CHAPTER X

THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE

I. THE FAR SOUTH[203]

The Rio de la Plata is the third of the great river systems which drain the South American continent. It combines the waters of the Uruguay, draining the hilly region of southern Brazil, with those of the Paraná, which through its numerous tributaries taps the heart of the south central portion of the continent. The Paraná and its continuation, the Paraguay, flowing almost due south from the centre of the continent, form a kind of axis, dividing the hilly lands on the east from the great woodland plains known as the Chaco, stretching westward to the Andes, from whose age-worn detritus they were doubtless formed. The northern boundary of the Chaco is in the neighbourhood of the Tropic of Capricorn; southward the plains extend far into Argentina, narrowing with the encroaching mountains, and finally giving way to the grassy pampas, in the latitude of Buenos Aires. These, in turn, extend southward to the Patagonian plains--geologically one of earth's youngest regions,--of which the terminus is the mountain region meeting the southern straits. Parallel with this stretch of open country, which diminishes in width as the southern latitudes are approached, is the Andean ridge, almost due north and south in sense, scarcely varying the width of the western coastal region which it marks off, but eastward extending in heavier lines of ridges and broader plateaus as the centre of the continent is approached. South of latitude 40º the western coastal region, with the sinking of the Andean range, merges in a long archipelago leading on to Tierra del Fuego and its satellite islands, beyond the Straits of Magellan,--an archipelago which is the far southern counterpart of that reaching along North America from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Isles.

The aboriginal peoples of the region thus described fall into a number of groups of exceptional interest to the ethnologist. In the Chaco, to the north, are to be found, to this day, tribes practically untouched by the influence of civilization--tribes in the state which for untold centuries must have been that of the peoples of central South America. Some of them show signs of having been under the influence of the cultured peoples of the Andean regions, preserving in their fabrics, for example, figured designs strikingly like those of Incaic Peru. It has even been suggested that the region is in no small part peopled by descendants of Indians who in former times fled from the west, first before the armies of the Incas, later before the advance of Spanish power.

This constant pressure, which can in a measure be followed in historic times, has had its effect in pushing southward peoples whose origin must be sought in the central region. Such a people are the Abipone--a group of tribes which owe their especial fame among South American Indians perhaps more to the fact that they were so faithfully pictured by Father Dobrizhoffer, during the period in which they were gathered in missions, than to their own qualities, striking as these are. In any case, the Abipone, who in the eighteenth century had become an equestrian people of the open country, had, according to their own tradition, moved southward out of the forests, bearing with them many of the traits still to be found among the tribes of the Chaco.

The Calchaqui civilization, of the Andean region just north of latitude 30º was one of the latest conquests of the Inca power, and represents its southerly extension. The actual dividing line, as recorded by Garcilasso, was the river Rapel, latitude 34º, where, according to the historian, the Inca Tupac Yupanqui was held in his southward advance by the Araucanian (or Aucanian) tribes who formed the population of Chile and west central Argentina. The Araucanians enjoy the proud distinction of being to this day an unconquered people; for they held their own in long and bloody wars with the Spaniards, as before they had held against the aggressive Incas. Further, in their general culture, and in intellectual vigor, they stand at the head of the peoples of southerly South America.

Scarcely less in romantic interest is the group of peoples--the Puelche and Tehuelche tribal stocks--forming the Patagonian race, whose tall stature, exaggerated in the imagination of early discoverers, made of them a race of giants. Like the Pampean tribes they early become horsemen, expert with the bolas; and with no permanent villages and no agriculture, they remain equestrian nomads of the southern plains. The Ona of Tierra del Fuego represent a non-equestrian as they are also a non-canoe-using branch of the Patagonian race. Altogether different are the canoe peoples of the southern archipelago, the Alakaluf and the Yahgan. These have shared with the Australian Blacks, with the Botocudo, and with one or two other groups of human beings, the reputation of representing the lowest grade of human intelligence and attainment. They were long thought to be hopelessly imbruted, though this judgement is being somewhat revised in the face of the achievements of missionary workers among them. Still there are few more striking contrasts in the field of ethnology than is that between the culture of the peoples of the Pacific archipelago of the northern America, with their elaborate society, art, and mythology, and the mentally deficient and culturally destitute savages of the island region of austral America.

II. EL CHACO AND THE PAMPEANS

In d'Orbigny's classification the Pampean race is divided into three groups. Of these the most northerly is the Moxean, comprising tribes about the headwaters of the Madeira. Next southward is the Chiquitean branch, with their centre on the divide between the headwaters of the Madeira and those of the southward flowing Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers; hence marking the division of the Amazonian and La Plata systems. Still south of these is the main Pampean branch, its northerly reach being represented by the Toba, Lengua, and other Chaco stocks; its centre by the Mocobi, Abipone, and the Charrua of Uruguay (whom other authorities ally with the Brazilian stocks); its southerly division comprising the Puelche and the Tehuelche, or Patagonians proper. So far as the Pampean branch is concerned, this grouping corresponds with ideas still received.

D'Orbigny gives scant materials as to the mythic beliefs of the Indians of the Pampean tribes, yet some are of more than ordinary interest. Thus, of the Mataguaya, he says[204] that they regard eclipses as due to a great bird, with spread wings, assailing the star eclipsed,--which is in harmony with widespread South American notions; so, for example, in the Chiquitean idea, recorded by Father Fernandez, the eclipsed moon is darkened by its own blood drawn by savage dogs. Still more interesting is the statement, drawn from Guevara's _Historia del Paraguay_, that the Mocobi regard the Southern Cross as the image of a rhea pursued by dogs. This is the very form in which the Great Wain is interpreted in North America; as far as north Greenland it is regarded as a bear or deer pursued by dogs or by hunters. Fragments of a Mocobi cosmic myth are also given: The Sun is a man, the Moon is a woman. Once, long ago, the Sun fell from the sky. The Mocobi raised it and placed it again in the sky, but it fell a second time and burned all the forests. The Mocobi saved themselves by changing themselves into caymans and other amphibians. A man and a woman climbed a tree to save themselves, a flame singed their faces, and they were changed into apes.... This tale is obviously related to the hero cycle of which the Bakairi and Yuracare stories are versions.

But among the Indians of this region it is of the Abipone, neighbours of the Mocobi, that our knowledge is fullest, owing to the classical narrative of Martin Dobrizhoffer[205] who, in the eighteenth century, was for eighteen years a Jesuit missionary in Paraguay. In general Dobrizhoffer's account of the Abipone corresponds so closely with what is now familiar knowledge of Indian ideas--animism, shamanism, necromancy, and in their own region belief in were-jaguars and the like,--that it is valuable rather for verification than interpretation. In the field of religion, the Father is interested in superstitions rather than in myth, of which he gives little. His comments, however, have a quality of personality that imparts an entirely dramatic verve to his narrative of the encounter of the two minds--Jesuit and savage.

"_Haec est summa delicti, nolle recognoscere quem ignorare non possit,_ are the words of Tertullian, in his Apology for the Christians. Theologians agree in denying that any man in possession of his reason can, without a crime, remain ignorant of God for any length of time. This opinion I warmly defended in the University of Cordoba, where I finished the four years' course of theology begun at Gratz in Styria. But what was my astonishment, when on removing from thence to a colony of Abipones, I found that the whole language of these savages does not contain a single word which expresses God or a divinity. To instruct them in religion, it was necessary to borrow the Spanish word for God, and insert into the catechism _Dios ecnam coagarik,_ God the creator of things." He goes on to tell how, camped in the open with a party of Indians, the serene sky delighting the eyes with its twinkling stars, he began a conversation with the Cacique Ychoalay: "Do you behold the splendour of the Heaven, with its magnificent arrangement of stars? Who can suppose that all this is produced by chance?... Who can be mad enough to imagine that all these beauties of the Heavens are the effect of chance, and that the revolutions and vicissitudes of the celestial bodies are regulated without the direction of an omniscient mind? Whom do you believe to be their creator and governor?" "My father," replied Ychoalay, "our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the plain afforded grass and water for their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in the Heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars."

Such incomprehension of things theological seemed to the missionaries to argue a sub-human nature in the Indians, and Dobrizhoffer, after remarking that Paul III was obliged to issue a bull in which he pronounced Indians to be really men, capable of understanding the Catholic faith and of receiving its sacraments, goes on himself to argue that they are in fact intelligent human beings in spite of this incredible density. And then he continues: "I said that the Abipones were commendable for their wit and strength of mind; but ashamed of my too hasty praise, I retract my words and pronounce them fools, idiots, and madmen. Lo! this is the proof of their insanity! They are unacquainted with God, and with the very name of God, yet they affectionately salute the evil spirit, whom they call _Aharaigichi_, or _Queevèt_, with the title of grandfather, _Groaperikie_. Him they declare to be their grandfather, and that of the Spaniards, but with this difference, that to the latter he gives gold and silver and fine clothes, but to them he transmits valour." Here the lips of the reader begin to flicker with amusement,--it is easy to see the devil under the mask of strange gods! Father Dobrizhoffer continues: "The Abipones think the Pleiades to be the representation of their grandfather; and as that constellation disappears at certain periods from the sky of South America, upon such occasions, they suppose that their grandfather is sick, and are under a yearly apprehension that he is going to die: but as soon as those seven stars are again visible in the month of May, they welcome their grandfather, as if returned and restored from sickness, with joyful shouts, and the festive sound of pipes and trumpets, congratulating him on the recovery of his health. 'What thanks do we owe thee! and art thou returned at last? Ah! thou hast happily recovered!' With such exclamations, expressive of their joy and folly, do they fill the air."

Dobrizhoffer devotes a learned and amusing chapter to "Conjectures why the Abipones take the Evil Spirit for their Grandfather and the Pleiades for the representation of him"; in which, finding no Scriptural explanation, he concludes that the cult came ultimately from Peru (the Peruvian's knowledge of God did not come along with it because "vice is more easily learnt than virtue"). As a matter of fact the Pleiades cult extends throughout Brazil, its seasonal reappearance being the occasion, as Dobrizhoffer narrates, of a great feast of intoxication and joy, a veritable Dionysia. And it is hardly to be doubted that the Abipone, as their own traditions indicate, came from the north, probably from the Chaco. It is to a contemporary missionary, Barbrooke Grubb, who has spent an even longer time in the Chaco than did the Jesuit among the Abipone, that we owe the completer interpretation of the ideas which Dobrizhoffer sketched. The Chaco Indians are as near untouched savages as any people on the globe, so that their beliefs are essentially uncontaminated.

The mythology of the Chaco tribes, says Grubb,[206] is founded on the idea of a Creator, symbolized by the beetle. First, the material universe was made; then the Beetle-Creator sent forth from its hole in the earth a race of First Beings, who for a time ruled all. Afterward the Beetle formed a man and a woman from the clay which it threw up from its hole, the two being joined like the Siamese twins. They were persecuted by the beings who preceded them, whereupon the Beetle separated them and endowed them with the power of reproduction, whence the world was peopled and came to its present state.

Whether or no the First Beings, hostile to man, are to be identified with the Kilyikhama, a class of nature daemones, Grubb does not make clear. He does, however, describe numerous of these daemonic forms,--the white Kilyikhama, heard whistling in his little craft on the swampy waters; the boy Kilyikhama with lights on each side of his head, the thieving Kilyikhama; and most dreaded of all the daemon, immensely tall and extremely thin, with eyes like balls of fire, whose appearance presages instant death. In addition to these daemones, Aphangak, ghosts of men, are intensely feared, and there are ghosts of animals, too, to be dreaded,--though, curiously, none of fish or serpents. The Milky Way is supposed to be the path of the Kilyikhama, some of whom, in the form of large white birds, are believed there to await their opportunity to descend into the bodies of men. A very curious burial custom is also associated with the Galaxy: when a person is laid out (sometimes even before the dying has breathed his last) an incision is made in the side of the body and heated stones are inserted; these stones are supposed to ascend into the Milky Way whence they await their opportunity to fall upon the person (wizard or other) who has caused the death. "Consequently the Indians are very frightened when they see a falling star." Whirlwinds are believed to be the passing of spirits, and the whole realm of the meteorological is full of portents,--the rainbow, oddly enough, conceived as a serpentine monster, being a sign of calamity rather than an arc of hope.

Of the Pleiades Grubb says that they are known by two names--Mounting-in-the-South and Holders-Together. "Their rising is connected with the beginning of spring, and feasts are held at this time, generally of a markedly immoral character." That they call the constellation Aksak, Grandfather, is not, in the missionary's opinion, due to the fact that it is the image or embodiment of the devil (as Dobrizhoffer supposed of the similar Abiponean custom). Aksak is rather a term applied to any person or thing whose nature is not quite understood or with whom power and authority rest: "what is most important of all, they term the creator beetle _aksak_." Grubb concludes: "In my opinion, the statement of Dobrizhoffer that the Abipones looked upon themselves as descendants, or, it may be, the creation of their 'grandfather the devil,' is nothing more nor less than the widespread tradition that man was created by the beetle, and, therefore, their originator, instead of being a devil, was rather a creating god." Perhaps, after all, Tertullian is right.

The missionary also speaks of "a remarkable theory" held by the Indians, that among the stars there are countries similar to their own, with forests and lakes, which he would explain either as tales of the mirage or as due to "a childlike notion that the sky is solid." The "childlike notion" is, of course, but another instance of a conception that prevails among the native tribes of the two Americas, as far as north Greenland; and along with this notion is that of an underworld to which ghosts descend, which he elsewhere mentions as characteristic of the Chaco,--though his account of their varying ideas as to the habitations of the dead shows well enough that these savage theorists are as uncertain in their location of the abode of shades as was Homer himself.

