it, from the multiplication of the Mexican priesthood and the special form of their cultus. It is to their enormous power, in the first place, that we must attribute the fearful multiplication of human sacrifices. These, there is abundant reason to believe, have existed in all religions at one stage; and it has depended on the presence or

He was, in fact, identical with the God Mexitli. Prescott, p. 9.

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2 Cato, "De re Rustica," 141 (142). Mars, too, was identified with the sun. Macrobius, "Saturnalia," i. 19. So was Arês, according to Preller ("Griech. Myth.,' ed. 1860, i. 257), who, however, only cites the Homeridian hymn, which does not bear him out. That identifies Arês with the planet Mars.

So White. Bréal derives it from a root meaning to strike. Cox, as cited.

* Dr. Réville notes that the humming-bird is specially courageous. The same view might be taken of the woodpecker.

Clavigero, B. vi. c. 6(p. 254).

• Ovid, "Fasti," v. 231-256.

absence of a powerful priesthood whether they are obstinately continued or abandoned. It may or may not be, as Professor Robertson Smith argues, that human sacrifices are not more ancient than those of animals, but arise late, after men have ceased to regard animals as equally belonging to the tribe with themselves. What we do know is that, where there is only a limited priesthood, the natural force of compassion leads men in time, as they grow more civilized, to abandon such sacrifices; while a priesthood tends to maintain and multiply them. Thus among the civilized peoples of the old world they lasted longest with the priest-ridden Carthaginians; and the reason that they did not continue late among the Jews, was that these did not possess a numerous priesthood till after the Captivity, when their religion was recast in terms of the higher Oriental systems. The process is perfectly intelligible. The stronghold of all priesthoods is the principle of intercession; whether it be in the form of simple prayer and propitiatory worship; or a mixture of that with a doctrine of mystic sacrifice, as among Protestants; or in the constant repetition of a ceremony of mystic sacrifice, as among Catholics; or in actual animal sacrifice, as among Jews and Pagans. In these cases we see that, the more stress is laid on the act of sacrifice, the stronger is the priesthood-or we may put it conversely. Strongest of all then must be the hold of the priesthood whose sacrifices are most terrible. And terrible was the prestige of the priesthood of Mexico. The greater and richer the State grew, the larger were the hecatombs of human victims. Almost every God had to be propitiated in the same way; but above all must the War-God be for ever glutted with the smoking hearts of slain captives. Scarcely any historian, says Prescott, estimates the number of human beings sacrificed yearly throughout the empire at less than 20,000, and some make it 50,000. Of this doomed host, Huitzilopochtli had the lion's share; and it is recorded that at the dedication of his great new temple in 1486 there were slain in his honour 70,000 prisoners of war, who had been reserved for the purpose for years throughout the empire. They formed a train two miles long, and the work of priestly butchery went on for several days.

At every festival of the God there was a new hecatomb of victims. Conceive how the chronic spectacle burnt itself in on the imagination of the people. The Mexican temples were great pyramids, sometimes of four or five stories, and the sacrifices were offered on the top. The stair was so made that it mounted successively all four sides of the pyramid, and when the train of torch-bearing priests wound their way up in the darkness, as was the rule for certain sacrifices, to the topmost platform, with its ever-burning fires and its stone of sacrifice, the whole city looked

"The Religion of the Semites," p. 346. It seems a reasonable presumption that cannibalism was practised in connexion with war among savages of all races. The religious element might be super-added.

On this, however, comp. F. W. Newman, " Miscellanies," pp. 302-3. 3 As cited, B. i., c. 3, p. 38. 4 Bancroft ii. 334.

on. And then the horror of the sacrificial act! In the great majority of the sacrifices the victim was laid living on the convex stone and held by the limbs, while the slayer cut open his breast with the sacred flint 1 knife -the ancient knife, used before men had the use of metals, and therefore most truly religious-and tore out the palpitating heart, which was held on high to the all-seeing sun, before being set to burn in incense in front of the idol, whose lips, and the walls of whose shrine, were devoutly daubed with blood.

