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 noble half-breeds, such as Ixtlilxochitl.[1]
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 combined 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 noble, learned, and priestly classes of Aztecs perished at the conquest. The survivors were more or less converted to Catholicism, and in their writings put the best face possible on the native religion. Like the Spanish clergy, their instructors, they were inclined to explain away their national gods by a system of euhemerism, by taking it for granted that the gods and culture-heroes had originally been ordinary men, worshipped 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 classes coexisted the popular beliefs, the myths of the people, partaking of the nature of folklore, but not rejected by the priesthood.
Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving
- ↑ 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. Müller, Ur. Amerik. Rel., p. 507. See chapter on the "Divine Myths of Mexico."