III. THE ARAUCANIANS

The Araucanian, or Auca, tribes--of which the Mapuche, Pehuenche, and Huiliche are the more important divisions, while the southerly Chono and Chiloe are remote branches--are the aborigines of the southern Andean region, inhabiting both slopes of the mountains, extending to the sea on the Pacific side and out into the Patagonian plains on the Atlantic side. Of all the extreme austral Indians they represent from pre-Columbian times the highest culture, though it is evident that the process of acculturation was recent when the whites first appeared, resulting from contact with Inca and Calchaqui civilizations. The whole group of Araucanians proper was organized into a confederacy, with four principal divisions, uniting for common defence,--an organization very similar to that of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, and equally effective; for the Araucanians not only put a stop to the southerly aggressions of the Incas, but they also successfully resisted the Spaniards, establishing for themselves a unique place in the history of American aborigines in contact with the white race. In manner of life the Araucanians were originally little if any in advance of their Patagonian neighbours; but as a result of their contact with the northerly Andean peoples, their own northern branches had acquired, when the Spaniards first came, a rudimentary agriculture, the potter's and the weaver's arts, some skill with gold and silver, and the habit of domesticating the guanaco,--and this culture was gradually extending to the south. As a whole, however, Araucanian culture represents a sharp descent, marked by the boundaries of the Incaic empire.

The romantic history of the Araucanians, and especially their heroic wars with the Spaniards, have naturally attracted to them an unusual measure of historical and anthropological investigation, so the literature is copious. Molina's _History_, written in the middle of the eighteenth century, is the best-known work in the field, and is, in a sense, the classic exposition of Araucanian institutions, though both for extent and accuracy it has been superseded by later works, pre-eminently those of José Medina and Tomás Guevara.[207] The first volume of the latter's great _Historia de la Civilización de Araucania_ is devoted to "Antropolojía Araucana," and in it is given a summary of the native pantheon.

First of the gods is Pillan, often regarded as the Araucanian equivalent of the Tupan of the forest regions of Brazil, god of thunder and spirit of fire. "This conception represents a survival of the prehistoric idea which considers fire as the life-principle, carried to the point of adoring it as an invisible and personal power ... forces of nature, such as this, being personified in the mind of the barbarian." Pillan, however, while a personal, is also a collective power: caciques at their death and warriors who fall in battle pass into the category of Pilli, some being converted into volcanic forces, others ascending to the clouds. "From this source," says Guevara, "is due the belief, conserved almost to this time, that a tempest is a battle between their ancestors and their enemies, and the custom of encouraging their own and imprecating the others according to the turn of the battle: if the clouds move toward the south victory pertains to those of their race; if to the north--the country of the Spaniards--they suppose the latter to be victorious."... Inevitably one recalls the bodeful thunder-storm in _Julius Caesar_,--

"Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds, In ranks and squadrons and right form of war, Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol; The noise of battle hurtled in the air, Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan, And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets."

Pillan, as the supreme god of a warlike people, was naturally regarded as the god of war. "They made his habitation," says our author, "in all those parts whence breaks the thunder: on the crest of high mountains, in the clouds, and in the volcanoes, whose eruptions are so often accompanied by electrical phenomena." The deity's name is, as a matter of fact, preserved in the names of various peaks.

Molina[208] states that the word Pillan is derived from _pilli_, meaning "soul," and that the god has various attributive designations, such as Spirit-of-Heaven (Guenu-pillan), the Great Being, the Thunderer; and along with these, suspiciously European, such epithets as the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Eternal. On the whole, it is not unreasonable to assume that the true aboriginal meaning of the word is "mysterious power" and that the idea itself belongs with the group of conceptions of a semi-pantheistic nature power, of which Wakanda and Manito are the best-known names.

That Pillan stands at the head of a hierarchy of nature powers is the unanimous testimony of authorities. Molina believes that the government of Pillan is modelled on that of the Araucanian confederacy. He is the great chief of the invisible world, having under him his high-chiefs and under-chiefs to conduct cosmic affairs. As with most primitive folk, the great majority of these lesser deities are considered as malignant, or at least as dangerous, rather than as beneficent powers. The Huecuvu (Guecubu, in Molina) are a group of daemones capable of assuming animal and human forms. The Indians "attribute natural phenomena to the implacable hatred of these agents of Pillan. They sow the fields with caterpillars, weaken animals with disease, quake the earth, and devour the fish in rivers and lakes. The Huecuvu corresponds with great exactness to the idea of demon." Evil also is Epunamun (whom Molina regarded as a war-god, apparently on the strength of the Padre Olivares's statement that he presided at councils of war, where "though they have no confidence in his councils, they frequently follow them, rather than offend through disobedience"). Epunamun is represented as having deformed legs, and he probably belongs to that extraordinary group of South American monster-bogeys having feet reversed or knees that bend backward. The Cherruve are the spirits or senders of shooting-stars and comets, figured (quite to the taste of the Mediaeval European) as man-headed serpents. Similar is the Ihuaivilu, a seven-headed fire-monster, inhabiting volcanic neighbourhoods. Meulen appears to be anything but the benevolent deity that Molina deemed it; he is the spirit of the whirlwind, disappearing in the ground in the form of a lizard when the whirlwind is dissipated; in modern folklore he appears as El Destolanado, devouring all children who cross his path.

The category of demonic beings is by no means exhausted with these wind and fire powers. The old Chilean mythic lore is filled with composite and metamorphosing beast-bogeys and witch-beings, many of which have been handed on to the modern peasantry; so that it is now often impossible to tell what elements are native and what communicated. Many still bear native names. Perimontum is a phantom appearing from the other world to announce some extraordinary event. The Am is the ghost of a murdered man; the Alhue is a mischievous sprite whose sport is to frighten men. Colocolo is a small, invisible or subterranean animal or bird, whose cry, _colo colo!_ is sometimes heard; anyone drinking its saliva will die. Negúruvilu, or Guirivilo, is a cat-like monster armed with a claw-pointed tail; it lives in the depths of the waters, whence it sallies forth to kill men and animals, assuming a serpentine form as it envelops them. There are numerous other water-monsters, some marine, some amphibians, their most various forms being naturally found among the Chiletes of the southern archipelago. El Caleuche, the witch-boat, is interesting for the fact that here, in the far Pacific south, it represents what might almost be called an outcropping of the similar conceptions found among the Eskimo and the pelagic tribes of the North-West Coast. The witch-boat is seen at night, illuminated, and it carries fishermen down to the treasure-houses at the bottom of the sea. Another monster of this region is Camahueto, capable of wrecking large boats; while Cuero, known to the Araucanians as Trelquehuecuve, is a sort of huge octopus, whose arms end in claws and whose ears are covered with eyes; it has great powers of dilation and contraction, and seizes and slays all that fall within its reach; when it goes ashore to sun itself and wishes to return to its element, it raises a gale which pushes it into the water. Huaillepeñ, or Guallipén, is in the form of a calf-headed sheep, with deformed legs; it issues from streams and pools on misty mornings and frightens pregnant women, causing their children to be born deformed. The Imbunche are monsters into which babes stolen by witches have been transformed; the Trauco is an old witch appearing in the form of a child and having the habits of an incubus; the Pihuicheñ, or Piguchén, is a vampire-like serpent that can transform itself into a frog, a blood-sucker and death-bringer, while the Chonchoñ, a vampire having the form of a human head whose huge ears serve as wings for its nocturnal flights, is reminiscent of the travelling heads which form so important a group of bogeys on the North American continent.

With such an array of demons surrounding them, it is small marvel that for the Chilean peasant of today the devil is not an interesting person in popular mythology, as Señor Vicuña Cifuentes tells us,[209] playing a rôle altogether inferior to those of the local demons. Beneficent powers are rare in the Araucanian pantheon. Pillan may be regarded in this light, as also Ngúnemapun, a higher power recognized by the Araucans of today, says Guevara, although not mentioned in the older chronicles. He seems to be a doublet of Pillan, and may represent an epithet of this god, or even a still higher power to whom invocations were formerly addressed which the Spaniards supposed to be addressed to Pillan. Like the latter, Ngúnemapun dwells on high mountains, has the power of rendering himself invisible, and is given the customary form of a warrior. Beneficent also is Huitranalhue, friend of strangers and the protector of herds from thieves.

A curious feature of Araucanian religion is the absence of any cult of the sun. Possibly this is due to the fact that the sun was the great deity of their enemies, the Incas; so that even if it had been adored in the primitive period, it might have been degraded after the Incaic defeat on the same principle that caused a Florida tribe to establish a cult of the Devil, because he was the enemy of the Spaniard. The fact that the Araucanians had measured the solar year, which they divided into twelve months of thirty days each, adding five intercalary days or epagomenae, argues a sun-cult. Molina tells us that they began their year immediately after the December solstice, which they called the Head-and-Tail-of-the-Year, while the June solstice was called the Divider-of-the-Year. Dobrizhoffer says that the Picunche, or Moluche (Araucanians), like the Puelche, had no name for God.[210] "These ascribe all the good things they either possess or desire to the sun, and to the sun they pray for them"; and one of their priests, he says, when told of God, said: "Till this hour we never knew nor acknowledged anything greater or better than the sun." This certainly points to the probability that in primitive times the sun was an Araucanian god, though it appears that the moon has assumed the place of celestial importance in the later pantheon. Her ancient name, Anchimalguen, signifies, says Guevara, Woman (i. e., wife)-of-the-Sun; Anchimallen is the contemporary form. She is implored in adversity and praised in prosperity, say the chroniclers. Sometimes Anchimallen is of ill omen, appearing at night in the form of a stray guanaco and luring travellers to vain pursuit; but she also serves to give warning of enemies and to frighten away evil spirits. Molina gives a very interesting suggestion, namely, that all the female powers of the invisible world form a class of beneficent nymphs called Amchi-malghen. "There is not an Araucanian but imagines he has one of these in his service. _Nien cai gni Amchi-malghen_, 'I keep my nymph still,' is a common expression when they succeed in any undertaking."

The mythic tales of the Araucanians are (judging from somewhat meagre materials) of a class with those prevalent in neighbouring regions,--a cosmogony in which volcanic forces destroy the world by fire, while a deluge causes all to perish save a few who flee to the three-peaked mountain Thegtheg, the Mount of Levin, which moves upon the waters; a hero cycle in which two brothers, Konkel and Pediu, figure as transformers; and there are stories of a Sky-World above, and of seaward Islands of the Dead.[211] One of the most interesting elements of their mythology is their version of the oft-recurring conception of a Way Perilous to the abode of the departed. An old woman, in the form of a whale, bears the soul out to sea; but before his arrival in the Araucanian Hades he is obliged to pay toll for passing a narrow strait, where sits another malignant hag who exacts an eye from any poor wretch who has nothing better to pay.

IV. THE PATAGONIANS

Few peoples have had fame thrust upon them with so little reason as have the Patagonian Indians, and few myths have been more widely credited than that Patagonia was the home of a race of giants. The Tehuelche are, as a matter of fact, men of large size, probably averaging above six feet; and they are noted for the large development, especially of the upper parts of their body. Keane states that they are second in size among South American peoples, being exceeded by the Bororo. Possibly it was due to the fact that the first navigators of this region were men of south Europe, themselves short, which gave rise to the myth of Patagonian giants. Pigafetta,[212] the chief chronicler of Magellan's voyage, says of one of these "giants" that he was "so tall that our heads scarcely came up to his waist," and the anonymous "Genoese pilot" who has left an account of the same navigation reports that where they wintered, in 1520, "there were people like savages, and the men are from nine to ten spans in height, very well made." It is, indeed, possible that the stature of the modern Tehuelche is modified slightly from that of the _Patagon_, or "Big-Foot" ("the captain named this kind of people Pataghom," wrote Pigafetta); for since the middle of the eighteenth century the Tehuelche have been an equestrian people, living on horseback, one might say; and a recent observer says of them that "the lower limbs are sometimes disappointing, being, in fact, the lower limbs of a race of riders." Such an influence may well have produced a small diminution of the average stature over that at the time of the first observations.

In no other respect is the Patagonian remarkable. The race is divided into two great divisions, the northerly Puelche and the Tehuelche, of Patagonia proper, now both equestrian peoples. Across the Strait of Magellan, in eastern Tierra del Fuego, dwell the Ona, still a pedestrian branch of the Patagonian race.

The Patagonians are a sluggish and peaceable people, quite self-sufficient when left to themselves, and in the south little influenced by the arts of civilization. Except for the changes which the introduction of horses has brought into their life, the description of the Genoese pilot is essentially true to this day:[213] "They have not got houses; they only go about from one place to another ... and eat meat nearly raw: they are all archers and kill many animals with arrows, and with the skins they make clothes.... Wherever night finds them, there they sleep; they carry their wives along with them with all the chattels they possess."

Accounts of Patagonian religion are all meagre; perhaps because the ideational content of their belief is itself meagre, for authorities agree that they are slow and unimaginative. The little information given by Pigafetta, chronicler of Magellan's voyage, has, to be sure, a moving background. Two of the "giants," he says, were lured on shipboard, and there, while being entertained with gauds, were clamped with irons, the intention being to take them for a show to the Castilian king. "When they saw the trick which had been played them, they began to be enraged, and to foam like bulls, crying out very loud _Setebos_, that is to say, the great devil, that he should help them." It is from this passage that Shakespeare derived his conception of the god of Caliban. Pigafetta adds that the lesser devils, under Setebos, are called Cheleule. "This one who was in the ship with us, told us by signs that he had seen devils with two horns on their heads, and long hair down to their feet, who threw out fire from their mouths and rumps,"--but we can hardly doubt that the navigators' imaginations were here potent interpreters of the signs. Dobrizhoffer's eighteenth century description of Patagonian beliefs is essentially the same as that of Prichard in the twentieth century.[214] "They are all acquainted with the devil, whom they call Balichù [_Valichu, Gualichu,_ are variants found in other sources]. They believe that there is an innumerable crowd of demons, the chief of whom they name El El, and all the inferior ones Quezubû [probably a form of the Araucanian _Huecuvu_]. They think, however, every kind of demon hostile and mischievous to the human race, and the origin of all evil, regarding them in consequence with dread and abhorrence." Dobrizhoffer goes on to state that the Puelche and the Araucanian Picunche alike revere the Sun, indicating the affinity of the beliefs of the two groups, which are probably at least remotely related. He continues: "The Patagonians call God Soychù [_Soucha_ is Pennant's variant], to-wit, that which cannot be seen, which is worthy of all veneration, which does not live in the world; hence they call the dead _Soychuhèt_, men that dwell with God beyond the world. They seem to hold two principles in common with the Gnostics and Manichaeans, for they say that God created both good and evil demons. The latter they greatly fear, but never worship. They believe every sick person to be possessed of an evil demon; hence their physicians always carry a drum with figures of devils painted on it, which they strike at the beds of sick persons, to drive the evil demon, which causes the disorder, from the body."