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Ritual and mystery lent their artistic glamour to the process of butchery. In connexion with one annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the Creator and "soul of the world," who combined the attributes of perpetual youthful beauty with the function of the God of justice and retribution, as Winter Sun, there was selected for immolation a young male captive of especiał beauty, who was treated with great reverence for a whole year before being sacrificed. He was gorgeously attired; flowers were strewn before him; he went about followed by a retinue of the king's pages; and the people prostrated themselves before him and worshipped him as a God. He was in fact the God's representative, and was described as his image. A month before the fatal day new indulgences were heaped upon him. Four beautiful maidens, bearing the names of the principal Goddesses, were given him as concubines. At length came his death day. His honours and his joys were ended, and his fine raiment taken away. Carried on a royal barge across the lake to a particular temple, about a league from the city, whither all the people thronged, he was led up the pyramid in procession, he taking part in the ritual by throwing away his chaplets of flowers and breaking his guitar. And then at the top, the six black-robed slayers, the sacrificial stone, and the horror of the end. And when all was over the priests piously improved the occasion, preaching that all this had been typical of human destiny."

The Goddesses too had their victims-women victims; and one maiden was prepared for one sacrifice to the Maize-Goddess Centeotl, the Mexican Ceres, somewhat as the representative of Tezcatlipoca was. Some of the ritual horrors of the slaying will hardly bear telling: they are sickening even to read." But we cannot ignore the special and peculiar horror of the Mexican cultus-the act of ritual cannibalism. This was strictly a

1 Or rather, obsidian, a volcanic mineral.

'It is remarkable that the doctrine of the Logos is here developed in connexion with the Winter Sun, who would presumably be born at the winter solstice (when the reign of Huitzilopochtli ended) and pass away at the vernal equinox. Tezcatlipoca was nominally the "greatest God” (Člavigero, B. vi., c. 2, p. 244), though Huitzilopochtli got more attention. "Tezcatlipoca was the most sublime figure in the Aztec Pantheon" (Dr. Brinton, "American Hero Myths," 1882, p. 69). See his titles (Id. p. 70). He was the Night God (p. 71); and Clavigero notes that his statue was of black stone. Sahagun, p. 97 (b. ii., c. 24).

His limbs were sacramentally eaten by the aristocracy.

'Sahagun, as cited.

• See Bancroft iii., 354-7; or Sahagun, pp. 134-5 (b. ii., ch. 30), as to the flaying of victims and donning of their skins, for instance.

matter of religion. After a captive had been sacrificially slain in ordinary course, his body was delivered to the warrior who captured him, and was by him made the special dish at a formal and decorous public banquet to his friends. It was part of the prescribed worship of the Gods. That the Mexicans were not cannibals by taste is shown by the fact that in the great siege by Cortès they died of starvation by thousands. They never ate each other: 1 only the sacrificially slain captive. But only a great priesthood could have maintained even that usage. There are signs that such ritual cannibalism has existed at one time in all religions: the memory of it survives in Christian formulas: and Dr. Réville points out that it must have originated in simple cannibalism, for men would never have begun to offer to the Gods food that was abominable to themselves. On the other hand, however, we know that cannibalism everywhere dies out naturally even among savages, apart from religion, as soon as they reach some degree of peaceful life, and even sooner. Among the native tribes of Lower California, though they are among the most degraded savages in the world, and given to various disgusting practices, the eating, not | only of human flesh, but of that of monkeys, as resembling men, is held abominable.3 And no amount of passion for war could have kept the civilized Aztecs complacently practising ritual cannibalism if an austere and all-powerful priesthood had not fanatically enforced it. The great sanction for human sacrifice, with the Mexicans as with the Khonds in India, was the doctrine which identified the God with the victim, and as it were sacrificed him to himself. The principle was thus in a peculiar degree priest-made.

The recital of these facts may lead some to conclude that the Mexican priesthood must have been the most atrocious multitude of miscreants the world ever saw. But that would be a complete misconception: they were as conscientious a priesthood as history bears record of.