Prichard's description adds nothing to this.[215] The religion of the Indians consists "in the old simple beliefs in good spirits and devils, but chiefly devils.... The dominant Spirit of Evil is called Gualicho. And he abides as an ever-present terror behind their strange, free, and superstitious lives. They spend no small portion of their time in either fleeing from his wrath or in propitiating it. You may wake in the dawn to see a band of Indians suddenly rise and leap upon their horses, and gallop away across the pampa, howling and gesticulating. They are merely scaring the Gualicho away from their tents back to his haunts in the Cordillera--the wild and unpenetrated mountains, where he and his subordinate demons groan in chosen spots the long nights through." The Good Spirit of the Tehuelche, says Prichard, is far more quiescent. Long ago he made one effort to benefit mankind, when he created the animals in the caves of "God's Hill" and gave them to his people for food, but since then he has shown little interest in earthly matters. Of the practices of the Tehuelche shaman--perhaps an innovation since the day of Dobrizhoffer--Prichard gives an odd instance, narrated by another white observer: "In the middle of the level white pampa two figures upon galloping horses were visible. As we came nearer we saw that one was a man clothed in a _chiripa_ and a _capa_ in which brown was the predominating colour. He was mounted on a heavy-necked powerful _cebruno_ horse, his stirrups were of silver, and his gear of raw-hide seemed smart and good. As he rode he yelled with all his strength, producing a series of the most horrible and piercing shrieks. But strange as was this wild figure, his companion, victim or quarry, was stranger and more striking still. For on an ancient _zaino_ sat perched a little brown maiden, whose aspect was forlorn and pathetic to the last degree. She rode absolutely naked in the teeth of the bitter cold, her breast, face and limbs blotched and smeared with the rash of some eruptive disease, and her heavy-lidded eyes, strained and open, staring ahead across the leagues of empty snow-patched plain. Presently the man redoubled his howls, and bearing down upon the _zaino_ flogged and frightened it into yet greater speed. The whole scene might have been mistaken for some ancient barbaric and revolting form of punishment; whereas, in real truth, it was an anxious Indian father trying, according to his lights, to cure his daughter of measles!" Devils are known to dislike noise and cold, says Prichard; hence, the unlucky patient without a shred to protect her and "the almost incredible uproar made by the old gentleman upon the dark brown horse."

D'Orbigny says[216] of the Tehuelche, "they fear rather than revere their Achekanet-kanet, turn by turn genius of ill and genius of good," and of the Puelche that, like the Patagonians, they believe in a genius of ill, named Gualichu, or Arraken, who sometimes becomes beneficent, without need of prayer. Falkner (cited by King in _The Voyage of the Beagle_, vol. ii, p. 161) mentions "at the head of their good deities," Guayarakunny, lord of the dead. "They think," he says, "that the good deities have habitations in vast caverns under the earth, and that when an Indian dies his soul goes to live with the deity who presides over his particular family. They believe that their good deities made the world, and that they first created the Indians in the subterranean caverns above mentioned; gave them the lance, bow and arrows, and the balls [_bolas_], to fight and hunt with, and then turned them out to shift for themselves. They imagine that the deities of the Spaniards created them in a similar manner, but that, instead of lances, bows, etc., they gave them guns and swords. They say that when the beasts, birds, and lesser animals were created, those of the more nimble kind came immediately out of the caverns; but that the bulls and cows being the last, the Indians were so frightened at the sight of their horns, that they stopped the entrances of their caves with great stones. This is the grave reason why they had no black cattle in their country, till the Spaniards brought them over; who, more wisely, had let them out of their caves."

A more recent account of what is a kindred, if not the same myth is given by Ramon Lista.[217] The creator-hero, in this version, is named El-lal. "El-lal came into the world in a strange way. His father Nosjthej (a kind of Saturn), wishing to devour him, had snatched him from his mother's womb. He owed his rescue to the intervention of the _terguerr_ (a rodent) which carried him away to its cave; this his father tried in vain to enter. After having learned from the famous rodent the properties of different plants and the directions of the mountain-paths, El-lal himself invented the bow and arrow, and with these weapons began the struggle against the wild animals--puma, fox, condor,--and conquered them all. But the father returned. Forgetting the past El-lal taught him how to manipulate the bow and the sling, and joyfully showed him the trophies of the chase--tortoise shells, condor's wings, etc. Nosjthej took up his abode in the cave and soon acted as master of it. Faithful to his fierce instincts, he wanted to kill his son; he followed him across the Andes, but, when on the point of reaching him, he saw a dense forest arise between him and his son. El-lal was saved; he descended to the plain, which meanwhile had become peopled with men. Among them was a giant, Goshy-e, who devoured children; El-lal tried to fight him, but he was invulnerable; the arrows broke against his body. Then El-lal transformed himself into a gadfly, entered the giant's stomach, and wounded him fatally with this sting. It was not until he had accomplished all these feats, and had proved himself a clever huntsman, that El-lal thought of marrying. He asked the hand of the daughter of the Sun, but she did not think him worthy of her and escaped him by a subterfuge. Disenchanted, El-lal decided to leave the earth, where, he considered, his mission was at an end, since man, who had in the meantime appeared in the plain and in the mountain valleys, had learned from him the use of fire, weapons, etc. Borne on the wings of a swan across the ocean towards the east, he found eternal rest in the verdant island which rose among the waves at the places where the arrows shot by him had fallen on the surface of the water."

This cosmogony is of the familiar primitive Indian type. Falkner, in the passage cited, goes on to describe Patagonian beliefs in regard to the fates of human souls: "Some say that the stars are old Indians; that the Milky Way is the field where the old Indians hunt ostriches [more likely, this myth attaches to the Southern Cross, as Guevara says it does with the Indians of Paraguay; and as, in North America, it attaches to the Ursa Major], and that the Magellan clouds are the feathers of the ostriches which they kill. They have an opinion that the creation is not yet exhausted; nor is all of it yet come out to the daylight of this upper world. The wizards, beating their drums, and rattling their hide bags full of shells or stones, pretend to see into other regions under the earth. Each wizard is supposed to have familiar spirits in attendance, who give supernatural information, and execute the conjurer's will. They believe that the souls of their wizards, after death, are of the number of these demons, called Valichu, to whom every evil, or unpleasant event is attributed."

_Mutatis mutandis_ this description would apply perfectly to the shamanistic beliefs and practices of the Polar North, and it is not without significance that Prichard is drawn to point the essential analogy between the austral and boreal aborigines of America. Substitute the kayak for the horse, the seal for the guanaco, with such differences in habit as these imply, and the differences of the two peoples (psychologically, for it must be owned that in stature they are antipodes) become slight. Certainly their beliefs are almost identical: a beneficent, but precarious food-giver; a host of spiteful and dangerous powers of wind and weather; a sky-world and an underworld, with hunter-souls pursuing their earthly vocation; fey-sighted wizards and medicine-men with drums. To be sure this represents the foundation stratum of Indian ideas throughout the two Americas, the simplest form of American religious myth; but there is surely a dramatic propriety in finding this simplest form, almost in its first purity, at the wide extremes of the two continents.

Have the conceptions travelled, from pole almost to pole? or are they separate inspirations to a universal human nature from a never vastly varying environmental nature? This is a riddle not easy to solve; for while it is not difficult to imagine unrelated peoples severally framing the notion that men and animals are born out of the womb of Earth or that the image of their own hunting parties is written in the constellations--for, as Molina remarks, more than one people have "regulated the things of heaven by those of the earth,"--still it is odd to find such particular agreements constant from latitude to latitude throughout a hemisphere.

V. THE FUEGIANS

The Yahgan and Alakaluf tribes of Tierra del Fuego and the adjacent archipelago enjoy the unenviable distinction of being rated as among the lowest of human beings both as to actual culture and possible development. The earlier navigators regarded them as little more than animals--and often, unfortunately, treated them no better. Even Darwin, viewing them with the naturalist's eye, saw little but annoyance in their presence and formed a dismal estimate of their powers. "We were always much surprised at the little notice, or rather none whatever, which was evinced respecting many things, even such as boats, the use of which must have been evident. Simple circumstances,--such as the whiteness of our skins, the beauty of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in washing ourselves,--excited their admiration far more than a grand or complicated object, such as the ship."[218] Darwin, however, noted that the Indians had a sense of fairness in trade, and when missionaries settled among them other good qualities appeared. Thomas Bridges, who lived with the Yahgan as missionary for years, wrote of them, in 1891: "We find the natives work well and happily when assured of adequate reward. They shear our sheep, make fences, saw out boards and planks of all kinds, work well with the pick and spade, are good boatmen and pleasant companions." With such a tribute from one who had lived long with them it can hardly be doubted that the Yahgan are better than the common report of them,--indeed, quite the children of nature which the not unaffecting anecdotes of York Minster and Jemmy Button, among the voyages of the _Beagle_, should lead us to expect.

"Jemmy Button," says Captain Fitzroy,[219] "was very superstitious and a great believer in omens and dreams. He would not talk of a dead person, saying, with a grave shake of the head, 'no good, no good talk; my country never talk of dead man.' While at sea, on board the _Beagle_, about the middle of the year 1832, he said one morning to Mr. Bynoe, that in the night some man came to the side of his hammock, and whispered in his ear that his father was dead. Mr. Bynoe tried to laugh him out of the idea, but ineffectually. He fully believed that such was the case, and maintained his opinion up to the time of finding his relations in the Beagle Channel, when, I regret to say, he found that his father had died some months previously. He did not forget to remind Mr. Bynoe (his most confidential friend) of their former conversation, and, with a significant shake of the head said, it was 'bad--very bad.' Yet these simple words seemed to express the extent of his sorrow."... Here is surely as good a case of the "veridical" apparition as any Researcher could desire.

"Ideas of a spiritual existence--of beneficent and evil powers," describes the nearest notion Captain Fitzroy could get of Fuegian religion. The powers of evil are especially the powers of wind and weather--naturally enough in a part of the globe world-famous for its bitter gales and treacherous waters. "If anything was said or done that was wrong, in their opinion it was certain to cause bad weather. Even the shooting of young birds, before they were able to fly, was thought a heinous offence. I remember York Minster saying one day to Mr. Bynoe, when he had shot some young ducks with the old bird--'Oh, Mr. Bynoe, very bad to shoot little duck--come wind--come rain--blow--very much blow.'" Primitive as they are, here are moral ideas---whether one explain, reconditely, the sparing of the young of game as an instinctive conservation of the food supply, or, simply, as due to a natural and chivalrous pity for the helpless young.

Our information in regard to the spirit-beings believed in by the Fuegians is at best nebulous. Captain Fitzroy tells of "a great black man ... supposed to be always wandering about the woods and mountains, who is certain of knowing every word and action, who cannot be escaped, and who influences the weather according to men's conduct," and again of thin wild men, "who have no belly," (surely, the "skeleton men" of the Eskimo and of other North American tribes). Dr. Hyades,[220] in his report of the gleanings of the French Mission to Cape Horn, half a century after the famous expeditions of the _Adventure_ and _Beagle_, gives a fuller, though still meagre description of these wild folk of Yahgan fancy,--irresistibly reminiscent of the Fog People and the Inland Dwellers of the Eskimo at the other extreme of the hemisphere. The Oualapatou, Wild Men from the West, are ever-present terrors. They are heard in the noises of the night, and hearing them, the Yahgan incontinently flee. These Wild Men, they say, enter their huts at night, cut the throats of the occupants and devour their limbs. From their confused accounts, says Dr. Hyades, it would appear that the Oualapatou are the dead returned to earth to eat the living; they are invisible, except at the moment of seizing their victims, but they are heard imitating the cries of birds and animals. Another class of wild beings are the Kachpikh, fantastic beings that live in desert caves or in thick forests. These, too, are invisible, but they hate man and cause disease and death. Still another class (reported by the Missionary Bridges) are called Hannouch. Some of these are supposed to have an eye in the back of their heads; others are hairless and sleep standing up supported by a tree; they hold in hand a white stone which they hurl with inevitable aim at any object soever, and they sometimes attack and wound men. One man, said to have been stolen away as a child by the Hannouch, was named _Hannouchmachaaïnan_, "stolen-by-the-Hannouch." Any man who goes off to live by himself is called a Hannouch, while a demented person is regarded as tormented by one of these beings.

The Fuegian's equivalent for the Eskimo's Angakok is the Yakamouch. Bridges' account is quoted by Hyades: "Nearly every old man of the people is a Yakamouch, for it is very easy to become one; they are recognizable at a glance from the gray colour of their hair, a colour produced by the daily application of a whitish clay. They make frequent incantations in which they appear to address a mysterious being named Aïapakal; they claim to possess, from a spirit called Hoakils, a supernatural power of life and death; they recount their dreams, and when they have eaten in dream any person, this signifies that that person will die. It is believed that they can draw from the bodies of the sick the cause of their ill, called _aïkouch_, visible in the form of an arrow or a harpoon point of flint, which they cause, moreover, to issue from their own stomachs at will.... They seem to believe that these sorcerers can influence the weather for good or bad; they throw shells into the wind to cause it to cease and they give themselves over to incantations and contortions." Women also may be Yakamouch, and there is even a report that formerly none but women professed the art.

The Fuegians are a vanishing people,--even in a vanishing race. They have long and often been cited as a people without religion. After recounting what is here narrated of their beliefs, Dr. Hyades concludes: "In all these legends, we see no reason seriously to admit a _belief_ in supernatural beings or in a future life, and consequently a religious sentiment, among the Fuegians." This judgement, however, is not wholly supported by the observations of others. According to the fathers of the Salesian mission[221] the Alakaluf believe in "an invisible being called Taquatú, whom they imagine to be a giant who travels by day and night in a big canoe, over the sea and rivers, and who glides as well through the air over the tops of the trees without bending their branches; if he finds any men or women idle or not on the alert he takes them without more ado into his great boat and carries them far away from home." Captain Low, of the Fitzroy expedition, asserted that there was not only a belief in "an immense black man" (Yaccy-ma) responsible for all sorts of evil, among the west Patagonian channel natives, but also that they believed in "a good spirit whom they called Yerri Yuppon," invoked in time of distress and danger. On the other point, of belief in a future life, there is no doubt but that the Fuegians recognize some form of ghost, or breath-spirit, which haunts the walks of men. One missionary says of the Yahgan that he thinks that "when a man dies, his breath goes up to heaven"; nothing similar occurs in the case of animals.

Of myth in the legendary form only meagre fragments have been gathered from the Fuegians, and of these the greater part come from the Ona, who are akin to the Tehuelche.[222] According to Ona lore there formerly "lived on earth bearded white men; the sun and moon were then husband and wife; when men began to war, the sun and moon returned to the sky and sent down a red star, the planet Mars, which turned into a giant on the way; the giant killed all men, then made two mountains or clods of clay, from one of which rose the first Ona man and from the other the first Ona woman." The same tribe have a tradition of a cataclysm which separated the island on which they dwell from the mainland. Both the Ona and the Yahgan have traditions of a flood and tales of earth-born men; and each of these peoples has also a mythic hero (Kuanip is the Ona, Oumoara the Yahgan name) concerning whom tales are told. Some of their stories appear to relate to historical transformations in the mode of tribal life, as the tradition (maintained by both tribes) that in former times the women were the tribal rulers, that the men rebelled, and invented initiation rites and the ruse of masked spirits in order to keep the women in subjection--a type of myth which, however, is rather more plausibly of an aetiological than of an historical character. In the main, nature is the theme of mythic thought, and there is perhaps no more unique a group of ideas among these peoples of the Far South than the Yahgan conception of the relations of the celestial beings: the moon, they say, is the wife of the rainbow, while the sun is elder brother to the moon and to shining Venus.

* * * * *

There is much in the culture and fancies of these peoples of austral America to recall the culture and fancies of their remote kinsmen of the Polar North. The two Americas measure, as it were, the longitude of human habitation, marked off zone by zone into every variety of climate and terrain to which men's lives can be accommodated. Moreover, the native peoples of this New World show a oneness of race nowhere else to be found over so great an area; so that, in spite of differences in culture almost as great as those which mark the heights and depths of human condition in the more anciently peopled hemisphere, there is a recognizable unity binding together Eskimo and Aztec, Inca and Yahgan. Now what is surely most impressive is that this unity is best represented neither by physical appearance nor material achievement (where, indeed, the differences are most magnified), but by a conservation of ideas and of the symbolic language of myth which is at bottom one. Not that there is any single level of thought common to all, for there is surely a world of intelligence between the imaginative splendour of Mayan art and science and tradition and the dimly haunted soul of the Fuegian who "supposes the sun and moon, male and female, to be very old indeed, and that some old man, who knew their maker, had died without leaving information on this subject";[223] but that no matter what the failure to build or the erosion of superstructure, or indeed no matter what the variety of superstructures as, for example, made apparent in the characteristic colours of North American and South American mythologies, there is still _au fond_ a single racial complexion of mind, with a recognizable kinship of the spiritual life. Through vast geographical distances, among peoples long mutually forgotten if ever mutually known, in every variety of natural garb, polar and tropical, forest and sea, this kinship persists, not favoured by, but in spite of, environments the most changing. It is not necessary here invariably to assume migrations of ideas, passed externally from tribe to tribe, although evidence of these, recent and remote, is frequent enough; it is not sufficient to postulate merely the psychical unity of our common human nature, although this, too, is a factor which we should not neglect; but along with these we may reasonably conceive that the American race, through its long isolation, even in its most tenuously connected branches retains a certain deep communion of thought and feeling, a lasting participation in its own mode of insight and its own quest of inspiration, which unites it across the stretches of time and space. The arctic tern is said to summer in the two polar zones, arctic and antarctic, trued to its enormous flight by the most mystifying of all animal instincts. Perhaps it is some human instinct as profound and as mystifying which joins in one thought the scattered peoples of the two continents, charting in modes more subtle than their obvious forms can suggest the impulses which lead men to see their environmental world not as their physical eyes perceive it, but, belied by their eyes, as inner and whispering voices proclaim it to be.

NOTES

[1] That there is an ultimate community of culture and thought between the Andean and Mexican regions can hardly be doubted. Furthermore, it is not merely primitive, but belongs to an era of some advancement in the arts. Spinden (_Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America_ [New York, 1917], and elsewhere) has termed the early stage the "archaic period," and he plausibly argues for its Mexican origination and southward migration. But at any rate since near the beginning of the Christian Era the civilizations of the two regions have developed in virtual independence.

[2] The most admirable general introduction to the whole subject of American ethnography is Wissler, _The American Indian_ (New York, 1917).

[3] The transition from the Antilles to Guiana is, however, rather more marked than is that from the Orinoco to the Amazonian regions. Virtually the whole South American region bounded by the Andes, the Caribbean Sea, and the Argentinian Pampas is one ethnographically; so that, in the present work, Chapters VIII and IX are descriptive of a single region. However, the great rivers have always been natural routes of exploration, and this has given to the river systems an ethnographically factitious, but bibliographically real differentiation.

[4] Wm. Henry Brett, _Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of British Guiana_ (London, no date).

[5] For a history of this interesting movement in certain phases of European culture see Gilbert Chinard, _L'Exotisme américain_ (Paris, 1911).

[6] Among early writers on Antillean religion the most important are Christopher Columbus, Ramon Pane, and Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. Columbus left Fray Ramon Pane in Haiti with instructions to report on the religious beliefs of the natives; and in Fernando Columbus's _Historie_, ch. lxii, Pane's narrative is incorporated, introduced by a brief quotation from Christopher Columbus, describing Zemiism. After Pane, the account of Haitian religion in Peter Martyr's "First Decade" is the most important source, although Benzoni, Gómara, Herrera, Las Casas, and Oviedo give additional or corroborative information. Of recent writings those of J. W. Fewkes, embodying the results of careful archaeological studies, form the most important contribution. Part ii of Joyce's _Central American and West Indian Archaeology_ gives a general survey of the field, which is more briefly treated in livre ii, 3e partie, of Beuchat's _Manuel_, and in its comparative aspects by Wissler, _The American Indian_.

[7] Beuchat, Joyce [a], and Fewkes [b] describe the condition of the Antilleans at the time of the discovery as reconstructed from early accounts and archaeological investigations. Of the early writings, the descriptions of Las Casas are the most detailed. The use of _Taïno_ to designate the island Arawakan tribes follows Fewkes [b], p. 26: "Among the first words heard by the comrades of Columbus when they landed in Guadeloupe were '_Taïno! taïno!_'--'Peace! peace!' or 'We are friends.' The designation '_taïno_' has been used by several writers as a characteristic name for the Antillean race. Since it is both significant and euphonious, it may be adopted as a convenient substitute for the adjective 'Antillean' to designate a cultural type. The author applies the term to the original sedentary people of the West Indies, as distinguished from the Carib." The incident to which reference is made is described in _Select Letters of Columbus (HS)_, p. 28. It is perhaps worth while to note that Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 66, 81) says that _taïno_ signifies "a virtuous man." The word _carib, caniba,_ is the source of our _cannibal_. It is possible that it means "man-eater" and is of Taïno origin. Columbus, in the _Journal_ of the first voyage (tr. Bourne, p. 223), is authority for the statement that "Carib" is the Hispaniolan form of the name. Im Thurn (p. 163) says that the Guiana Carib call themselves _Carinya_, which would seem to show that the word is an autonym, in which case it may mean, as Herrera says (III. v), "valiant." It is rather curious, if the insular Carib were the inveterate cannibals the earlier writers make them to be, that those of the mainland should have held the practice in abhorrence, for which we have Humboldt's statement, _Voyage_ (tr. Ross, ii. 413).

[8] A term of some interest is _cacique_, which is generally regarded as Haitian in origin, being, says Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 82) their word for "king." Bastian, however, affirms that it is Arabic (ii. 293, note): "Das Wort Cazique ist nicht amerikanisch, sino arabigo, usado entre los alarabes de Africa en el Reyno de Mazagan, con el qual nombran al principal y cabeças de los aduares, como tambien le nombran Xeque (meint Simon)."

[9] The literature of the discovery is summarized by Beuchat, "Bibliographie," ch. iv. Christopher Columbus's _Letters_ and _Journal_, tr. Major, Markham, and Bourne, are here quoted.

[10] The question of Amazons (cf. _infra_, Ch. IX, i), is a curious commingling of Old and New World myth, with, perhaps, some foundation in primitive custom, especially linguistic. Thus Beuchat, p. 509 (citing Raymond Breton and Lucien Adam; cf. also Ballet, citing du Tertre, pp. 398-99), states that the Caribs of the Isles had separate vocabularies, in part at least, for men and women, and that the women's speech contained a majority of Arawak words. This argument should not be pushed too far, however, for there are a number of South American languages with well-differentiated man-tongue and woman-tongue, where a similar origin of the difference is not shown. On his first voyage Columbus (letters to de Santangel and Sanchez), though he did not meet them, heard of "ferocious men, eaters of human flesh, wearing their hair long like women." On the second voyage--as described by Chanca in his "Letter to the Chapter of Seville" (_Select Letters_)--the Caribs were encountered and found to be holding in slavery many Taïno women: "In their attacks upon the neighbouring islands, these people capture as many of the women as they can, especially those who are young and beautiful, and keep them as concubines; and so great a number do they carry off, that in fifty houses no men were to be seen" (p. 31). It is added that the Caribs ate the children born of these captive women (a custom ascribed also to some South American cannibalistic tribes); but as it is said in the same connexion that captive boys were not devoured until they grew up, "for they say that the flesh of boys and women is not good to eat," the story is scarcely plausible. Herrera repeats that the Caribs ate no women, but kept them as slaves, in association with the statement that the natives of Dominica ate a friar, and dying of a flux caused by his flesh, gave over their cannibalism. These stories seem to point to a ritualistic element in the cannibalism, for to the Carib the flesh of warriors was the only man's meat. Of course, in the notion of Amazons there was an element of myth as well as of custom, and the myth was certainly known to Columbus, if we may trust the authenticity (and there is small reason to doubt it) of the paragraph with which Ramon Pane's narrative is introduced. For the myth in question see _supra_, pp. 31-32, and cf. Pane, chh. iii-v.

[11] The story of the search for the Fountain of Youth and of the colony of Antillean Indians in Florida is to be found in Fontaneda, pp. 17-19. The influence of Antillean culture has been traced well to the north of Florida, where it may have been extended by the pre-Muskhogean population; see also Herrera, III. v.

[12] The story of Hathvey, or Hatuey, is given by Fewkes [b], pp. 211-12, and by Joyce [a], p. 244; its source is Las Casas [a], III. xxv.

[13] West Indian idolatry, called Zemiism, is earliest described in the passage attributed to Christopher Columbus (Fernando Columbus, ch. lxi); other authorities here quoted are Benzoni, pp. 78-80; Peter Martyr, "First Decade," ix (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-78); Ramon Pane, ch. xix-xxiv (tr. Pinkerton, xii. 87-89); and Las Casas [b], chh. clxvi-vii; cf. also Fewkes, especially [b], [e], Joyce [a], and Beuchat.

[14] The most interesting artifacts from the Antilles are the stone rings, triangles, and elbows, which must be regarded as certainly ritualistic in character, and probably as used in fertility rites. This is not only indicated by Columbus and Ramon Pane, but is supported by numerous analogies. Ramon Pane (ch. xix) says: "The stone _cemis_ are of several sorts: some there are which, they say, the physicians take out of the body of the sick, and those they look upon as best to help women in labour. Others there are that speak, which are shaped like a long turnip, with the leaves long and extended, like the shrub-bearing capers. Those leaves, for the most part, are like those of the elm. Others have three points, and they think they cause the yucca to thrive." It is perhaps not far-fetched to see in the triangular stones analogues of the mountain-man images of the Tlaloque in Mexico, or of the similar images from South America, certainly used in connexion with rain ceremonies. Very likely separate forms were employed for different plants, as maize or yucca. The stone rings, again, could very reasonably be those which were supposed to help women in labour, as seems to have been the case with the analogous rings and yokes from Yucatan (see Fewkes, _25 ARBE_, pp. 259-61). Even if the two types of stones were combined, as seems altogether likely, at least for magic and divination, there is congruity in the relationship of both types to fertility, animal and vegetable respectively. Señor J. J. Acosta has suggested that the Antillean stone rings represent the bodies, and the triangular stones the heads, of serpents; and this is not without plausibility in view of the frequency with which serpents are regarded as fertility emblems. It may be worth recalling, too, that an Antillean name for doctor, or medicine-man, signified "serpent."