Apart from the vast priesthood of human sacrifices, there was a body attached to the worship of the benign deity Quetzalcoatl, "Feathered Serpent," the God of the Air,' who appears to have been a God of the Toltec people, driven out by the Aztecs, but whose worship was retained by the latter, among whom no doubt many Toltecs were absorbed. It

1 It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the eating of a slain enemy was originally part of a process of triumphing over him; and that the abstention from the flesh of fellow-citizens meant not distaste for human flesh (which is negatived by the ritual practice), but obedience to a moral veto on domestic cannibalism, such as must have been set up early in all civilizations. Cf. Bancroft, ii. 358.

Lectures cited, p. 87.

Bancroft, i. 560. But it is not certain whether this veto applies to enemies. Professor Robertson Smith thinks the horror of human flesh arose in superstition as to its "sacrosanct character," but does not explain. "Religion of the Semites," p. 348.

* As to the customariness of this identification, see Bancroft, iii. 342. "Of the human sacrifices of rude peoples, those of the Mexicans are perhaps the most instructive, for in them the theanthropic character of the victim comes out most clearly" (Prof. Robertson Smith, as cited, p. 347). Generally, on this widely important phase of early religion. see Mr. J. G. Frazer's valuable work "The Golden Bough."

⚫ Clavigero, B. vi., c. 4 (p. 248).

admittedly exhibits the highest kind of moral development that a Naturemyth can take.1 According to Dr. Brinton and Dr. Réville, Quetzalcoatl is the God of the beneficent west-wind, identified with the vanquished Toltec people, so that like them he is driven away by the enmity of other deities, but like the vanishing or slain Sun-God of all mythologies, he is to return again in power and great glory. This myth was probably the main cause of the success of Cortès, for he was at first believed by both people and king to be the good God Quetzalcoatl come back again." Well, his myth is admittedly a beautiful one; and one writer argues that the Mexicans cannot have framed such a high religious conception unless there had been men of the highest moral qualities among them. By such a myth Christians are set vaguely surmising a debt to their own legend; but there is no such thing in the case. As Mr. Bancroft observes, the process is one which has occurred in many mythologies :

"It is everywhere the case among savages, with their national God, that the latter is a nature-deity, who becomes gradually transformed into a national God, then into a national King, high-priest, founder of a religion, and at last ends in being considered a human being. The older and purer the civilization of a people is, the easier it is to recognise the original essence of its national God, in spite of all transformations and disguises. So it is here. Behind the human form of the God glimmers the nature-shape, and the national God is known by, perhaps, all his worshippers as also a nature-deity. From his powerful influence upon nature, he might also be held as creator. The pure human form of this God [Quetzalcoatl] as it appears in the fable, as well as in the image, is not the original, but the youngest. His oldest concrete forms are taken from nature, to which he originally belongs, and have maintained themselves in many attributes. All these symbolize him as the God of fertility, chiefly . . . by means of the beneficial influence of the air."4

Now, we know that Quetzalcoatl was held to be averse to human sacrifices, and we may assume that the best-hearted and sanest Mexicans would incline to his cultus, which was of high, though not the highest standing. But do not let us decide on that account that the other priesthoods were wholly evil in spirit or even in act. The strangest thing of all is that their frightful system of sacrifice was bound up not only with a strict and ascetic social morality, but with an emphatic humanitarian doctrine. If asceticism be virtue, as Christianity teaches, they cultivated it zealously. There was a Mexican Goddess of Love, and there was of course plenty of vice; but nowhere could men win a higher reputation for sanctity by living in celibacy. Their saints were numerous. They had nearly all the formulas of Christian morality, so called. The priests themselves mostly lived in strict celibacy; and they educated children with the greatest

1 Dr. Tylor strangely writes: "I am inclined to consider Quetzalcoatl a real personage, and not a mythical one" (“ Anahuac,” p. 278). It was this deity who was long ago identified with St. Thomas (Clavigero, B. vi., c. 4, p. 250). For the myth see Dr. Brinton, “American Hero Myths," pp. 73-142. In the ritual of the confessional he is called the "father and mother" of the penitent (Sahagun, p. 341; l. vi., c. 7). He, too, is born of a virgin mother (Brinton, p. 90).

Prescott, B. ii., c. 6; B. iv., c. 5.

3 Mr. Kirk, in note on Prescott, as cited, p. 29.

4 "Native Races," iii. 279.

• His priests were white-robed, while those of the bloody cults were robed in black.

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