[15] There is no reason to assume any essential difference in character in the shamans or medicine-men of the North and South American Indians. In general, the lower the tribe in the scale of political organization, the more important is the shaman or doctor, and the more distinctly individual and the less tribal are the offices which he performs; as organization grows in social complexity, the function of priest emerges as distinct from that of doctor, the priest becoming the depository of ritual, and the doctor or shaman, on a somewhat lower level, attending the sick or practising magic and prophecy. Apparently in the Antilles the two offices were on the way to differentiation, if, indeed, they were not already distinct. The _bohutis, buhuitihus, boii,_ or, as Peter Martyr latinizes, _bovites_ of this region were evidently both doctors and priests. Certainly both Ramon Pane's and Peter Martyr's descriptions imply this; though there are some hints which would seem to point to a special class of ritual priests, who may or may not have been doctors, as when priests are said to act as mouthpieces of the cacique in giving oracles from hollow statues, or as when Martyr (following Pane) says that "only the sons of chiefs" are allowed to learn the traditional chants of the great ceremonials (p. 172). The term _peaiman_, applied to the shamans of the Guiana tribes, is, says im Thurn (p. 328), an Anglicized form of the Carib word _puyai_ or _peartzan_. The _peaiman_, im Thurn states, "is not simply the doctor, but also, in some sense, the priest or magician." As matter of fact, the priestly element is slight among the continental Caribs, their practice being pure shamanism; and Fewkes ([b], p. 54) says that they "still speak of their priests as _ceci-semi_"--a term clearly related to _zemi_. "The prehistoric Porto Ricans," he says again (ib. p. 59), "had a well-developed priesthood, called _boii_ (serpents), _mabouya_, and _buhiti_, which are apparently dialect or other forms of the same word." It was in Porto Rico, of course, that Carib and Taïno elements were most mixed. Brett [a], p. 363, in a note, derives the word _piai_ from Carib _puiai_, which, he says, is in Ackawoi _piatsan_; while the Arawak use _semecihi_, and the Warau _wisidaa_, for the same functionary. Certainly the resemblance of _boye_ and _puiai_, and of _zemi_ and _semecihi_, or _ceci-semi_, indicates identities of origin, though the particular meanings are not altogether the same.

[16] Little is preserved of Antillean myth, and that little is contained almost wholly in the narrative of Ramon Pane. The authorities here quoted are Ramon Pane, chh. i, ix-xi, ii-vii (tr. Pinkerton, xii); Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-70); Benzoni; and Ling Roth, in _JAI_ xvi. 264-65. Stoddard gives free versions of several of the tales.

[17] Peter Martyr, _loc. cit._ (quoting pp. 166-67, 172-76).

[18] Gómara [a], ch. xxvii, p. 173, ed. Vedia (tr. Fewkes [b], pp. 66-67); cf. Benzoni, pp. 79-82; Las Casas [b], ch. clxvii. The plate representing the Earth Spirit ceremony is taken from (cf. Fewkes [b], Plate IX) Picart, _The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the known World_, London, 1731-37, Plate No. 78.

[19] Im Thurn, pp. 335-38; cf. Fewkes [e], p. 355.

[20] Ramon Pane, chh. xiv, xxv; Gómara [a], ch. xxxiii, pp. 175-76, ed. Vedia, gives supplementary information.

[21] Authorities cited for Carib lore are Columbus, _Select Letters_, pp. 29-37; im Thurn, pp. 192, 217, 222; Fewkes [b], pp. 27, 217-20, 68; Ballet, citing du Tertre and others, pp. 421-22, 433-38, 400-01; Davies, cited by Fewkes [b], pp. 60, 65; Currier, citing la Borde, pp. 508-09.

[22] Holmes, "Areas of American Culture" (in _AA_, new series, xvi, 1914) gives a chart of North America showing five culture areas for Mexico and Central America, in general corresponding to the grouping here made. The _American Indian_ of Wissler, the _Ancient Civilizations_ of Spinden, the _Manuel_ of Beuchat and the _Mexican Archaeology_ of Joyce follow approximately the same lines. E. G. Tarayre's "Report" in _Archives de la commission scientifique du Mexique_, iii (Paris, 1867) contains "Notes ethnographiques sur les régions mexicaines." For linguistic divisions the standard works are Orozco y Berra [b], Nicolás León [a], and especially Thomas and Swanton, _Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America (44 BBE)_; cf. Mechling [b]. Contemporary ethnography is described in Lumholtz [a], [b], [c], in McGee, and in Starr [a], [b].

[23] Doubtless it should be stated at the outset that there is serious and reasonable question on the part of not a few students of aboriginal Mexico as to whether Aztec institutions merit the name "empire" in any sense analogous to those of the imperial states of the Old World. "A loose confederacy of democratic Indians" is the phrase employed by Waterman [a], p. 250, in describing the form of the Mexican state as it is pictured by Morgan, Bandelier, Fiske, and others (see Waterman, _loc. cit._, for sources); and it is altogether reasonable to expect that Americanist studies will eventually show that the great Middle American nations were developed from, and retained characteristics of, communities resembling the Pueblos of our own Southwest rather than the European states which the Spaniards had in the eye when they made their first observations. It is to be expected, too, that a changed complexion put upon the interpretation of Mexican society will eventually modify the interpretation of Mexican ritual and mythology, giving it, for example, something less of the uranian significance upon which scholars of the school of Förstermann and Seler put so great weight, and something more, if not of the Euhemerism of Brasseur de Bourbourg, at least of reliance upon social motives and historical traditions.

[24] Of all regions of primitive America, ancient Mexico is represented by the most extensive literature; and here, too, more has been transmitted directly from native sources than is the case elsewhere. The hieroglyphic codices, the anonymous _Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas_ and _Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan y de Mexico_ (better known and commonly cited as _The Annals of Quauhtitlan_), and the writings of men of native blood in the Spanish period, notably Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, and Chimalpahin, are the most important of these sources; unless, as is doubtless proper, the works of Sahagun, originally written in Nahuatl from native sources, be here included--undoubtedly the single source of greatest importance. Among Spanish writers of the early period, after Sahagun, the most important are Cristobal del Castillo, Diego Durán, Gómara, Herrera, Mendieta, Motolinia, Tobar, and Torquemada. Boturini, Clavigero, Veytia, Kingsborough, Prescott, and Brasseur de Bourbourg are important names of the intermediate period; while recent scholarship is represented by Brinton, Bancroft, Hamy, García Icazbalceta, Orozco y Berra, Peñafiel, Ramirez, Rosny, and most conspicuously by Seler. The most convenient recent introductions to the subject are afforded by Beuchat, _Manuel_; Joyce, _Mexican Archaeology_; Spinden, _Ancient Civilizations of Mexico_; while the best guide to the whole literature is Lehmann's "Ergebnisse und Aufgaben der mexikanistischen Forschung," in _Archiv für Anthropologie_, new series, vi, 1907 (translated as _Methods and Results in Mexican Research_, Paris, 1909). But while the material is relatively abundant, it is so only for the dominant race represented by the Aztec. For the non-Nahuatlan civilizations of Mexico the literature is sparse, especially upon the side of mythology. Sahagun gives certain details, mainly incidental, except in X. xxix, which is devoted to a brief description of the peoples of Mexico. Gómara, Herrera, and Torquemada afford added materials, touching several regions. For the Totonac-Huastec region the sources are particularly scanty, except for such descriptions of externals as naturally appear in the chronicles of Cortez, Bernal Diaz, and other _conquistadores_ who here made their first intimate acquaintance with the mainland natives. Fewkes [g] deals with the monuments of the Totonac region, and expresses the opinion (p. 241, note) that the Codex Tro-Cortesianus, commonly said to be Maya, was obtained in this region, near Cempoalan; Holmes [b], and Seler, in numerous places, are also material sources for interpretation of the monuments. For the Tarascans of Michoacan the most important source is an anonymous _Relacion de las ceremonias, rictos, poblacion y gobernacion de los Indios de Michuacan hecha al illmo. Sr. D. Ant. de Mendoza_ (Madrid, 1875; Morelia, 1903), while of recent studies Nicolás León's _Los Tarascos_ (see León [c]) is the most comprehensive. The Mixtec-Zapotec area fares better, both as to number of sources and later studies. Burgoa, Juan de Córdoba, Gregorio García, Balsalobre, Herrera, Las Casas, and Torquemada are the primary authorities; while the most significant later studies are doubtless those of Seler, "The Mexican Chronology with Special Reference to the Zapotec Calendar," and "Wall Paintings of Mitla," both in _28 BBE_. Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], bk. ix, deals with the Mixtec-Zapotec and Tarascan peoples, and is still a good introduction to the literature. Cf. also Alvarez; Castellanos (himself a Zapotec); Génin; León [d]; Mechling; Portillo; Radin.

[25] The works of Clavigero, Helps, Prescott, Orozco y Berra [b], and Veytia are the best-known histories narrating the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Of the earlier writers Bernal Diaz, who took part in the expeditions of Cordova and Grijalva, as well as in that of Cortez, is the most important (of his work there are several English translations besides that of Maudsley in _HS_--by Maurice Keatinge, London, 1800, by John G. Lockhart, London, 1844, and a condensed version by Kate Stephens, _The Mastering of Mexico_, New York, 1915).

[26] Bernal Diaz, ch. xcii (quoted), describes the ascent of the temple overlooking Tlatelolco. Seler [a], ii. 769-70, says that on the upper platform were two shrines, one to Tlaloc, the other to the three idols described by Bernal Diaz, of which the principal was not "Huichilobos" (Huitzilopochtli), but Coatlicue, the earth goddess. The "page" Seler regards as the tutelary of Tlatelolco, called Tlacauepan. The great temple of Huitzilopochtli was in the centre of the city, on the site of the present Cathedral. See León y Gama; Seler [a], _loc. cit._; and cf. Zelia Nuttall, "L'Évèque Zumárraga et les principales idoles du Templo Mayor de Mexico," in _SocAA_ xxx (1911).

[27] General descriptions of the Aztec pantheon are given by Beuchat, livre ii, Ie partie, chh. v, vi, and by Joyce [b], ch. ii. The most important early source is Sahagun, bk. i; other primary sources are Mendieta, bk. ii (derived from de Olmos), León y Gama (in part from Cristobal del Castillo), Ruiz de Alarcón, Jacinto de la Serna, the _Tratado de los ritos y ceremonias y dioses_ of the _Códice Ramirez_ (see Tobar, in Bibliography), and the explanations of the Codices Vaticanus A and Telleriano-Remensis (Kingsborough, v, vi). Of recent works the most significant are Seler [a] (collected essays), and [b], [c], [d], [e] (analyses of divinatory or astrological codices).

[28] For data concerning the use of these numbers by American peoples north of Mexico, see _Mythology of All Races_, Boston, 1916, x, Ch. IX, iv, and Notes 11, 31, 42, 50, with references there given. Further allusions to the nine and thirteen of Mexican cosmology will be found _infra_, Ch. III, i, iii. The origin of the peculiar uses of the number thirteen is a puzzle without satisfactory solution. In the explanation of Vaticanus A (Kingsborough, vi. 198, note), it is said--referring to the statement that "Tonacatecotle" presides over the "thirteen causes"--that "the causes are really only nine, corresponding in number with the heavens. But since four of them are reckoned twice in every series of thirteen days, in order that each day might be placed under some peculiar influence, they are said to be thirteen." This, however, is probably assuming effect for cause (cf. Ch. III, iii).

[29] Sahagun, VI. xxxii. Other references to Sahagun are, III, Appendix i; X. xxi.

[30] Seler [b], p. 31; [c], pp. 5, 10, 14.

[31] Seler [c], pp. 5-31, where he discusses the whole problem of cruciform and caryatid figures; as also in [e], ii., 107, 126-34; [d], pp. 76-93.

[32] Seler [a], index, _s. w_., is a guide to the manifold attributes of the Aztec gods. The most important myths concerning them are related by Sahagun, bk. iii, and by the authorities cited with respect to cosmogonies, _infra_, Ch. III, i, ii.

[33] See especially Seler [a], ii, "Die Ausgrabungen am Orte des Haupttempels in Mexico"; [c], p. 112; Sahagun, III. i; _Tratado de los Ritos_, etc. (see Tobar, in Bibliography); Robelo [a], _s. v._; and Charency, _L'Origine de la légende d'Huitzilopochtli_ (Paris, 1897); cf. also _infra_, Ch. III, v. The story of Tlahuicol is given by Clavigero, V. vi.

[34] See Seler [b], p. 60; [c], pp. 33, 205; [d], pp. 77, 95-96; [e], index. The prayers quoted are in Sahagun, VI. i, iv, v, vi; while the famous sacrifice is described in II. v, xxiv (also by Torquemada, VII. xix and X. xiv; and picturesquely by Prescott, I. iii). The myths are in Sahagun, III. iv ff.; a version with a different list of magicians (Ihuimecatl and Toltecatl are the companions of Tezcatlipoca) is given by Ramirez, _Anales de Cuauhtitlan_, pp. 17-18.

[35] See Seler, indexes, and the picturesque and romantic treatment by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], iii. The more striking early sources are Sahagun, III. iii-xv; VI. vii, xxv (quoted), xxxiv (quoted); IX. xxix; X. iii, iv; Ixtlilxochitl, _Historia Chichimeca_, I. i, ii; _Anales de Cuauhtitlan_, pp. 17-23; Mendieta, II. v; and _Explicación del Codex Telleriano-Remensis_ (Kingsborough, v). For later discussions see Léon de Rosny, "Le Mythe de Quetzalcoatl," in _Archives de la société des américanistes de France_ (Paris, 1878); Seler [a], iii, "Ueber die natürlichen Grundlagen mexikanischer Mythen"; [b], pp. 41-48 (p. 45 here quoted); and Joyce [b], pp. 46-51. Duplicates or analogues of Quetzalcoatl are described in _Mythology of All Races_, Boston, 1916, x, Ch. IX, iii, v; Ch. XI, ii (p. 243); and _infra_, Ch. IV, ii; Ch. V, iv; Ch. VI, iv; Ch. VII, iv; Ch. VIII, ii.

[36] For Tlaloc see especially Seler [a], iii. 100-03; [b], pp. 62-67; Sahagun, I. iv, xxi; II. i, iii, xx (quoted), and Appendix, where is given the description of the curious octennial festival in which the rain-gods were honoured with a dance at which live frogs and snakes were eaten; the feast was accompanied by a fast viewed as a means of permitting the deities to resuscitate their food-creating energies, which were regarded as overworked or exhausted by their eight years' labour. See also _Historia de los Mexicanos for sus Pinturas_, chh. ii, vi; and Hamy [b]. References to Chalchiuhtlicue will be found in Seler [a], index; [b], pp. 56-58; etc. The ritual prayer is recorded by Sahagun, VI. xxxii.

[37] Sahagun, bk. i; Seler [a], index; and Robelo [a], are guides to the analysis and grouping of the Aztec deities.

[38] See Seler [d], pp. 130-131.

[39] Seler [a], ii. 1071-78, and _CA_ xiii. 171-74 (hymn to Xipe Totec, here freely rendered). See, also, Seler [b], pp. 100-104, and [a], ii, "Die religiösen Gesänge der alten Mexikaner" (cf. Brinton [d], [e]), where a number of deities are characterized by translations and studies of hymns preserved in a Sahagun MS. A description of the Pawnee form of the arrow sacrifice will be found in _Mythology of All Races_, Boston, 1916, x. 76 (with plate), and Note 58. The Aztec form is pictured in Codex Nuttall, No. 83, as is also the famous _sacrificio gladiatorio_ (as the Spaniards called it), of which Durán, _Album_, gives several drawings. The _sacrificio gladiatorio_ was apparently in some rites a first stage leading to the arrow sacrifice (see Seler [e], i. 170-73, where several figures are reproduced).

[40] Tonacatecutli is treated by Seler [d], pp. 130 ff. See also, _supra_, Ch. II, iii; _infra_, Ch. III, i.

[41] Seler [d], p. 133; and for discussion of Xochiquetzal, Seler [b], pp. 118-24.

[42] Sahagun, I. vi, xii. Seler [b], pp. 92-100, discusses Tlazolteotl, on p. 93 giving the story of the sacrifice of the Huastec, taken from Ramirez, _Anales_, pp. 25-26.

[43] The conception of sacrifice as instituted to keep the world vivified, and especially to preserve the life of the Sun, appears in a number of documents, particularly in connexion with cosmogony (see Ch. III, i, ii), as Sahagun, III, Appendix, iv; VI. iii; VII. ii; _Explicacion del Codex Telleriano-Remensis_ (Kingsborough, v. 135); and especially in the _Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas_; see also Payne, i. 577-82; Seler [a], iii. 285; [b], pp. 37-41; "Die Sage von Quetzalcouatl," in _CA_ xvi (Vienna, 1910).

[44] Sahagun, III, Appendix, i (quoted); cf. Seler [b], pp. 82-86. See also Sahagun, _loc. cit._, ch. ii, for a description of Tlalocan, and ch. iii. for a description of the celestial paradise (cf. I. x and VI. xxix).

[45] The meaning of _Tamoanchan_ is discussed by Preuss, "Feuergötter," who regards it as an underworld region; by Beyer, in _Anthropos_, iii, who explains it as the Milky Way; and by Seler [a], ii, "Die religiösen Gesänge der alten Mexikaner," and [e] (see index), who identifies it with the western region, the house of the evening sun. Xolotl is discussed, in the same connexions, by Seler; see especially [b], pp. 108-12. The myth from Sahagun is in VII. ii; those from Mendieta in II. i, ii.

[46] The limbo of children's souls is described in the _Spiegazione dette tavole del Códice Mexicano_ (here quoting Kingsborough, vi. 171).

[47] Mexican cosmogonies are discussed by Robelo [a], art. "Cosmogonia," in _AnMM_, 2a época, iii; Bancroft, III. ii (full bibliographical notes); R. H. Lowie, art. "Cosmogony and Cosmology (Mexican and South American)," in _ERE_; Brühl, pp. 398-401; Brinton [a], vii; Charency [a]; Müller, pp. 510-12; Spence [b], iii. A literary version of some of the old cosmogonic stories is given by Castellanos [b].

[48] Herrera, III. iii. 10 (quoted by León, in _AnMM_, 2a época, i. 395).

[49] Mixtec and Zapotec myth are studied by Seler, _28 BBE_, pp. 285-305 (pp. 289, 286 are here quoted); the source cited for the Mixtec myth is Gregorio García, _Origen de los Indios_, V. iv; for Zapotec, Juan de Córdoba, _Arte del Idioma Zapoteca_.

[50] Sahagun, VI. vii, with reference to the Chichimec (elsewhere he speaks of Mixcoatl as an Otomian god); X. xxix. I, with reference to the Toltec; III. i, ii, and VII. ii, with reference to the origin of the sun, etc.

[51] Seler [b], p. 38.

[52] Mendieta (after Fray Andrés de Olmos), II. i-iv.

[53] The fullest versions of the Mexican cosmic ages, or "Suns," are: (a) Ixtlilxochitl (_Historia Chichimeca_, I. i; _Relaciones_, ed. Kingsborough, ix. 321 ff., 459); (b) _Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas_, i-viii--the narrative which most resembles a primitive myth; (c) _Anales de Cuauhtitlan_ (ed. Ramirez, pp. 9-11), partly translated into French by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], i. Appendice, pp. 425-27, where the version of the deluge myth is given; (d) _Spiegazione dette tavole del Codice Mexicano_ (i.e. Codex Vaticanus A), where Plates VII-X are described as symbols of the Suns; though a discordant explanation is given in connexion with Plate V. Other authorities are Gómara [b], p. 431; Muñoz Camargo, p. 132; Humboldt [a], ii, Plate XXVI; and especially Charency [a], who makes a comparative study of the myth. Monumental evidences are discussed by Seler [a], ii, "Die Ausgrabungen am Orte des Haupttempels in Mexico," and by MacCurdy [a]. Maya forms of the myth are sketched _infra_, pp. 153-55; cf. pp. 159 ff.

[54] The _Spiegazione_ contains the description of the deluge (Kingsborough, vi. 195-96), chiefly in connexion with Plate XVI. Similar material, briefly treated, is in the _Explicación del Codex Telleriano-Remensis_.

[55] The literature dealing with the Mexican calendar is voluminous. Summary treatments of the subject, based on recent studies, are to be found in Beuchat, II. i. 5; Joyce [b], iii.; Preuss, art. "Calendar (Mexican and Mayan)," in _ERE_. The primary sources for knowledge of the calendar are three: (1) writings of the early chroniclers, among whom the most noteworthy are Sahagun, books ii, iv, vii, and León y Gama, who derives in part from Cristobal del Castillo; (2) calendric codices, the more important being Codex Borgia, studied by Fábrega, in _AnMM_ v, and by Seler [a], i, and [e]; Codex Borbonicus, studied by Hamy [a], and de Jonghe; Codex Vaticanus B (3773), studied by Seler [d]; Codex Ferjérváry-Mayer, studied by Seler [c]; Codex Bologna (or Cospianus), studied by Seler [a], i; Codex Nuttall, studied by Nuttall; and the _Tonalamatl of the Aubin Collection_, studied by Seler [b]; (3) monuments, especially calendar stones: León y Gama, _Dos Piedras_; Chavero [a]; MacCurdy [a]; and Róbelo [b] are studies of such monuments. Recent investigations of importance, in addition to papers by Seler ([a] and elsewhere), are Z. Nuttall, "The Periodical Adjustments of the Ancient Mexican Calendar," in _AA_, new series, vi (1904), and Preuss, "Kosmische Hieroglyphen der Mexikaner," in _ZE_ xxxiii (1901). Studies of the Maya calendar (especially the important contributions of Förstemann, in _28 BBE_) and of that of the Zapotec (Seler, "The Mexican Chronology, with Special Reference to the Zapotec Calendar," ib.) are, of course, intimately related to the Aztec system. For statement of current problems, see Lehmann [a], pp. 164-66.

[56] For Mexican astronomy, in addition to the studies of the codices, see Sahagun, bk. vii; Tezozomoc, lxxxii; Seler, _28 BBE_, "The Venus Period in the Picture Writings of the Borgian Codex Group" (tr. from art. in _Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte_, 1898); Hagar [a], [b]; Chavero [b]; and Nuttall [a], especially pp. 245-59. On the question of the zodiac, advocated by Hagar, see H. J. Spinden, "The Question of the Zodiac in America," in _AA_, new series, xviii (1916), and the bibliography there given.

[57] Accounts of the archaeology of Tollan, or Tula, are to be found in Charnay [a], iv-vi, and in Joyce [b], especially in the Appendix. Sahagun's description of the Toltec is in X. xxix. 1. The _Spiegazione_ of Codex Vaticanus A, Plate X, gives interesting additions (here quoted from Kingsborough, vi. 178). The chief authority, however, is Ixtlilxochitl, whose accounts of the Toltec, Chichimec, and especially Tezcucan powers have frequently been regarded with suspicion, as coloured by too free a fancy. Nevertheless, as Lehmann points out ([a], p. 121), it is certain that Ixtlilxochitl had at his command sources now lost. Much of his material is clearly in a native vein, and there is no impossibility that it is a version of history which is only slightly exalted.

[58] Spanish and French versions of the elegy of Nezahualcoyotl (here rather freely adapted) are in _TC_ xiv. 368-73.

[59] The Aztec migration is a conspicuous feature of native tradition, and is, therefore, prominent in the histories, being figured by several of the codices, as well as in Durán's _Album_. An early narration of the Aztec myth forms chh. ix ff. of the _Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas_, while the _Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan y de México_, the narrative of the "Anónimo Mexicano," and Tezozomoc, i-iii, give other native versions. Mendieta, Sahagun, and Durán, are other sources for the myth. Seler [a], ii, "Wo lag Aztlan, die Heimat der Azteken?" gives a careful study of the mythical elements in the migration-story as displayed in the Codex Boturini and elsewhere. Orozco y Berra [a], iv, presents a comparative study of the Aztec rulers, drawn from the various accounts. Buelna's _Peregrinación_ is generally regarded as the completest study of the migration from both legendary and archaeological evidence. Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], VI. iv, contains an account of the Aztlan myth, while VII sketches the development of Nahuatlan power in Tezcuco and Mexico; in ii. 598-602, the Abbé gives his chronological restoration of the history of Anahuac. Motezuma's _Corona Mexicana_ should be mentioned as a partly native source for the records of the Aztec monarchs; while Chimalpahin represents not only a native record, but one composed in the native tongue.

[60] Mendieta, II. xxxiii-xxxiv.

[61] Sahagun, X. xxix. 12.

[62] Best known is the Codex Boturini (reproduced in Kingsborough, i; see also García Cubas [b], where Codex Boturini is compared with a supplementary historical painting; interesting reproductions of related Acolhua paintings, the "Mappe Tlotzin" and the "Mappe Quinatzin," are in Aubin [a]).

[63] Durán, xxvii.

[64] Accounts of the portents that preceded the coming of Cortez are conspicuous in nearly all the early narratives; among them Acosta, VI. xxii; Clavigero, V. xii, etc.; Chimalpahin, "Septième relation"; Durán, lxi, lxiii, etc.; Ixtlilxochitl, _Historia Chichimeca_, II. lxxii; Sahagun, XII. i; Tezozomoc, xcvii; Torquemada, III. xci.

[65] The Papago myth is given by Bancroft, III. ii (after Davidson, _Report on Indian Affairs_ [Washington, 1865], pp. 131-33); cf. Lumholtz [c], p. 42.

[66] For identification of the Nicaraguan divinities (originally described by Oviedo) see Seler [a], ii. 1029-30. Phases of contemporary pagan myth in Mexico are treated by Lumholtz (_passim_), Preuss, Mechling [a], Mason, and Radin. Interesting ritualistic analogies are suggested by Fewkes, Evans, Génin, Nuttall, and Preuss.

[67] Preuss [a], [b], and Lumholtz [b], I. xxix.

[68] Preuss, "Die magische Denkweise der Cora-Indianer," in _CA_ xviii (London, 1913), pp. 129-34.

[69] Seler [a], iii. 376, regards the Huichol Tamats as the Morning Star, which is certainly plausible in view of his similarity to Chuvalete of the Cora. Huichol myth and deities are described by Lumholtz [a], ii (p. 12 here quoted); [b], II. ix; cf., also, Preuss.

[70] Lumholtz [b], i. 356.

[71] The physiography and ethnography of the Maya region are summarized in Spinden [a]; Beuchat, II, ii; and in Joyce [b], ch. viii. Wissler, _The American Indian_ in this, as in other fields, most effectively presents the relations--ethnical, cultural, historical--to the other American groups. Recent special studies of importance are Tozzer [a]; Starr, _In Indian Mexico_, etc.; Sapper [b]; and the more distinctively archaeological studies of Holmes, Morley, Spinden, and others.

[72] It is unfortunate that the region of Maya culture was the subject of no such full reports, dating from the immediate post-Conquest period, as we possess from Mexico. The more important of the Spanish writers who deal with the Yucatec centres are Aguilar, Cogolludo, Las Casas, Landa, Lizana, Nuñez de la Vega, Ordoñez y Aguiar, Pio Pérez, Pedro Ponce, and Villagutierre, with Landa easily first in significance. The histories of Eligio Ancona and of Carrillo y Ancona are the leading Spanish works of later date. Native writings are represented by three hieroglyphic pre-Cortezian codices, namely, Codex Dresdensis, Codex Tro-Cortesianus, and Codex Peresianus, as well as by the important _Books of Chilam Balam_ and the _Chronicle_ of Nakuk Pech from the early Spanish period (for description of thirteen manuscripts and bibliography of published works relating to their interpretation, see Tozzer, "The Chilam Balam Books," in _CA_ xix [Washington, 1917]). Yet what Mayan civilization lacks in the way of literary monuments is more than compensated by the remains of its art and architecture, to which an immense amount of shrewd study has been devoted. The more conspicuous names of those who have advanced this study are mentioned in connexion with the literature of the Maya calendar, Note 92, _infra_. The region has been explored archaeologically with great care, the magnificent reports of Maudsley (in _Biologia Centrali-Americana_) and of the Peabody Museum expeditions (_Memoirs_), prepared by Gordon, Maler, Thompson, and others, being the collections of eminence. Brasseur de Bourbourg can scarcely be mentioned too often in connexion with this field. His fault is that of Euhemerus, but he is neither the first nor the last of the tribe of this sage; while for his virtues, he shows more constructive imagination than any other Americanist: probably the picture which he presents would be less criticized were it less vivid.

[73] Landa, chh. v-xi (vi, ix, being here quoted).

[74] The sources for the history of the Maya are primarily the native chronicles (the _Books of Chilam Balam_), the _Relaciones de Yucatán_, and the histories of Cogolludo, Landa, Lizana, and Villagutierre. The deciphering of the monumental dates of the southern centres has furnished an additional group of facts, the correlation of which to the history of the north has become a special problem, with its own literature. The most important attempts to synchronize Maya dates with the years of our era are by Pio Pérez (reproduced both by Stephens [b] and by Brasseur de Bourbourg [b]); Seler [a], i, "Bedeutung des Maya-Kalenders für die historische Chronologie"; Goodman [a], [b]; Bowditch [a]; Spinden [a], pp. 130-35; [b] (with chart); Joyce [b], Appendix iii (with chart); and Morley [a], [b], [c] and [d]. Bowditch, Spinden, Joyce, and Morley are not radically divergent and may be regarded as representing the conservative view--here accepted as obviously the plausible one. Carrillo y Ancona, ch. ii, analyzes some of the earlier opinions; while the first part of Ancona's _Historia de Yucatán_ is devoted to ancient Yucatec history and is doubtless the best general work on the subject.

[75] Brinton [f], p. 100 ("Introduction" to the _Book of Chilan Balam of Mani_).

[76] Spinden [b]; Joyce [b], ch. viii. But cf. Morley's chronological scheme, _infra_; and Spinden [a], pp. 130-35.

[77] Morley [c], ch. i.

[78] Morley [b], p. 140. In this connection (p. 144) Morley summarizes the various speculations as to the causes which led to the abandonment of the southern centres, as reduction of the land by primitive agricultural methods (Cook), climatic changes (Huntington), physical, moral and political decadence (Spinden). He adds: "Probably the decline of civilization in the south was not due to any one of these factors operating singly, but to a combination of adverse influences, before which the Maya finally gave way."

[79] The culture heroes of Maya myth have taken possession of the imaginations of the Spanish chroniclers, and indeed of not a few later commentators, rather as clues to native history than to mythology. Bancroft, iii. 450-55, 461-67, summarizes the materials from Spanish sources; which is treated also, from the point of view of possible historical elucidation, by Ancona, I. iii; Carrillo y Ancona, ii, iii; Comte de Charency [b]; García Cubas, in _SocAA_ xxx, nos. 3-6; and Santibáñez, in _CA_ xvii. 2.

[80] The primary sources for the Votan stories are Cogolludo, Ordoñez y Aguiar, and Nuñez de la Vega, whose narratives are liberally summarized by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], I. i, ii (pp. 68-72 containing the passages from Ordoñez here quoted).

[81] For Zamna (or Itzamna) the sources are Cogolludo, Landa, and Lizana, summarized by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], I. pp. 76-80. Quotations are here made from Cogolludo, IV. iii, vi; Brasseur de Bourbourg [f], ii, "Vocabulaire générale"; and Lizana (ed. Brasseur de Bourbourg), pp. 356-59; cf. also Seler [a], index; Landa, chh. xxxv, xxxvi.

[82] Identifications of images of Itzamna and Kukulcan are discussed by Dieseldorff, in _ZE_ xxvii. 770-83; Spinden [a], pp. 60-70; Joyce [b], ch. ix, and Morley [c], pp. 16-19.

[83] Cogolludo, Landa, and Lizana are the chief sources for the Kukulcan stories,--especially Landa, chh. vi, xl, being here quoted. Tozzer [a], p. 96, is quoted; cf., for Yucatec survival, p. 157.

[84] Citations from Landa in this section are from chh. xxvii, xl (which records the new year's festivals), xxxiii (describing the future world), and xxxiv. Landa is our chief source for knowledge of the Yucatec rites and of the deities associated with them; additional or corroborative details being furnished by Aguilar, Cogolludo, Lizana, Las Casas, Ponce, and Pio Pérez.

[85] Interpretations of the names of the Maya deities, as here given, are from Brasseur de Bourbourg [f], ii, "Vocabulaire"; and Seler [a], index.

[86] Lizana (ed. Brasseur de Bourbourg), pp. 360-61.

[87] Schellhas [b] gives his identifications and descriptions of the gods of the codices; additional materials are contained in Fewkes [i]; Förstemann [b]; Joyce [b], ch. ix; Morley [c], pp. 16-19; Spinden [b], pp. 60-70; and Bancroft, iii, ch. xi.

[88] Tozzer [a], pp. 150 ff.; also, for the Lacandones, pp. 93-99. The names of the deities, Maya and Lacandone, are here in several cases altered slightly from the form in which Tozzer gives them, for the sake of avoiding the use of unfamiliar phonetic symbols; the result is, of course, phonetic approximation only.

[89] Landa, chh. xxvi, xxvii.

[90] Las Casas [b], ch. cxxiii.

[91] Landa, ch. xxxiv. In chh. iii, xxxii, he gives information in regard to the goddess Ixchel.

[92] The literature of the Maya calendar system is, of course, intimately connected with that of the Mexican (see Note 55). The native sources for its study are the Codices and the monumental inscriptions, while of early Spanish expositions the most important are those of Landa and Pio Pérez. In recent times a considerable body of scholars have devoted special attention to the Maya inscriptions and to the elucidation of the calendar, foremost among them being, in America, Ancona, Bowditch, Chavero, Goodman, Morley, Spinden, Cyrus Thomas, and in Europe, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Förstermann, Rosny, and Seler. The foundation of the elucidation of Maya astronomical knowledge is Förstermann's studies of the Dresden Codex, while the study of mythic elements associated with the calendar is represented by Charency, especially "Des ages ou soleils d'après la mythologie des peuples de la Nouvelle Espagne," section ii, in _CA_ iv. 2; and by J. H. Martínez, "Los Grandes Ciclos de la historia Maya," in _CA_ xvii. 2. Summary accounts of the Maya calendar are to be found in Spinden [a], Beuchat, Joyce [b], Arnold, and Frost, while Bowditch [b] and Morley [c] are in the nature of text-book introductions to the subject.

[93] Morley [d], "The Hotun," in _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917).

[94] Morley [c], p. 32.

[95] Tozzer [a], pp. 153-54.

[96] J. Martínez Hernández, "La Creación del Mundo según los Mayas," in _CA_ xviii (London, 1913), pp. 164-71. Señor Hernández notes that the tense of the verb in the first sentence of the myth is for the sake of literal translation.

[97] For ethnic analysis Thomas and Swanton is followed here and throughout the chapter. Of the earlier Spanish authors Las Casas (especially [b], chh. cxxii-cxxv, clxxx, ccxxxiv ff.) is the most weighty. See also Morley [e], "The Rise and Fall of the Maya Civilizations," in _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917).

[98] Brinton [h], p. 69.

[99] ib. p. 149.

[100] Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], pp. lxxx-lxxxiii.

[101] The _Popul Vuh_, described by Brasseur de Bourbourg in his _Histoire du Mexique_ under the title _Manuscrit Quiché de Chichicastenango_ ([a], i. pp. lxxx ff.), is a Quiché document, part myth and part legendary history, supposed to have been put in writing in the seventeenth century, when it was copied and translated into Spanish by Francisco Ximenes, of the Order of Predicadores. The manuscript was found by C. Scherzer in 1855 in the library of the university of San Carlos, Guatemala. The Spanish text of Ximenes was published at Vienna in 1856, and again, with French translation and notes, by Brasseur de Bourbourg, Paris, 1861; a second Spanish version, by Barberena, appeared in San Salvador, 1905. None of these translations is regarded as accurate, or indeed as other than filled with error and misinterpretation; but pending the appearance of a scholarly rendering from the native text they are our only sources for a document of profound interest. The edition of Brasseur de Bourbourg is that here employed, translations being from parts i, ii, and iii, while interpretations of names are drawn chiefly from Brasseur's footnotes. Las Casas [b], ch. cxxiv, contains some account of the gods and heroes mentioned in the _Popul Vuh_.

[102] For discussion of the bat-god, Zotz, see Seler, _28 BBE_, pp. 231 ff., "The Bat God of the Maya Race"; also, Dieseldorff, ib., p. 665, "A Clay Vessel with a Picture of a Vampire-headed Deity"; cf. Giglioli, _CA_ xvi (Vienna and Leipzig, 1910).

[103] The _Manuscrit Cakchiquel_, or _Mémorial de Tecpan-Atitlan_, as he calls it, was given to Brasseur de Bourbourg by Juan Gavarrete, of the Convent of Franciscans of Guatemala. Its author, says the Abbé ([a], i. p. lxxxiii) was Don Francisco Ernandez Arana Xahila, of the Princes Ahpotzotziles of Guatemala, grandson of King Hunyg, who died of the plague, five years before the Spaniards set foot in this country, in 1519. The manuscript was brought down to 1582 by this author, and thence carried forward to 1597 by Don Francisco Diaz Gebuta Queh, of the same family. Brinton published his translation under the title, _The Annals of the Cakchiquels_, in Philadelphia, 1885, and the work now commonly is referred to under this name. It is Brinton's version which is here followed, with some inconsequential alterations of phraseology. In his introduction Brinton gives (pp. 39-48) interesting comments on the "Religious Notions."

[104] Brinton [h], pp. 25-26.

[105] ib. p. 14.

[106] Of works dealing with the religious beliefs of the natives of Honduras and Nicaragua, the writings of Oviedo and of Las Casas (especially [b], ch. clxxx) are the most important of early date. Among works of later date Squier's books are of the first significance. Bancroft, iii, ch. xi, gives a summary of most that is known of the myths of this region; Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], livre v, ch. iii, livre viii, ch. iv, contains additional materials. The archaeology is described by Squier [a], [b], [c], _passim_; Joyce [a], part i; Brinton [h], introduction; and, with ethnological analysis, Lehmann [c].

[107] Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], ii. p. 556. The Mictlan myth is given, ib. p. 105.

[108] Oviedo, _TC_ xiv, p. 133.

[109] Lehmann [c], p. 717.

[110] See Lehmann [c], pp. 715-16.

[111] The ethnology of the Andean region is treated by Joyce [c], Wissler, _The American Indian_, and Beuchat, II. iv. Bastian, _Culturländer_, and Payne, _History_, give more extended views; while tribal distribution in its cultural relations is probably best presented by Schmidt, in _ZE_ xlv. Spinden, "The Origin and Distribution of Agriculture in America," and Means, "An Outline of the Culture-Sequence in the Andean Area," both in _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917), are significant contributions to the problem of origins and history; with these should be placed, "Orígenes Etnográficos de Colombia," by Carlos Cuervo Márquez, in the _Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress_, i (Washington, 1917). Spinden conceives an archaic American culture, probably originating in Mexico and thence spreading north and south, which was based upon agriculture and characterized by the use of pottery, textiles, etc., and which, in the course of time, made its influence felt from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to that of La Plata. This hypothesis admirably accounts for the obvious affinities of the civilizations of the two continents.

[112] The linguistic and cultural affinities of the Isthmian tribes are described by Wissler, Beuchat, Joyce [c], and Thomas and Swanton; and on the archaeological side especially by Hartman [a], [b], and Holmes [c], [d]. For the broader analogies of the Central American, North Andean, and Antillean regions see also Saville, Cuervo Márquez, and Spinden's article mentioned in Note 111, _supra_. Spinden, _Maya Art (MPM)_, argues against the conception of extensive borrowing. Of the earlier authorities for this region, the important are Peter Martyr, Benzoni, Oviedo, Herrera, and Las Casas. Among writers of later times, Humboldt holds first place.

[113] Oviedo (_TC_), pp. 211-22. Other references in this paragraph are: Benzoni (_HS_), ii; Andagoya (_HS_), pp. 14-15; Cieza de León (_HS_),1864, ch. viii.

[114] Peter Martyr, 1912, ii (pp. 319, 326 quoted).

[115] Gabb, pp. 503-06; Pittier de Fábrega [b], pp. 1-9; Las Casas [b], ch. cxxv.

[116] The most recent work, summarizing the legend of El Dorado, is Zahm [b]; and the earliest versions of the tale are those of Simon, Fresle, Piedrahíta, Cavarjal, and Castellanos, the latter of whom incorporated the story in his poetical _Elejias de Varones Ilustres de Indias_, which was printed at Madrid, in 1850. Critical accounts, in addition to Zahm, are Bollaert's "Introduction" to Simon's _Expedition of Pedro de Ursua_ (Spanish in Serrano y Sanz, _Historiadores de Indias_, ii) and in Bandelier's _The Gilded Man_. On the historical side, especially as regards the period of the Conquest, Andagoya, Castellanos, Carvajal, Fresle, Simon, give unforgettable pictures of the adventurous extravagance and _bizarrerie_ of a time scarcely to be paralleled in human annals. Father Zahm's _Quest of El Dorado_ is an inviting introduction to this literature.

[117] For Chibchan ethnology and archaeology, see Joyce [c], Acosta de Samper, and Cuervo Marquez.

[118] Cieza de León (_HS_), 1864, pp. 59, 88, 101.

[119] The primary sources for the mythology of the Chibchan tribes at the time of the Conquest are Pedro Simon, Lucas Fernandez Piedrahíta (especially I, iii, iv), and Cieza de León. Simon's "Cuarta Noticia," in eighteen chapters, is the fullest exposition of Chibcha beliefs and history; along with the "Tercera Noticia" it is printed in Kingsborough, viii, which is here cited (pp. 244, 263-64 quoted). Other authorities include Humboldt, Joyce [c], chh. i, ii; Acosta de Samper, ch. viii; Sir Clements Markham, art. "Andeans," in _ERE_; and Beuchat, pp. 549-50. On the deluge myth see also Bandelier [c].

[120] The story of the giants is given by Cieza de León [a], ch. lii; see also Velasco, p. 12; Bandelier [b], where the literature of the subject is assembled; and Saville, 1907, p. 9. The archaeology of the region, with numerous plates, is presented in Saville's reports; ii. 88-123 (1910) contains a description and discussion of the stone seats; while brief accounts are to be found in Beuchat and in Joyce [c].

[121] Velasco is the chief authority for the career of the people of Cara. The discoveries of Dorsey on the island of La Plata give an added significance to these tales of men from the sea.

[122] Balboa (_TC_), ch. vii; cf. Joyce [c], ch. iii.

[123] The history and archaeology of aboriginal Peru is summarized by Markham, _The Incas of Peru_ (1910), to which his notes and introductions to his many translations of Spanish works, published by the Hakluyt Society, form a varied supplementation. Among earlier authorities E. G. Squier, _Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas_ (1877), and Castelnau, _Expédition_ (1850-52), are eminent; while of later authorities the more conspicuous are: for Inca monuments, Bingham, of the Yale Expedition, and Baessler; for Tiahuanaco, Créqui-Montfort, of the Mission scientifique française à Tiahuanaco, Bandelier, Gonzalez de la Rosa, Posnansky, Uhle and Stübel; for the coastal regions, Baessler, Reiss and Stübel, Uhle, Tello; and for the Calchaqui territories, Ambrosetti, Boman, and Lafone Quevado. General and comparative studies are presented in Wissler, _The American Indian_; Beuchat, _Manuel_; Joyce, _South American Archeology_; Spinden, _Handbook_; while a careful effort to restore the sequences of cultures in Peru is Means, "Outline of the Culture-Sequence in the Andean Area," in _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917).

[124] Cieza de León [a], ch. xxxvi.

[125] The origin of agriculture in America is regarded by Spinden, "The Origin and Distribution of Agriculture in America," _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917), as probably Mexican. From Mexico it passed north and south, reaching its limiting areas in the neighbourhoods of the St. Lawrence and of La Plata. Cf. Wissler, _The American Indian_.

[126] Montesinos's lists are analyzed by Markham [a]. See, also, Means; cf. Pietschmann.

[127] Uhle, especially [a], [c], and art., _CA_ xviii (London, 1913), "Die Muschelhügel von Ancon, Peru"; Bingham [b], [c].

[128] Means, _CA_ xix (Washington, 1917), p. 237, gives as the general chronological background of Peruvian culture:

?-_circa_ 200 B. C. Preliminary migrations. _circa_ 200 B. C.-600 A. D. Megalithic Empire. _circa_ 600-1100 A. D. Tampu-Tocco Period, decadence. _circa_ 1100-1530 A. D. Inca Empire.

He also gives in the same article, p. 241, a most interesting comparative restoration of the chronologies of the sequence of culture in the several Peruvian and Mexican centres, namely:

[Illustration: TABLE DESIGNED TO SHOW THE SEQUENCE OF ABORIGINAL AMERICAN CULTURES AND THEIR CHRONOLOGIC RELATIONS]

[129] For the myths and religion of the coastal peoples of Peru the important early authorities are Arriaga, Avila, Balboa, Cieza de León, and Garcilasso de la Vega. Markham [a], especially chh. xiv, xv, is the primary authority here followed. For archaeological details the authorities are Baessler; Bastian; Joyce [c], ch. viii; Squier [e]; Tello; Putnam; and Uhle. It is from this coastal region that the most striking Peruvian pottery comes, the Truxillo and Nasca styles respectively typifying the Chimu and Chincha groups.

[130] Tello, "Los antiguos cementerios del valle de Nasca," p. 287, suggests three criteria by means of which the mythological nature of such figures is to be inferred: When symbolical attributes are indicated by the animal's carrying mystical or thaumaturgical objects; when the figure retains, through a variety of representations, certain constant, individualizing traits; and when the same image is used repeatedly on the more notable types of cultural and artistic objects. Señor Tello believes Nasca religion to have been totemic in character.

[131] It is reproduced by Joyce [c], p. 155.

[132] Garcilasso's accounts of the coastal religion are scattered through his inchoate work, the more important passages being bk. ii, ch. iv; bk. vi, chh. xvii, xviii.

[133] Summarized by Markham [a], p. 216.

[134] Summarized by Markham [a], pp. 235-36.

[135] Avila [b].

[136] Avila's _Narrative_ in _Rites and Laws of the Yncas (HS)_, 1883, pp. 121-47, is the authority for the myths given in the text; but several of the stories appear also in Molina, Salcamayhua, and Sarmiento, showing that the mythic cycle was widespread, extending into the highlands as well as along the coast. The people from whom Avila received his tales were of a tribe that had migrated from the coast to higher valleys.

[137] The Tiahuanaco monolith is interpreted by Squier [e], ch. xv; Markham [a], ch. ii; Gonzalez de la Rosa, "Les deux Tiahuanaco," _CA_ xvi (1910); and by Posnansky, "El signo escalonado," _CA_ xviii (1913). The latter regards the meander design, or its element, the stair-design in its various forms, as a symbol of the earth; and he believes Tiahuanaco to be the place of origin of this symbol, whence it spread northward into Mexico. It is, of course, among the Pueblo Indians of the United States an earth-symbol. If this be the correct interpretation, the central figure is the sun, rising or standing above the earth. Bandelier [e] gives ancient and modern myths in regard to Titicaca and its environs.

[138] Representations of pottery and other designs from the Diaguité region showing the influence of Tiahuanaco and possibly Nasca influence are to be found in the publications of Ambrosetti, Boman, Lafone Quevado and others. Perhaps the most interesting is the potsherd showing the figure of a deity (?) bearing an axe with a trident-like handle, while near him is what seems clearly to be a representation of a thunderbolt; a trophy head is at his girdle.

[Illustration]

[139] Markham [a], pp. 41-42. Caparó y Pérez, _Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress_, section i, pp. 121-22, interprets the name "Uirakocha" as composed of _uira_, "grease," and _kocha_ "sea"; and, since grease is a symbol for richness and the sea for greatness, it "signified that which was great and rich."

[140] Molina (Markham, _Rites and Laws_), p. 33.

[141] Markham [a], ch. viii; another version is given by Markham [c]; while the text and Spanish translation are in Lafone Quevado [a]. Cf. the fragments from Huaman Poma given by Pietschmann [b], especially the prayer, p. 512: "Supreme utmost Huiracocha, wherever thou mayest be, whether in heaven, whether in this world, whether in the world beneath, whether in the utmost world, Creator of this world, where thou mayest be, oh, hear me!"

[142] Salcamayhua (Markham, _Rites and Laws_), pp. 70-72.

[143] Bandelier [d], [e], especially pp. 291-329.

[144] Molina, _op. cit._; Cieza de León [b], ch. v, pp. 5-10; Sarmiento, pp. 27-39; and for summary of the narrative of Huaman Poma, Pietschmann, _CA_ xviii (London, 1913), pp. 511-12.

[145] Viracocha and Tonapa obviously belong to the group, or chain, of hero-deities of a like character, extending from Peru to Mexico, and, in modified forms, far to the north and far to the south of each of these centres. This personage, as a hero, is a man, bearded, white, aided by a magic wand or staff, who brings some essential element of culture and departs; as a god, he is a creator, who appeared after the barbaric ages of the world and introduced a new age (there are exceptions to this, as the narrative of Huaman Poma); further, he is a deity of the heavens, the plumed- or the double-headed serpent is his emblem, perhaps his incarnation, and he is closely associated with the sun, which seems to be his servant. Is it not entirely possible that this interesting mythic complex is historically associated, in its spread, with the spread of the cultivation of maize at some early period? In the Navaho representations of Hastsheyalti, the white god of the east, bearded with pollen, and himself creator and maize-god, with the Yei as his servants, and his two sons (in the tale of "The Stricken Twins") genii respectively of rain (vegetation) and of animals (see _Mythology of All Races_, Boston, 1916, x, ch. viii, sections ii, iv) we have the essential attributes of this deity and at the same time an image of his probable function, as sky-god associated especially with the whiteness of dawn, with rain-giving, and hence with growing corn. The staff, which is the conspicuous attribute of Tonapa and Bochica in

## particular, may well bear a double significance: in the hands of the

hero, as the dibble of the maize-planter; in the hands of the god, as the lightning. In any case, there are a multitude of analogies, not only in the myths, but also in the art-motives and symbolisms of the group of tribes which extends from the Diaguité to the North American Pueblo regions that powerfully suggest a common origin of the ideas which centre about the cult of heaven and earth, of descending rain and upspringing maize. Many partial parallels for the same group of ideas are to be found among the less advanced tribes of the plains and forest regions of both South and North America. Possibly, the myth, or at least the rites upon which it rests, accompanied the knowledge of agriculture into these regions.

[146] Lafone Quevado [a], p. 378.

[147] Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. i, chh. xv, xvi. The myth is also given by Acosta, bk. i, ch. xxv; bk. vi, ch. xx; by Sarmiento, chh. xi-xiv; and by Salcamayhua (Markham, _Rites and Laws_), pp. 74-75.

[148] Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. ii, ch. xviii; bk. viii, ch. viii; cf. bk. ix, ch. x.

[149] Molina, pp. 11-12.

[150] The Inca pantheon is described by Markham [a], chh. viii, ix, and by Joyce [c], ch. vii. The primary sources are Garcilasso de la Vega, Cieza de León, Molina, Salcamayhua, and Sarmiento, and perhaps most important of all Blas Valera, the "Anonymous Jesuit" whose writings were utilized by various early narrators. Salcamayhua's chart is published by Markham, in a corrected form, in _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, p. 84. The literal reproduction accompanies Hagar's discussion of it, _CA_ xii, and it has been several times reproduced. Its interpretation is discussed by Hagar, _loc. cit._; Spinden, _AA_, new series, xviii (1916); Lafone Quevado [b], and "Los Ojos de Imaymana," with a reproduction of the chart which he characterizes as "the key to Peruvian symbolism"; cf., also, Ambrosetti, _CA_ xix (Washington, 1913).

[151] The myth of the Ayars is recorded by Sarmiento, x-xiii; it is discussed by Markham [a], ch. iv, where are the interpretations of the names adopted in this text.

[152] Cieza de León [b], chh. vi-viii (pp. 13, 16, quoted).

[153] Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. i, ch. xviii.

[154] The argument for the antiquity of man in South America rests mainly upon the discoveries and theories of Ameghino, especially, _La Antigüedad del hombre en la Plata_ (2 vols., Buenos Aires and Paris, 1880) and artt. in _AnMB_, who is followed by other Argentinian savants. Ales Hrdlicka, _Early Man in South America (52 BBE_, Washington, 1912), examines the claims made for the several discoveries and uniformly rejects the assumption of their great age, in which opinion he is generally followed by North American anthropologists; as cf. Wissler, _The American Indian_ (New York, 1917). The theory favored by Hrdlicka and others is of the peopling of the Americas by successive waves of immigrants from north-eastern Asia, with possible minor intrusions of Oceanic peoples along the Pacific coasts of the southern continent.

[155] The sketch of South American ethnography in d'Orbigny's _L'Homme américain_ is, of course, now superseded in a multitude of details; it appears, however, to conform, in broad lines, to the deductions of later students. In addition to d'Orbigny and Schmidt (_ZE_ xlv, 1913), Brinton, _The American Race_, Beuchat, _Manuel_, and Wissler, _The American Indian_, present the most available ethnographic analyses.

[156] "Linguistic Stocks of South American Indians," in _AA_, new series, xv (1913); also, Wissler, _The American Indian_, pp. 381-85, listing eighty-four stocks. It must be borne in mind, however, that the tendency of minute study is eventually to diminish the number of linguistic stocks having no detectable relationships, and that, in any case, classifications based upon cultural grade are more important for the student of mythology than are those based upon language alone.

[157] Brett [a], p. 36; other quotations from this work are from pp. 374, 401, 403.

[158] King Blanco, pp. 63-64. The lack of significant early authorities for the mythologies of the region of Guiana and the Orinoco (Gumilla is as important as any) is compensated by the careful work of later observers of the native tribes, especially of Guiana. Among these, Humboldt, Sir Richard and Robert H. Schomburgk, and Brett, in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, and im Thurn, at a later period, hold first place, while the contributions of van Coll, in Anthropos ii, iii (1907, 1908), are no less noteworthy. Latest of all is Walter Roth's "Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians," in 30 _ARBE_ (1915), which, as a careful study of the myth-literature of a South American group, stands in a class by itself; it is furnished with a careful bibliography. The reader will understand that the intimate relation between the Antillean and Continental Carib (and, to a less extent, Arawakan) ideas brings the subject-matter of this chapter into direct connexion with that of Chapter I ; while it should also be obvious that the Orinoco region is only separated from the Amazonian for convenience, and that Chapter X is virtually but a further study of the same level and type of thought. The bibliographies of Chh. I, VI, and X are supplementary, for this same region, to that given for